Off to a Good Start

I think that the most challenging part of a writing a story for radio is formulating the introduction. The stakes are very high: your listener will decide within a few short seconds whether to stick around for your story or whether to turn the proverbial dial, and so you must do everything you can to persuade that listener to stay, and you must do it quickly. A good introduction has the magical power to seize a person’s attention and keep them curious about how your story will unfold. 

I came across a great example of this within the Stanford Storytelling Project’s archives, in The Human Map, by Raj Bhandari. Within the first 30 seconds, Bhandari introduces himself, his topic, his character, and, perhaps most importantly, promises us that we will learn something new if we continue listening. So what else can we do but stay?! 

Here is the transcript of the first 30 seconds. I think it’s worth reading closely, because it is so packed with top-notch craft elements.

A genome is complete set of genetic material in a human. Through most of human history it has been hidden. But in today’s world we can now look into ourselves and map our genetic code. We can now understand ourselves at the basic, elemental level. But we’re more than just amino acids and proteins. This is the story of someone who learned a lot about her genes. But she found out that knowing about her genetic sequence raised more questions than it answered. 

Here’s what this brief introduction accomplishes: 

1. Starts by making sure that the audience is familiar with his topic. Defines his terms in very simple language that everyone can relate to. 

2. Indicates the context of his subject, the conversation to which this story makes a contribution. 

3. Clearly signals a mystery/question, and has an implicit promise. Implies what you will learn/understand something new by the end of the story. 

4. Introduces its narrator (himself) and his character.

As an aside, look how many sentences he uses in that intro! Short clauses are audio gold (because they’re easier for your listener’s brain to process), and when you listen to the story, you won’t even notice that he’s using them. Your attention will be drawn to the story of the woman who explores the mysteries of her DNA, right from the start.

The Human Map (19 minutes), produced by Raj Bhandari and Jonah Willihnganz for State of the Human in 2010

Tempo

When I first started producing radio, I took it upon myself to enlighten my listeners with unusual sound combinations. I would edit my stories so that the fast and the slow were sporadically mixed. Long, slow fade-ins were placed between quick, short speech excerpts. Sometimes I would sandwich five minutes of music between fifteen-second intervals of an interview. I thought I was doing my audience a favor by challenging their normal listening habits. I thought that the element of surprise would foster their keen listening. 

Now when I go back and listen to those stories, I realize that more than catching their attention, I was probably testing my listeners’ patience. The varying speeds of speech and music, and the unpredictability of it all, probably prevented the kind of attention I was hoping to encourage. In creating such a wild mish-mash of fast and slow, I think I thwarted my own attempt at producing immersive, engaging stories. 

There’s nothing wrong with a slow or fast story, per se, but over time I’ve come to prefer one or the other, not both at the same time. Listening to a good story should be like walking, or rowing, or carrying on a comfortable conversation. It should have a rhythm, a tempo, and it should keep that pace from beginning to end. This, I think, is more likely to sustain a listener’s attention over a long period of time.  

If you listen carefully to any great radio story, you’ll notice that it usually has a regular pace. The distance between speech, music, and ambient sound clips will be pretty consistent. Radiolab is super fast; This American Life tends to be on the medium side, sometimes slow. One venue that produces very immersive medium-paced stories, in which the balance between narration and scoring sustains a natural sense of momentum, is WNYC’s Studio 360. 

Their Peabody-award-winning episode, Moby-Dick, traces the influence that Melville’s 1851 book has had on several artists. Host Kurt Andersen speaks with, among others, musician Laurie Anderson, painter/sculptor Frank Stella, playwright Tony Kushner, and Juilliard professor Stanley Crouch.   

Towards the beginning of this episode, Andersen follows Professor Crouch into the classroom at Juilliard, where he is teaching a class on jazz in American history. Crouch compares the prose of Herman Melville to the stride piano of James P. Johnson, even though Moby-Dick was written “half a century before jazz was born.” This little vignette [7:00-12:30] follows a typical editing pattern of a just-right-paced story.

If you listen with a stopwatch, you’ll find that this story has a pretty even clip: 20-40 seconds of speech are followed by 10-20 seconds of music or ambient sound. There is some variation, but the regular rate of exchange between narration and music allows the listener to take in a reasonable amount of information, then have moment to process it, while anticipating the information to come. 

The music in this piece is edited to round out the ideas of Professor Crouch, as well as to queue us about what to expect next. In the opening, Professor Crouch compares the fearlessness of Melville’s prose to the improvisational technique in Johnson’s music. As Crouch draws this parallel, we hear the piano underneath, illustrating his idea. When he has finished a sentence, the piano music takes the stage for 10-20 seconds, as if adding color to the picture Crouch has created. 

