How to tell meaningful stories

Out on the Wire is a must read for anyone who does creative work, even if it’s just as a hobby. I guess it’d be helpful if you listen at least occasionally to podcasts or NPR-type radio too, just so you have context. Abel basically spent a year interviewing and observing the creatives at 99% Invisible, The Moth, Planet Money, Radio Diaries, Radiolab, Snap Judgment, and This American Life. Somehow she took all that information about the process of telling stories via radio and distilled it into a graphic novel. Even though this book is about radio, the process of making good stories applies to almost all art forms.

Out on the Wire gets seriously meta in places because you start to notice how Abel is applying the techniques she learned in the very scenes she’s depicting. This thing is dense as fuck, but never feels unwieldy. There are so many people and ideas that she manages to organize and present in a natural, understandable way. I am super impressed that she managed to wrangle the narrative into anything cohesive.

The panels are done in simple black ink drawings. They’re beautiful, but probably not something you’d buy the book for alone. The drawings are clearly there to support the narrative, not the other way around. It was really fun seeing the voices I know from radio rendered in cartoon and seeing what happened behind the scenes of actual stories I’ve listened to.

I’ll probably end up getting a copy of this book for my personal reference. I had checked it out on inter-library loan so I had to rush through it and I’d really like to revisit certain parts. The section on ideas was one of the most helpful things I’ve ever read as an artist. How do you come up with an idea and once you do, how do you know it’s good or refine it so it works? Such good advice throughout the book, but especially in that section.