In a video interview I came across on 37signals, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, explains his storytelling process and two points in particular stood out to me:
“The amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story.”
“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”
These two ring true with everything we do in our office. It’s not obvious to the visitors of our sites just how much time is spent on doing the initial research, finding the story, building the information architecture, deciding on the back-end technologies or creating the design mock-ups. The actual build-out of a site, the stuff that people end up experiencing, goes much, much quicker.
That’s only half the battle. Even if you do all the initial work, you still have to edit out the “crap.” You have to be ruthless and only show what needs to be shown in order to get your information across with as little static as possible.
Anyone can tell a story, or build a Web site. The difference between a good one and a great one is not about what has been put in, but what has been taken out.
The entire interview: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4
See also: Stories smooth as Glass (Mizzou Wire)
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