"Failure is a big part of success." - Ira Glass
On the series of YouTube videos created by Ira Glass, I learned a lot about storytelling that I didn't already know...even though I've been a storyteller my whole life. His theory on the two building blocks of birthing a good story was an excellent skeleton outline to go by:
1. The Anecdote-- He described the "anecdote" part of the story to be sort of a chronological guideline for a good story: this happened, which caused this to happen, which in turn disturbed this and caused that to happen, etc. It makes sense that the anecdote is a great building block for good storytelling, because some movies, books, TV shows, and articles can seem really vague and confusing when you don't have an anecdote...especially if you're searching for what caused what to happen. Example: Experimental films. They're really hard to follow and understand because they DON'T go by the anecdotal formula.
2. The Bait-- Mr.Glass basically described this block as you want you audience to constantly be asking questions. For example, the house was dead silent. You want the audience to think "Why was the house dead silent?" The more questions, the more suspense. The more suspense, the more intrigued the audience is, and the more they will come to love your story.
One thing that Mr. Glass said in one of his clips on YouTube that I already knew about storytelling was how hard it is to find a decent story. I stumbled across this predicament when I was a sophomore in college in my News Writing class. It was so, SO, SO hard for me to find interesting and decent stories to write about for that class....and we had to have four stories that semester that could not be related at all! And also like Mr. Glass said, you usually spend more time searching for a decent story than editing it! Now that I work at a news station, this statement could not be any more true. Sometimes on the weekends when it's just me and my producer Lana, we scour our news sources for HOURS looking for news, and not just any news but decent, relative news that is timely, close to home, and interesting.
More thoughts to come...
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