Fortune Favours the Brave
As part of my New Year's resolutions (and post-Trump-era-lutions), I decided to refresh my podcast feed. It felt like a good time to cull a bunch of shows about news, current affairs and policy wonkery in the US, which in practice had become little more than rubbernecking sessions at the edge of the Trumpian car wreck.
I wanted to focus on different kinds of podcasts—memoirs, fiction, experimental stuff. Stuff that might be more challenging and outside my comfort zone.
One podcast I’d been meaning to check out for a while is Scott Carrier’s Home of the Brave. Carrier is a legend of narrative radio; a “documentarian’s documentarian”. Even his origin story is the stuff of legend. Here is Ira Glass telling it.
The basic gist is that Carrier hitchhiked across the US in the early 1980s with a microphone and a tape recorder, interviewing people he met along the way. He then showed up at the NPR offices in Washington, DC, with a duffel bag full of cassette tapes, hoping to speak to a producer. He was let into the building by pure chance and went on to create his first radio piece from the content on those tapes.
It’s a great story. The takeaway might be either:
success requires a savant-like virtuosity from an early age
success requires immense luck—after all, Alex Chadwick let him into the building for a laugh, just to take a look at the young kid who thought he could walk into NPR and make a radio piece
There are elements of truth in both of these, but I don’t think they hit the mark in this case. Yes, Scott Carrier does have a unique voice and a prodigious talent at crafting stories from slices of the mundane in forgotten America. But as he himself says in this episode of Tape, just because this was his first radio story doesn’t mean he was a novice. He had studied documentary film-making in college. He was well aware of how to stage a scene, find characters, capture ambient sound, etc.
Even the part about “luck” is somewhat misleading. Sure, he was fortunate that Alex Chadwick happened to be there on a Sunday afternoon. But if he hadn’t been, you can imagine that Carrier would have been back the next day, and the day after that, and he would have probably befriended the doorman downstairs, and somehow found a way to get into the building. It’s what young, driven people do.
So what’s the moral I take from Scott Carrier’s story? That behind every person who seems like they were “born to do” something, there is a long (hidden) history of practice, preparation and determination.
And also that, to tell a good story, you will often need to weed out a bunch of extraneous details that can get in the way.