Ira Glass

I recently heard Ira Glass, of This American Life fame. I was spellbound. He began by describing a year he spent writing on an inner city school in Chicago. As he reported daily on the radio, his listeners got to know the kids. Their empathy grew without ever seeing so much as a picture of the kids. In fact, many listeners fell in love with what was once a statistic. But how sympathetic would they have been if they had actually seen the kids, with their thug-like attire, body piercing, and teenage acne? All the listeners knew was a story, told by an invisible voice, and it got to them.

So what makes a good story? A story that integrates the serious and funny, just as it comes to us every day. Glass would say familiar themes, that are actually universal themes, can be explored and recounted with a sense of discovery and joy. Telling this kind of story can capture someone’s attention, then they feel the suspense and they imagine it. This is the power of narrative: to get inside someone and to change the way they feel.

You can imagine my interest with an introduction like that. As Glass continued, he described the way of telling stories that he had developed after 30 years in radio. Almost every sentence was prefaced “I wish someone had told me…” For the sake of brevity, I’ll list….

1. CAST YOUR CHARACTERS. Search for small stories. A local story jumps to an international story. Get into the micro decision making that occurs within everyone. Interview someone and get them to talk. Make them give you the dialogue of the story. Proceed methodically, step by step. Then drive them to your point.

2. ACTION. The steps of the story must bait the listener. Build narrative suspense. A fact pattern is magnetic only if it has a destination. The listener must feel the tension, that something is about to happen. Logical steps alone won’t build tension, the sequence of actions must create emotion.

3. THOUGHT. A story must have a thought. This is the satisfying part. We are constructed to feel stories. Consider how quickly our feelings translate into a physical reaction. We cringe or laugh at what we hear because it resonates with our own experience. So what is the universal that gets our attention? Interrogate this point.

And what’s the point of all this? Stories are powerful. But I’ll have to save that for another day.