Anecdotes and reflections are the two main building blocks that Ira Glass goes in great detail about when he is describing his view on storytelling. Glass mentions that once these building blocks are meshed together, you have to make sure that the story you are telling keeps the listener’s attention. You have to make sure that the questions raised in your story aren’t predictable and that they are constantly coming until the end of the story.

Having a very predictable story can cause the listener to become less engaged and invested in the story. Although, it is still possible to keep the audience’s attention by doing something unique with your story. An example would be two horror stories. They are similar in many ways by having the same cliches and similar characters, but  if they were told different perspectives, the killer’s or the victims’, they would be two almost completely different stories. Thus, making the viewers interested and invested again. It’s not difficult to this, but it takes a lot of time.

In order to create unique stories, you have “go through the crap” like Glass talks about in his interview. He mentions that behind every story is  a pile of crap that was create to help get to the story that could be called unique. “Crap” isn’t being used as synonym for trash here. Glass goes into more detail in the video about how that crap can be transformed into a well written story if you remove the boring parts and get straight into the part of the story that you as the author can truly enjoy and appreciate.

Listening to Glass helped me realize even more about story telling when I thought I already knew all I needed to know. Now, I do know that all those stories that I had ideas for, but thought they were “crappy” and threw them out, weren’t actually crappy. They could’ve been gold or maybe a they could’ve been so unique that it revolutionized a genre or created it’s own. The most important piece of information that I took from the interview is that stories need to keep the listener or viewer engaged by asking questions and answering them relatively soon as the story progresses.