Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Seth Louviere asks How do you construct your shows? I can’t imagine you simply copy and paste from one source like Wikipedia. How many sources do you usually try to get information from? Do you have some sources that are a go-to?

There is no single source for anything because every topic is different.

I have no problem with Wikipedia per se, but there are issues with using it.

For starters, I often find data that doesn’t jibe with other sources. When that happens, I often have to dig around to find the correct year something happened or at least check the original source that Wikipedia sites, and to be honest, there often either isn’t a source or the link to the source is broken.

There are some articles that are simply too long and too in-depth, and there are other articles that have almost nothing written. My goal is to tell an approximately 10-minute story, which requires trying to figure out the essence of what to say. That will often mean explaining the background of something or leaving out details that aren’t necessary.

Cutting and pasting anything wouldn’t really work because writing for the eye doesn’t usually translate well into writing for the ear.

One of the things I have to figure out for each episode is how I’m going to structure the episode and tell the story. Once I can figure out how the general arc of the episode is going to go, then it is just a matter of writing the script, which takes time but isn’t necessarily that difficult.