What are Ira Glass' Secrets for Great Story-Telling?

In part one Glass identifies two key blocks to build effective stories:

1. You must have a sequence of facts, actions or events (one thing leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing -- creating a sense of suspense). You must raise a question from the beginning, and then answering those questions. The shape of a story is that you are throwing out questions, to keep people listening, and then answering them along the way. This is called the anecdote.

2. You have to have a moment of reflection in which the reader or audience finds out what this sequence of actions means. The moment of reflection also Both the sequence of actions and the moment of reflection should be compelling in order to have a good story.

You have to have an interesting anecdote and you have to have a moment of reflection. These are the two fundamental building blocks for a good story.

In part two Glass talks about how hard it is to find a good story. More than half of your time, if you're really good, will consist of looking for a good story and trying things out that don't work. You also have to be willing to kill the crap when the story doesn't work.

Glass says that it's useful to think of a story as something that is trying to be crap. It is trying to be unstructured, pointless, boring and digressive. It is your job to actively work against this tendency at every stage of the way and to prop the story up and make it work.

Do not take for granted that the story will work on its own. It won't.

Glass says that the storyteller must be merciless in killing off the boring parts of the story. He says you have to record and get rid of a lot of crap if you are going to produce something that is really, really good. Stories that work, he says, are good because the storyteller was willing to be tough in ruthless in cutting all of the bad parts out of it.

The reality, he says, is that most of what you produce just won't work. That's natural. That's what you have to go through each time, in order to come up with good material. Failure is part of success. If you are not failing all of the time then you are not going to get into the situation where you are likely to get lucky.

Finally, Glass says much of finding a good story is pure luck. The more you work, the more you write, the more crap you throw out, the more likely you are to get lucky -- and luck is everything in this business -- but you have to work for it.

In part three Glass talks about your skills will be mediocre, at best, when you first start telling stories, but your taste in good stories -- the thing that got you into this game -- is still good enough so that you can tell how bad you are. Use your good taste to strengthen your weak skills.

Unfortunately, he says, a lot of people never get beyond the point of having mediocre skills and good taste because they get discouraged and give up.

The most important thing you can do, says Glass, when you get discouraged because your taste tells you that what you are putting out there is not as good as you hoped it would be, is to produce a lot of material. Put yourself on a deadline so that you know that every week, or every month you will complete a project.

It is only when you do a huge amount of work that the work you are putting out there will be equal to your ambitions. It literally takes years of work to hone your craft.

In the final part Glass discusses the importance of finding your own voice while, at the same time, being interested in the stories of other people.

Ira Glass spent a hour talking to Google employees about his popular radio broadcast, "This American Life", and what it takes to make that program actually work.