Then, just when we expect it, the music fades down slowly, but stays softly underneath, and Crouch comes in with a new idea. The music simultaneously begins a new motif, paralleling the change in the direction of the story. When Crouch finishes his sentence, the music surfaces again, as if it absorbed Crouch’s new idea and is further embellishing it. The balance between narration and scoring in this piece, and the steady tempo of the exchange, sets up a structure of anticipation and satisfaction which carries us listeners merrily along.   

A good tempo is the kind of thing your listeners will probably never notice. It only stands out when it’s missing. If you listen to this Studio 360 piece, you’ll find it much easier to pay attention to the story than to notice the pacing. This, I’ve realized, is a good thing. 

Moby-Dick, [7:00-12:30], Kurt Andersen interviews Stanley Crouch, produced by Studio 360, Episode 1252, Dec 2011

One Step Script at a Time

We don’t know who this story comes from, and perhaps because the author remains anonymous, listening to The Age of Consent feels like being on the receiving side of a confessional booth. This story is essentially a series of incommodious admissions, portrayed through a series of vividly-narrated, increasingly intense moments. 

In the interest of protecting the author’s privacy, This American Life’s senior producer Julie Snyder reads the story on the air. It is recounted in the first person, and centers on the author’s teenage daughter’s first foray into sexual activity. 

Like any great story, this one is told in such a way that it feels organic and spontaneous, but also like any great story, it is actually very carefully engineered. In radio in particular, a story’s design remains well hidden because so much of its power comes from feeling authentic, intimate, and spontaneous.

Great stories, written and spoken, are often designed to develop in a series of building beats. I wanted to get a sense of how this story builds, and to do that, I made an outline as I listened. At the Stanford Storytelling Project, we made outlines at the start of every story’s production. We called them step scripts because they described the steps of the story (others call them storyboards or beat scripts). 

Step scripts can sometimes feel like an extra task in the production process, but they actually save us a lot of time, because making changes to a step script involves a lot less heavy lifting than making changes to a fully written and developed script. Step scripts enable us to tighten transitions, generate a more dramatic narrative arc, and make sure that every reflection in our story is earned by the anchor of a scene before we take the time to write the fully scripted version of a story. 

For my purposes in this post, a step is anything that advances the plot of the story. A step is usually an event or decision, and sometimes that event or decision is coupled with a reflection or interpretation. My stories are usually comprised of not more than 10 steps. 

So here’s our step script of ‘The Age of Consent’ (you might want to listen first, then look at this):

1. Scene: Mother at the kitchen table, late at night, ruminating over the fact that her 16-year-old daughter just lost her virginity. Reflection: She is not the mother she wanted to be, disappointed in the way her daughter has turned out. 

2. Scene: Mother calls the clinic to arrange birth control for daughter, receives an icy tone from receptionist, disapproval. Reflection: Embarrassed. Imagines a hypothetical situation in which a “good mother” tells her daughter not to have sex again until she’s married. 

3. Scene: Daughter comes home with a rose from boyfriend, and a morning-after pill. Mother tries to speed up doctor’s appointment. Reflection: Sense of urgency. Less than a week after losing her virginity, daughter is on the pill. 

4. Scene: Mother and daughter take a trip to Chicago. At lunch daughter asks if her boyfriend can stay the night in their hotel room. Mother consents.

5. Mother wakes up the next morning to see daughter and boyfriend tangled in a blanket. Reflection: Mother is baffled by her own role in the situation. Also has a “disquieting sense of envy.” 

6. Scene: Few weeks later, mother is reading in bed. She hears daughter downstairs cutting the screen out of her window. Daughter tells mother that her boyfriend is coming over. Mother tells daughter to let him in the front door. Reflection: Mother is tired and unhappy. Making her daughter happy seems more important than protecting her virginity or her reputation. 

7. Scene: Because daughter’s boyfriend is staying the night so often, the tension between daughter and her father has come to a boil. Daughter wants her mother to leave her father. Daughter asks if she and her boyfriend can stay at a hotel for the night. Reflection: Mother identifies with her daughter. Staying at a hotel could be therapeutic. 

8. Scene: Because daughter is 16 years old, mother has to check her in at the hotel. Mother watches people in pool, restaurant, and sprawls across the bed. Reflection: Mother understands why her daughter wanted to come here. She doesn’t want to leave. Mother wants same refuge she is giving to her daughter.

Through this exercise we are able to see how the tension in this story builds, and keeps on building, right through the end. Listening, we experience a decent dose of discomfort. But with a step script in hand we are able to step back from the emotional impact of the story and take a more critical look at its design. This kind of tool gives us the opportunity to manipulate a story’s rhythms and beats, such that each step yields its intended effect.      

The Age of Consent, (12 min), starts at [33:30] Episode 341, ‘How to Talk to Kids,’ produced and read by Julie Snyder, 2007.