Ira Glass on storytelling lessons from 30 years of ‘This American Life’

The format of “This American Life” is designed around this thing that [Roland Barthes] calls the proairetic code. And the proairetic code is basically this simple principle that if you have any sequence of actions start, no matter how banal, [with] “This thing happens and it leads to this next thing, and it leads to this next thing,” even if all the things are very ordinary. [For example,] ”a man wakes up and the house seems very quiet, and he walks to the door of the bedroom and just listens for a second, and the house is very quiet. He walks down the stairs; the house is very quiet.”

Nothing is happening in this story, actually. It's all, like, super banal, but you feel the forward motion of a story happening and you can feel the intentionality and you start to wonder what will happen next. And he says that any sequence of actions that you get going will create the question, ”Where are we going?”

And that's just incredibly useful. That's one of the reasons why “This American Life” just starts in motion.

Reiman: When Mari shows me this video, it feels like something I'm not supposed to be watching. On the screen is her fiancé, Mikael. He's shirtless. He's crisply lined up. He's young, 23, bright green eyes, wild curly hair tucked under a baseball cap, and he's holding a tattoo gun, giving himself a tattoo on his stomach while she teases him, says he's never going to tattoo her again.

[MIKAEL LAUGHING]

He looks up and laughs, his mouth full of braces. Mari is always sort of dragging Mikael about his tattoos. He has lots of them, some which Mari finds offensively dumb.

Mari

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

Interpreter

He has a Mickey Mouse, but the Mickey Mouse is smoking. He used to smoke, and he used to do ridiculous things like that, because to me, they're ridiculous things. But yeah.

And then behind that, he has a little hand, like a little hand with an eye. And he tells me that eye sees everything. And I was just like, bueno, OK.

Mari

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

Interpreter

And he has something else there, like just — like an ugly doll, like it looks like a toad. It has big eyes.

Mari

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

Nadia Reiman

It's E.T. smoking a blunt. Mari is not her real name. She's from Venezuela. She's here applying for asylum, which is legal, but that seems to matter less and less nowadays in terms of who gets deported, hence the alias.

When I talked to her I liked how she was able to describe things in scenes. She also was so open and direct — and just so young. Such a picture of most of the folks affected by this CECOT thing. While at the same time she was so ACTIVE. She did so much — she found the lawyer, she talked to her boss. She's a person with a lot of agency and motion, so that made her a solid character to me. Someone I wanted to get to know. 

I am what I would call a plot jock, so it's hard for me to think about how to start a story without thinking about the action that happens first, what happens next … and almost all of my stories are structured chronologically. For this one, we started with the tattoo tape simply because it was a scene that said something about Mari and Mikael's dynamic as a couple. And Mari's eye-rolling about his tattoos helps you know them and picture them in a real and funny way before you get to what happened to them. Otherwise I think it's too easy for stories of people that went through something traumatic to feel truly 3-D. If you start straight with the police coming, they become characters that something happens to, rather than full people with agency. So that was the thought behind that.