Anyone interested in narrative audio – podcasts and non-fiction radio, in particular – should read Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel. With the help of fleeting co-pilot Ira Glass of This American Life, and ‘visits’ to leading exponents from Radiolab, Planet Money, Snap Judgment and The Moth, Abel reveals how the stories we listen to draw us in and why radio (at its best) is a visual medium.
The graphic novel format really adds zip and flow to each chapter, illustrating key points in a more compelling way than your typical textbook or blog post. Here’s a quick peek inside.
Revelations to look out for:
always characters and plot before topics and ideas
why “what happens next?” is the engine of a good story and suspense is an unanswered question
the importance of signposting to emphasise key moments
capturing the awe in conversations (particularly the complex and abstract ones)
reframing thoughts to take stories into a wider context (what x says about y)
letting go and being open to different reactions on the first play
going with your intuition in the edit.
A big tip that any seasoned journalist will endorse is this nugget from transom.org founder Jay Allison: “The moment you know you have a story is when you realise it’s not the story you thought it was.”
That need to know animates and propels a story, something that Michael Shapiro, the writer of last week’s The Delacorte Review newsletter, unpacked in the context of creative non-fiction and truth vs artifice.
“We feel the writer’s need to make sense of what she or he had to learn and now cannot wait to tell us. That writer worked hard to get to the point of telling and that struggle, with all its false starts and wrong turns and self-doubt, has given the story its heart, its power, its soul.”
It’s still early days – you can still say that at 41 – but here are a few radio-related projects I have worked on. Looking forward to developing a podcast series of conversations next year where I promise to put many of these lessons into practice.