This is part two of our take on the four-part video series, Ira Glass on Storytelling. Last time, in The Building Blocks of Story, we saw how great stories and scenes have elements of both anecdote (action) and reflection (giving the action significance).
This episode is about the challenges that face those who wish to create great stories. After the video I’ll discuss how this applies to improvisation.
The difficulty of finding great stories
Creating great stories for any medium is difficult. For radio, news, or any written format, the challenge lies not only in finding compelling material, but also in presenting it in a compelling way. There may be a hundred ways to tell a given story, but only one may be truly great — Goldilocks and the Three Bears wouldn’t be as much fun if it were written from the cold porridge’s point of view.
This raises the questions: do great stories simply exist and wait to be found, or is it all in the presentation? Can anything be made into a great story? More importantly, can it be done live, on stage, in real-time?
When improvising, searching for a “better” story simply is not possible. One must build upon the foundation laid in the beginning of the scene or risk being sucked into an exhausting debate, negotiation, or argument which produces nothing at all.
When your improvisation is honest, the work often happens to be funny. When your improvisation is focused, stories naturally emerge.
Without the luxury of searching for great stories in improvisation, we must choose between crafting our stories piece-by-piece in real-time or abandoning the notion of story altogether. While the latter can produce some light entertainment, it does little to progress improvisation as an art or to truly engage audiences in a meaningful way.
Improvising Stories: less is more
Glass advocates “ruthlessly killing” stories which aren’t shaping up to be great. In improv, we cannot kill what has already been created. Instead, we can preemptively edit by “ruthlessly focusing” on the core of the story — usually the tension between the fundamental desires of your characters — and minimizing those things which complicate our stories by distracting from that core.
The only way I know to successfully improvise a story is this: focus on and explore what already exists. Persistence at this often causes a latent story to reveal itself.
This seemingly straightforward concept is challenging in practice. Something about our very nature insists that we should add more, say more, do more. Most novice improvisers run their mouths or their minds a mile a minute on stage, but it never gets them anywhere. It is the equivalent of flailing in a net that only gets tighter the more you struggle.
Experienced improvisers do not do this. You can always pick out an experienced improviser by how much they do not say and do not do.
Experienced improvisers understand that everything that happens in a scene costs energy. Energy that can be used to focus on, or to distract from, what already exists in a scene. We must work much harder to keep things simple than to let them get crazy. Mick Napier explores this idea in his essay “Improvisation and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” from his excellent book Improvise: Scene from the Inside out. I endorse it both as a scientist and an improv-tist.
The point of what I’m saying here, and what Mick says, is this: Do less. Say less. Add less. Use your energy to prevent the addition of extraneous information to the scene, not to add more.
When there is less “in the air,” it is easier to explore what you do have. The more you add, the harder it gets.
When your improvisation is honest, the work often happens to be funny. When your improvisation is focused, stories naturally emerge.
Practice makes simple
The only way to get good at improvising (or writing) stories is to simply do the work. The more you practice, the more quickly you will be able to identify and explore what already exists in a scene without needing to add more.
The ultimate goal, at least in my mind, is to improvise stories which are indistinguishable from written ones. They do not have to be long; every scene can tell a story, whether it takes thirty seconds or an hour.
What do you think?
Are good stories simply waiting to be found, or are they created through merciless editing? Is it possible to improvise truly great stories by focused exploration of a central theme, or is that an unreasonable goal?
In part three we’ll discuss good taste, persistence, and how to keep expectations from getting the best of you.
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