I’m writing and editing at TechBuzz.News these days. Part of my work is training interns in news writing. And every day, I share with them News Writing Tip of the Day. I thought today’s tip was worth sharing widely, beyond our modest Slack channel. This is what I’ve shared with the TechBuzz Interns.
Long story, but please stick with me. This is really important.
Do you know about Ira Glass?
Can I tell you about Ira Glass?
Ira Glass is one of the most famed storytellers and broadcasters of our time. In the mid-90s he started a radio show in Chicago called “This American Life”, telling the individual stories of regular Americans from all walks of life. It sounds unassuming, and it is in a way, but This American Life became the model for what audio storytelling could be. It was (and continues to be) funny and heartwarming and eye-opening. It puts you in the shoes of another in a way few other programs can. It’s the model that countless podcasts have tried to emulate, to the benefit of every listener. It’s won so many awards that there’s a whole section about “Awards” in Glass’s Wikipedia entry.
But here is something not everybody knows. When Ira Glass started writing and broadcasting… he was abysmally bad. He was awful. It would be reasonable to have called young Ira Glass a talentless hack.
So what changed? Just one thing. Practice. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Glass stuck with it, and became one of the best story-tellers on earth.
Glass himself admits as much in his instructional booklet, Radio: An Illustrated Guide. I don’t have a link, but I once heard a radio piece Glass produced at the beginning of his career. I think he started right out of high school. He was still a teenager. And the piece is awful. It was a news radio segment about trade in a specific industry. It was incoherent. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that I didn’t understand any of it, not because it was a complex topic, but because he did such a bad job of explaining.
This… is totally normal. I did the same thing.
I went to BYU, and if you don’t know, BYU had (probably still has) an excellent communications program. We, the broadcasting students, produced a news show every day, which no other university in the country could claim. We had lots of practice, and students routinely won awards. Once we were doing “live labs”, which is something younger students do where they essentially do a dry run. We’d go through all the motions of a live broadcast without actually broadcasting anything — it just went live to the classroom. I’d memorized my story to share. I was standing outside the broadcasting building, in a suit in front of the camera, ready to go, microphone in my hand, earpiece in my ear.
The producer standing behind the camera looks at me, says, “We’re live… in 5… 4… ” then hand motions — 3, 2, and 1.
A light turns red. I’m on camera. My classmates are watching. And I… freeze. The lines I’d memorized are gone. I can’t even remember what story I’m supposed to share. I stand… silently.
“You’re live!” my producer nervously whispers.
“I know.” Even my two words sound painfully anxious.
I stand, speechless, for much much longer than you’d think I could. Longer than you’d think they’d keep the camera on. All of my classmates watch. Everybody is embarrassed for me. I’m just staring at the camera in horror the whole time.
Eventually, I remembered my story. My mistake was in memorizing a word-for-word script. Forget the first word, and you have nowhere to start. From then on, I just remembered the basic points of a story. I never relied on verbatim scripts again for live broadcasting.
I think I still have the tape somewhere. I should dig that out. People today tell me I’m a natural on camera, that I radiate charisma and presence. To the degree that is true, it is only true because I’ve practiced on camera, thousands of times.
The details may change, but I think everybody goes through this. Almost nobody starts out great at what they do. Maybe there are exceptions. Orson Scott Card says he wrote the sci-fi classic “Ender’s Game” without editing at all. He just completed the final page, and was done.
Well… screw you, Orson Scott Card. The rest of us have to practice. And we have to keep practicing for years before we’re any good. We wade through years of producing bad work — garbage — the product of our hands and our own minds, just embarrassing to look at. But there’s no shortcut. You get good by starting really bad. And then you just keep going.
I’ve had to do this over and over in my career. I launched a film festival. I’ve made hundreds of commercial videos. I made a documentary film. I made a TV show. I led marketing at a startup that raised $30M. I made a couple premium podcasts, that were scripted, researched, and produced (as opposed to the Joe Rogan style of 3 hours of live conversation unedited; who has time to listen to that?). And now I’m editing a news site about tech and entrepreneurship.
You could call it diverse, or eclectic, or if you’re inclined to be a bit more harsh, you could call it flighty, bombastic, or unfocused. There are reasons my career has played out the way it has, but I won’t go into those here.
The point is, I’ve had to keep learning the whole time. I’ve had to start over with new things again and again. And each time that happens, I’m a novice all over. The only way to get better… is to practice. To push through. To produce lots of awful work until it starts to look like good work.
Keep going. Don’t get discouraged. The only reason your work looks bad now is because you know what good work looks like. Whether you want to become a news writer, or a painter, or sculptor, whether you want to be an essayist or songwriter or, heck, if you want to be a statistician or actuary or whatever, just keep practicing. Keep going. The persistent amateur will eventually overtake the negligent prodigy. You’ll get there. Keep going.
Enjoy some words of wisdom from our friend, the talentless hack who became the best in the world, Ira Glass: