{"id":146,"date":"2025-07-10T22:59:28","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T22:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/?p=146"},"modified":"2025-07-16T00:48:55","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T00:48:55","slug":"when-a-story-became-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"My Thoughts on Audio Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week, I watched a couple of videos where Ira Glass<\/a> talks about what makes good audio storytelling. One thing he said that really stood out to me was that finding a good story is often harder and takes longer than actually producing it. I understand that this is true because for example, finding the actual algorithms to solve the Rubix cube would be harder than actually executing them. Ira Glass said that for his team at This American Life<\/em>, they spend more than half their week just looking for stories worth telling. He said you have to be okay with killing a story if it isn\u2019t working, even if you\u2019ve already spent time recording it. That\u2019s something I think I\u2019d struggle with. If I spent all day interviewing someone, I\u2019d feel bad about just deleting it. But he made me realize it\u2019s not about disrespecting the person or wasting time. It\u2019s about respecting the final story enough to make sure only the best parts stay. The same principle applies with pruning a bonsai tree where you\u2019d cut off the small weak branches so the stronger ones can grow better. He also talked about how everything you record is \u201ctrying to be crap.\u201d That made me laugh a bit, but I understood what he meant. Most raw recordings are messy and unstructured and not very interesting on their own. It\u2019s up to us to shape them into something that actually reaches people\u2019s hearts. He said you have to be \u201cruthless\u201d about cutting out the boring parts. I think a lot of beginners including myself probably try to keep everything they recorded because it feels precious. But now I see that storytelling isn\u2019t about collecting everything. It\u2019s about finding only what matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to the War of the Worlds<\/em><\/a> broadcast by Orson Welles helped me see what Ira Glass was talking about. That broadcast wasn\u2019t just people reading lines in a studio. I think that\u2019s why people believed it was real back in 1938. They used the structure and pacing of normal radio to their advantage. Ira Glass said that the best stories have a sense of drama and characters interacting with each other. Even though War of the Worlds<\/em> was fake, it sure did sound like the reporters were witnessing everything first-hand, describing alien tripods stomping across New Jersey farmlands with tentacles and poisonous gas and are currently heading towards New York! I didn\u2019t need visuals to imagine it. The calm way they described terrifying things made it feel even scarier.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing Ira Glass said was that beginners often try to talk like \u201cpeople on TV\u201d instead of just being themselves. I think I do that too sometimes, like trying to sound more formal or \u201cprofessional\u201d instead of just… me! He said people connect better with someone who talks like a normal human being. When I think about War of the Worlds<\/em> again (even though it was dramatic), it still sounded like real people reporting news instead of actors reading lines. Maybe that\u2019s why it was so powerful. Overall, what I learned from Ira Glass this week is that good audio storytelling takes patience, being honest, and being willing to fail many times before finding something special! And listening to War of the Worlds<\/em> just showed the real effects of powerful storytelling when done right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, I watched a couple of videos where Ira Glass talks about what makes good audio storytelling. One thing he said that really stood out to me was that finding a good story is often harder and takes longer than actually producing it. I understand that this is true because for example, finding the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[9,32],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intro-sound","tag-ds106","tag-introsound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/typingtomyself.ericisinschool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}