Handcrafts in Kyoto

In the U.S., we tend not to lack for things. We’ve become quite adept at creating the machinery to make things in bast quantities. In many cases, the rise of an industrial process has meant the end of traditional hand-craft methods of making things. I went to Kyoto two weeks ago to accompany a participant in the first International Kumihimo Conference, which was sponsored by and held at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. Kumihimo is the traditional Japanese craft of braiding, a craft that had significant uses in many aspects of life in Japan before the industrial age. At KIT, they study traditional kumihimo as an end unto itself, and as a source of inspiration for structures and designs used in making products from a variety of materials, including the latest carbon-fiber threads.

I spoke with a number of conference attendees in an attempt to answer the basic question, “Why”. When every participant acknowledged that machines could produce many useful braids, why did they consider it important to preserve the craft and improve their own skills. Some of the answers they gave are in my soundslide presentation on Preserving Handcrafts.

I’m looking forward to completing the full project, and to seeing your comments on the soundslide.

Disc Golf at Northside Park

I like urban parks. Central Park in New York City, Forest Park in St. Louis, and Kapiolani Park in Honolulu are three example of great urban spaces where people go to enjoy friends, family, activities, and just a little bit of being outside. Gainesville doesn’t have an urban park like the three I mentioned, but it does have some nice small parks. Northside Park, near the intersection of NW 34th Street and Highway 441, is one of Gainesville’s city parks. Northside is notable for a couple of things: it’s the site of the city’s only disc golf course, and it is apparently the ideal place to put a large retail center.

I decided to make my second soundslide project about Northside Park, with a particular emphasis on the disc golf course. The project was interesting to put together. I focused on the disc golf for two reasons — it’s a large part of what makes the park unique, and I wanted to try to get some “action” shots in. I ended up getting a few pretty good action shots, almost all of which were left out of the final project. I’ll post a few of them here over the next couple of weeks.

The sound, especially the natural sound on tape, was an adventure in itself. There’s a blog post coming on that, too, in the very near future. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Northside Park in Gainesville, Florida.

Inspiration from Ira Glass

So I was feeling particularly bad about some of my work this week (there will be particulars in a future post), and decided to go back and review the Ira Glass videos (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) on storytelling. I came away with several things, some of which even managed to help me feel better.

Part 1: When Ira Glass talks about story movement and a continuing progression of questions, he’s using different language to describe something Robert McKee covers. McKee talks about the “gaps”, those places in a story where you have a gap between what a character expected and what they got, or between what the audience thought was going to happen and what actually happened. These “gaps” are where the movement takes place, and the structure for the gap is often expressed in a question. If we know precisely what’s going to happen next as we move from one fact to another, we’re really just sliding among static positions. It’s the unexpected, the “I didn’t see that coming!” that helps turn a set piece into a story.

Glass also talks about being ruthless, something else that every good writer and editors I’ve ever worked with knew well. If a bit of dialogue, a fact, a piece of exposition about a character doesn’t move the story forward (or help create a story in the first place), then get rid of it–at best it will slow down the story, at worst, it will bring it to a crashing stop.

Part 2: “Give yourself permission to fail” is some of the best advice I’ve ever received. If everything I do meets my standards, then my standards aren’t nearly high enough. It’s critical, though, to understand why something is a failure, to recognize it as a failure, and to move on to the next story with lesson in hand–to move on and try to succeed. This is one of those situations in which a good editor or second set of eyes can be important: someone who hasn’t spent 38 hours collecting material can be much freer with a proper diagnosis of “crap” than the person who’s trying to figure out how to justify having spent all that time…

Part 3: OK, an admission: I don’t particularly enjoy writing books, and I’ve never tried to write a novel. I know quite a few successful novelists, though, and almost all have shared the same advice on getting a first novel published: start by writing a novel and sticking it in desk drawer. Then, write the novel that you’ll try to get published. Their point is that you have to write enough words to develop your craft before you have a reasonable chance of success. Glass uses the same approach here–if you have the basic “good taste” to get started, then a significant part of success is developing the craft through repetition. Don’t give up. That’s a piece of great advice.

Part 4: Characters and stories. I think the thing I really take away from this is that even in the “moment of reflection” that tells the audience why they should care, the characters should be the ones showing the audience why they should care. If I have to come up with a voice-over to tell the audience why this matters, then I either haven’t found the right character or I haven’t let them tell the right story.

I know what I want my stories to do, I just don’t always succeed in allowing the stories to do their work. Especially when I’m using new tools to tell the story, I don’t yet have the “chops” to let the craft get out of the way. Fortunately, I have time and more stories to work on getting it right.

Thoughts on "Journalism stories: A multimedia approach

I enjoyed walking through Mindy McAdams’ tutorial on multimedia journalism. I absolutely agree that starting off with a list of questions you want answered is the right beginning. Too often, we begin with a list of points we want to make, rather than questions we want answered, and the result is a screed rather than a work of journalism. After working through her steps, though, there is one point one which I’d make a modification: I think her sequence may be limiting.

Here’s what I mean: Mindy writes about asking questions, putting them into modules, and managing the size of the modules, all before you begin the reporting. I know you can do that, but I think you should also be quite open to re-organizing the modules based on what the story tells you. If we’re starting with questions, we have to be willing to go where the story takes us, in form as well as content.

One of the points made in the second part of this story (yes, I read ahead…) is that we have to consider how best to tell each part of the story. That’s new, and represents one of the most interesting parts of being a multimedia journalist. The tricky part, in my experience, isn’t in telling the story in various places, but in getting the reader to follow the story across the different media. When every part of the story is on-line, it’s somewhat easier — hyperlinks can take you anywhere — but when a piece of the story is in print and others are on-line, then you’re faced with the dilemma of how much of the story to tell in each medium.

Knowing that, even on line, many readers won’t pick up the entire package, I think it’s critical that each module (or story element) stand alone — if a reader is going to come into a single piece of the story (through, for example, a link from a search engine) they must be able to get meaning and a complete story experience from that piece alone. This goes counter to some strategies for giving readers an incentive to read the whole package, but it’s the only honest way to deal with the readers — and honesty has to be at the center of everything a journalist does.