Ira Glass’s Manifesto
I am fascinated by Ira Glass [“This American Life”] — witness [for example] my posts featuring Glass on storytelling here, here, here, and here. So when I ran across this at Transom.org, I knew it was a keeper.Yes, Glass is talking specifically about radio. But stories are stories are stories, so there is significant applicability in what he has to say for screenwriters, TV writers, novelists, short story writers, playwrights, and poets. So here is Ira Glass’s Manifesto:
— Force yourself to do a lot of stories.
— Create your own projects.
— Have your own agenda.
— Imitate others.
— Some Basics About Story Construction.
— So How Do You Find the Ideas Inherent in a Story?
I wanted to pull one quote for the post and decided this was an interesting one.
Before we close down this discussion, there was one other thing I had notes about, that I want to write. It’s part of my answer to the original questions the people at Transom posed to me:
From all the submissions you get, you must have a sense of Things That Tend NOT To Work… and maybe some ideas for GETTING them to work. For instance, what moves the personal story toward something more? Are there stories that are just not worth pursuing and what do they have in common?
Weeks ago, as part of answering this, I turned to Julie Snyder, the Senior Producer of This American Life, who’s in charge of overseeing all the submissions. Much more than me, she actually knows the kinds of ideas people send in that don’t work. I also asked another producer on the show, Alex Blumberg, who teaches a radio documentary class at Columbia in New York, what kinds of things his students attempt that have little chance of succeeding. What ideas should they kill before they ever start work on them?
Julie told me that one common problem in the pitches we get is that often, people don’t understand that in a narrative story, something has to be at stake. They’ll say, “I’m going to be driving across the country and I’ve bought this tape recorder and I was thinking I’d record the people I meet along the way.” That kind of idea would be hard to turn into a narrative story because there’s nothing at stake. There’s no question driving it forward, nothing compelling that the characters are trying to figure out in these scenes. Also: there’s no conflict. Narrative can’t happen without conflict, without people who want different things, or see things in different ways.
Compare that pitch with one of the few travel stories we’ve done on the show, in an episode of the program we called “Trek.” In that story, two best friends went to South Africa for the first time, shortly after the end of apartheid. There were two things at stake in the story. First, one of the guys had found out he had distant relatives in South Africa and he wanted to meet them, hoping they hadn’t been racists and supporters of the apartheid state, but instead part of the political opposition. This was the mission/question part of the story. This mission actually gets them into some dramatic discussions with the guy’s family and with each other, scenes where it really feels like people are sizing each other up and talking and arguing.
The second conflict in the story comes from the fact that one of the guys was black and one was white. In America, as best friends, they’d never really talked much about race. Once they were in South Africa, they had very different reactions to the people they met and the things they saw, and started arguing about race a lot, and fighting for the first time in their friendship.
Julie also said it’s common for someone to pitch us a story that’s not really a story but just the germ of an idea that could lead to a story. They’ll write saying “I thought it’d be interesting to …” but haven’t worked out the characters or conflict. Like: “I thought it’d be interesting to check with a family that won the lottery four years ago, to see what happened to them.” That’s the kind of thing it’s hard for us to say yes to because again, there’s no conflict and nothing at stake. In this kind of case, Julie will suggest that the person pitching go out and find a family, to see if there’s anything surprising and compelling to report, some interesting experience they went through, with hopefully at least one person who’s a good talker.
BTW per DoneDealPro.com there are 10 projects based on “This American Life” stories set up at Hollywood movie studios.
Any Ira Glass fans out there? What’s your favorite “TAL” story?
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