Claudia Dreifus: Who were some of your influences in those early years?
Ira Glass: Roland Barthes. At college, we were assigned Barthes’s S/Z , which made me understand what I could do in radio. In S/Z, Barthes takes apart a short story by Balzac, line by line. He asks: How does this story pull you in, engage, and give you pleasure? He names things that are helpful if you want to make stories about people. Barthes explains: here’s how to structure a narrative by creating a sequence of events that will create forward motion that will create narrative suspense, planting questions along the way that can be answered. That turned out to be an enormously useful way to think about how to do an interview.
Ira Glass: Roland Barthes. At college, we were assigned Barthes’s S/Z , which made me understand what I could do in radio. In S/Z, Barthes takes apart a short story by Balzac, line by line. He asks: How does this story pull you in, engage, and give you pleasure? He names things that are helpful if you want to make stories about people. Barthes explains: here’s how to structure a narrative by creating a sequence of events that will create forward motion that will create narrative suspense, planting questions along the way that can be answered. That turned out to be an enormously useful way to think about how to do an interview.
Source : ‘To Get Things More Real’: An Interview with Ira Glass
