The two questions Ira Glass says lead to great stories
How to take two disjointed stories and build a bridge that connects them.
When it comes to getting good stories, Ira Glass swears by these two questions: “How did you think the situation was going to work out before it happened? And then how did it really work out?”
Source:
in this piece…The reason it works so well is because you get told two disjointed stories, and the person has to build a bridge to connect them. It also forces the narrator to reflect on both scenarios by comparing them and describing why their imagined reality didn’t come to fruition but another one did. “The jump between the two is just kind of interesting,” he says.
In this interview, Glass expands on why those questions work so well:
Glass: You get two stories. And you get the shift between them, you get the kind of like, here’s how I thought it would go, which is one story. And then here’s how the reality is different than the dream of that. And then the jump between the two is just kind of interesting.
Interviewer: Yeah, I mean it forces—it basically forces someone to generate a This American Life story, which is to say it forces them into narrative. It forces them into another narrative and because they’ve given these two narratives, it forces them into reflection, right? Like there’s no choice but to compare them.
Some more good Glass quotes from the piece in The Profile:
“Great stories happen to those who can tell them.”
“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”
“You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.”
“Most everybody I know who does interesting creative work went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.”
“Perfectionism: the need to be right instead of being right.”
“Force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase; I feel like your problem is that you're trying to judge all things in abstract before you do them. That is your tragic mistake.”
“If you’re a three-dimensional person, it gives the other person the opportunity to be three-dimensional back.”
Related:
dear matt,
love ira glass! great piece!
“How did you think the situation was going to work out before it happened?
And then how did it really work out?”
those are great questions not only for story-telling but also for any joke, from the audience's perspective. good to think about, however long or short the form is!
thanks for sharing!
love
myq
Here’s a great story about Ira Glass and his violent pit bull. Unintentionally hilarious allegory about the NPR leftist mindset. TLDR: it constantly bit everyone including him, his wife, and children. They gave it prozac and exotic meats to "cure" it and it still had to be muzzled all the time. They stopped having guests over. He still claims the dog is the victim.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160805130408/https://www.petful.com/pet-health/ira-glass-dog-piney/