Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama
Drama for the dinner table
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 […]
This is a rambling exploration of Aristotle’s guide to understanding and writing drama (as applied to audio drama) that began as a set of personal notes on Artistotle’s little book “The Poetics”, but, as I wrote, turned into a one-sided imaginary address to other writers, who like myself, are interested in figuring out why script-writing […]
Cliché and curiosity-quenching prose are the twin enemies of the writer of good dialog. And first drafts are often filled with both. Cliché is the Enemy Because we are saturated with story, conversation, prose, poetry, and music lyrics, etc., our attempts at writing (at least in the first draft) are prone to include dull, conventional, […]
EXPOSITION I’ve been thinking about exposition in audio drama lately and thought I’d take a moment to sum up some of the conclusions I’ve reached regarding how to deliver it. ON THE NOSE EXPOSITION Exposition is incredibly easy to get wrong – something I have proved in my own writing more than I’d like to […]
I recently attended a fantastic online class where I was challenged to think about techniques that can convey exposition in audio drama. My lack of answers at the time got me thinking specifically about how (and whether) to communicate a character’s appearance. The Power of Visual Storytelling Unfair, though it may be, the way someone […]
Once again, I am, in my overlong and wordy way, wading into an area of Audio drama that, as a person who has significant hearing loss, I probably don’t belong. As with my last article on the topic of sound and silence, these aren’t hills I’m particularly committed to dying on – merely thoughts and […]
