Narrative Pleasure = Right v. Wrong

In this Slate article Kathyrn Schultz interviews Ira Glass from This American Life about "wrongness", and how it sub-textually drives each of the stories they do on the show. In it, Ira discusses the collision of expectation versus reality as a narrative convention, and even as a creative discipline. At one point, he's talking about a story he did on The Onion's brainstorming sessions, in which it is not uncommon for them to come up with about 600 headlines, only 16 or 17 of which they actually end up using. That means that they are willing to be wrong 583 times in order to be right 17. He goes on:

"It kind of gives you hope. If you do creative work, there's a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired. "

It's an interesting idea; one that I probably agree with about 90 percent, but then, the whole interview is interesting and, though it deprives you of Ira Glass's signature voice, I highly recommend that you check it out in full.