Ira Glass bequeaths the tricks of the trade in four YouTube videos that are extremely interesting, whether or not your are in the publishing/podcasting/video making business.
… It is your job to be kind of ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions — you don’t have the story part that works or you don’t have a moment of reflection that works and you’re going to need both, and in a good story you’re gonna flip back and forth between the two like to be a little bit of action and someone will say something about it and then a little more action and someone will say something and it and that’s really like a lot of the trick of the whole thing you know is to have the perseverance that if you’ve got an interesting anecdote that you also uh… can end up with an interesting moment of reflection that will support it and then the two together interwoven into three minutes or six minutes or however long your story is will make something that’s larger than the sum of its parts.
(Via Kottke)