One of the neat things about Oregon is that it is the home of the largest used bookstore in the United States: Powell’s. For those who know me, you can imagine how beyond thrilled I was to be inside this gigantic bookstore. Long story short: I bought a few books (surprise surprise), one of which being The New Kings of Nonfiction that Ira Glass edited and put together. Essentially, it’s a collection of some of his favorite stories from over the years–some of which lots of people know, and some of which very few people know. Awesome, right?
Well, in the “Introduction” (I know, I’m that anal retentive person that insists on reading books cover to cover, copyrights and dedications included) Ira discusses a couple of points that immediately leaped out at me. They help me because it gives me a new way to think, so hopefully they will help someone else too!
The first is on the components of a good story and what Wesch refers to as the KYHOI.
“When you’re writing stories like these, I think you’ve really only got two basic building blocks. You’ve got the plot of the story, and you’ve got the ideas the story is driving at. Usually the plot is the easy part. You do whatever research you can, you talk to lots of people, and you figure out what happened. It’s the ideas that kill you. What’s the story mean? What bigger truth about all of us does it point to? You can knock your head against a wall for days thinking that through.”
Knowing Ira struggles with this should put everyone at ease, but the part I love about this is thinking about “what bigger truth about all of us does it point to.” It is the ‘bigger truth,’ the KYHOI, that I’m still searching for. I plan on spending the next couple of days thinking about The Uncultured Project and all of the other research I’ve done in hopes of finding that “bigger truth.”
The next quote is on the power of a good story…
“They make the world seem like an exciting place to live. I come out of them feeling like a better person–more awake and more aware and more appreciative of everything around me [...] in times when the media can seem so clueless and beside the point, that’s a great comfort in itself.”
I was particularly fond of this quote because it served as a good, concise reminder of what it is I’m trying to do.
I’m at a point where I’m easily getting lost in all my research, but when it comes down to it, the point of my research and video is to move people and do exactly what Ira talked about–make people feel “more awake and more aware and more appreciative.”
So, somehow I need to move from the point of knocking my head against the wall trying to think up a KYHOI, and get to that point where I’m able to make people feel real (which is a whole other blog post in itself)!
