Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama
Drama for the dinner table
I’m going to state the obvious; writing audio drama is not the same as writing a novel, short story, screenplay, or stage play. One of the most obvious ways this is true relates to setting. In a narrative, the setting can be described and brought to life for the reader. In a play or film, […]
Finally, I present the rather anti-climactic end to my look at Aristotle’s Poetics. Here Aristotle explores a few ancillary topics before giving some final advice on what constitutes a good drama. By finishing this final summary, though its value to writers is, I think, limited, it does give this project some sense of closure.. Chapter […]
Believable Dialog Dialog concentrates meaning. While speech in real life sprawls and weaves and contradicts itself and follows tangents and gets lost and sometimes finds its way to the point via a circuitous route, dialog (with appropriate allowances for characterisation) homes in on the essential meaning in what is being said. This is, in my […]
Universal Style for Audio Writers Strunk and White’s little pamphlet on style has been in use for decades and provides helpful principles for writers. Their guide is a classic and is full of useful advice. The advice should be followed judiciously, however. Sometimes characterisation requires us to break these rules (some characters are meant to […]
This week we turn our attention to the practical use of punctuation and how understanding it can help improve our writing. Punctuation isn’t grammar. But it does govern how we express grammar and, if we are audio dramatists, how a line and its meaning is communicated to an actor. It is the writer’s responsibility to […]
This week we turn our attention to the practical use of grammar and how understanding it can help improve our writing. Sentence Types Declarative – Makes a statement about something. Interrogatory – Asks a question. Imperative – Provides an instruction. Exclamatory – Makes an exclamation. The following exchange contains each of these. But in any […]
This continues my series on the basics of grammar for audio writers. We looked, in the last essay, at the traditional parts of speech and some ways that understanding them helps us to diagnose problems in our scripts. This week we are looking at some other ways to think about and classify words. Simple, compound […]
A while back I was looking at Aristotle’s poetics and thinking about how they applied to audio drama writing. I worked my way through the first 19 chapters and then came to a grinding halt. The 20th chapter was about grammar – specifically ancient Greek grammar. Besides being irrelevant (since its discussion concerned a language […]
Welcome Back. This week, Aristotle continues to give advice about the writing process, wading, briefly, into the subjects of outlining, gesture, structure, and unity. Book XVII Writing Process a. See the Action In this section of The Poetics, Aristotle turns his attention to the process of writing. He begins by talking about the importance of […]
Hi, and welcome back to this ongoing dive into Aristotle’s analysis of dramaturgy. This week we are getting, at last, into the practical advice Aristotle provides to help us write our plays. Book XIII Dramatic Plots Aristotle thinks about art in primarily moral terms. Part of his purpose was to defend the arts against his […]
Today, I’m only travelling a short distance through Aristotle’s poetics. He is again presenting us with a series of definitions, but these definitions are highly practical (at least until we get to book XII which, I think, can be skipped without any real loss occurring). If we use these definitions as a guide, we gain […]
Here we are taking a look at the next 5 sections of Aristotle’s poetics. As I stated last time, I’m working through Aristotle’s Poetics in an attempt to figure out why, even today, he is pointed to by script-writers as a guiding light in the production of drama. He is wordy, and often difficult to […]
