More great advise from Ira Glass
I’ve mentioned in the past how much Ira Glass and his program This American Life inspires me. Tonight I noticed on their website that they have a whole lot of advise about how to get started in making great radio.
You can find the links to their sources here. One of the great things in the list is this site Transom where the public have the opportunity to look at, develop, ask for feedback on and eventually submit ideas for pieces to be played on NPR. Ira Glass writes up this amazing three page discussion on what he sees as great radio and things you should think about when making radio.
Ira says at one point
One simple way to test whether your story is worth telling on the radio is to tell it to your friends, and notice how you feel. Do you feel like you’re dragging through one tedious moment after another, always on the verge of losing their interest, and sometimes you’re not even sure what the story’s about or why you’re telling certain parts? Or are your friends laughing and buying you drinks and begging you for more details about the characters? When you’re done, does everyone at the table launch into an excited discussion of similar things that happened to them? Heed these signs. If you can’t tell the story compellingly to a friend, it means either you haven’t figured out what the story is really about, or much more likely it never will be possible to tell this story compellingly over the radio.
(Also notice, incidentally, the way you tell your friends the story: where you begin it, what background facts you feel compelled to throw in and where you throw them in, what parts of the story you tell in what order, what parts of the story you leave out, what parts of the story seem weaker when you tell them. The way you tell the story to your friends is often the most structure for the story on the radio. Sometimes, when someone’s stuck on writing a story for our show, I or one of the other producers will have them put down their notes and logs and just tell us the story, to hear the structure they naturally use in telling it aloud.)
just yet another great piece of advise from a radio genius. This definitely makes me re think the way I put together the story for The Wire the other day.
At the same time though I ask myself the question, can these principals that Glass suggests above be put into the context of current affairs packages as well as this story telling style of This American Life has? The piece I put together last week was one on the liquor licensing debate that has been going on in Victoria, although I have a bug collection by now of audio of protest rallies and people standing outside the tote and bands performing I opted in the end for Bruce from the tote and a few other prominent figures talking about the issue. The story really feels like it has no life in it. So how does one make a current affairs package that can only run for four minutes engage in the way that This American life does
