Today Ira Glass has set me straight...

You know how I've been fuckin depressed the past week about losing my job, and I can't put my finger to it - am I more relieved than depressed that finally I've yanked myself out of that shit hole...? Or is it entirely my fault that they think I'm too vocal with my opinions.

A week had passed and I've yet to be able to tell my folks that i'm out of job. I can't even seem to be able to pacify myself to pull myself together and charge on. Well not untill a few minutes ago that by some divine luck that I chanced upon a video by a person called Ira Glass.

I have seen his name once, but had no idea who he is, dead or living. I can't tell you why his name stuck to my head, but when I saw that name again while browsing YouTube today (and I RARELY browse ) I just felt the itch to click on it.

Watching 'Ira Glass on Storytelling, Part 3 of 4' almost had me well up in tears cos finally, like finally, someone said it out loud, exactly what has been tangled and left murky in my head. Its like someone finally set me straight. All this months I've felt like I'm grappling through work, slogging day to night, in a blindfold, not knowing if I'm doing this right or if it is ok to be feeling unsatisfied about the level of work I was producing. Now I realise that I was in a 'I Hate What I Make' phase. And today, Ira Glass has set me straight, once and for all, creatively, that is.



"You have to fight your way through that. You will be fierce, You'll be a warrior and you will make things that arent as good as you know in your heart you want them to be..."

More notes/ transcription from the video (parts 1 & 2) for my reference:

Building blocks of a good story:-
- Anecdote (sequence of actions)
Raising a question from the beginning
A bait
It is implied that any qn you raise, you're going to ans
manipulate this - raising a qn, n giving an ans
throwing out qns to keep people qn or listening and answering them along the way

- A moment of reflection
At some point somebody's got to say, here's why the hell you're listening to this story,
Here's the point of this story, here's the bigger something that we're driving at, here's why I am wasting your time with all this...
In a good story there will a flip back and forth of actions, there'll be the story and someone will say something about it... the trick of the whole thing is to have the preseverence that you've got an interesting anecdote that you can end up with an interesting moment of reflection that will support it and that the two together interwoven will make something thats larger than some of its parts.

[part 2 ] On finding great stories...
...(You should think of it the same way) If I were gonna be good, its that point, that time to be the ambitious, super-achieving person, who you're gonna be, and to 'kill' it. Its time to kill, and to enjoy the killing becos by killing you will make something else even better lived. And I think that not enough get said about the importance of abandoning crap. You have to prop it up aggressively at every stage of the way, if its gonna be any good. You have to be a killer about getting rid of the boring parts and go right to the parts that are getting to your heart, and you have to be ruthless if anything is gonna be good.
Things that are really good are good becos people are being really really tough, and you're gonna be really really tough in doing it. And you're gonna know also that failure is a big part of success. You are gonna run alot of stuff and its gonna go nowhere. You should be happy about that. If you're doing that, you're doing it right. If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.
You have to go into it, knowing that you're gonna record and get rid of a lot of crap before you'll get to anything special. You don't want to be making mediocre stuff. That's not why anybody gets into this. The only reason why you'd wanna do this is cos you wanna make something thats so memorable, its special. And thats what you wanna do.