Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama
Drama for the dinner table
Character Conflict Conflict is the essence of drama. If a character gets up in the morning and achieves everything they want to without encountering a single obstacle, that’s great for the character, but the audience will be bored to tears. If, however, they struggle, encounter obstacles, and must fight to achieve their goals, then the […]
Discovering character I love working on back story and developing mini-biographies for my characters as a step towards finding their voices. But while backstory and biography are useful, they will not necessarily tell me how my characters will act or help me bring them to life on their own. There are some essential decisions that […]
Reviews of Audio Drama are a great help to audiences but they can also be useful for creators. Creators read reviews for constructive critique. To many folks, reviewers and creators seem like natural enemies, but in reality that’s rarely the case. As creators of audio drama, whether producers, sound designers, actors, composers and musicians, or […]
I had the opportunity to look at a script recently that made good use of the A plot – B plot combination. Integrating A and B Plots is not a technique I’ve made much use of myself, so it prompted me to do a bit of analysis regarding how this script structure works. For those […]
The Problem of Ageing You know how a random thought occasionally strikes you, and then grows over a few weeks until you find yourself giving it quite a bit of attention? Well, that’s happened to me just recently on the topic of ageing. These are just some things I’ve been thinking about that others may […]
TRANSCRIPTS A Little-Known Secret of Podcast Marketing Success that Audio Dramatists could easily be Implementing (but Rarely Do). NB: Actually, in the twelve months since I wrote this article, the number of audio dramas providing transcripts to accompany their shows has increased dramatically – a great thing in my view. WHY PROVIDE TRANSCRIPTS? Back before […]
The Importance of Compelling Titles I’m thinking about marketing again, this time specifically about the importance of well-chosen titles. How Consumers Choose Have you thought about how we decide on the audio dramas that we are going to listen to? I’ve got no hard data on this, but I’m willing to bet most of us […]
I’ve been thinking about marketing and how it intersects with writing scripts lately and thought this might be worth sharing. Here’s a strategy I use to create “the logline or blurb” that goes with my stories (also known as the elevator pitch, logline, or promo). The aim of the blurb is, of course, to try […]
Complex and involved stories with many plot threads can quickly become confusing for the audience. The deeper the story gets, the more likely it is that the audience will get lost. Some producers like to provide a quick opening recap to bring their audience up to speed. And while not everyone goes down this path, […]
Every tool has its purpose, and when it is being used in the right way (to accomplish that purpose), there’s no problem… but… where it is being used inexpertly, or for a purpose that it was not designed to meet, it creates more problems than it solves. I can’t help feeling that a lot of […]
FORMULATING A PROFESSIONAL RESPONSE TO CRITICISM It happens to all of us who create things that we then launch out into the world in the hopes of finding an audience. We sweat and bleed for our art, struggle with the fact that nothing we ever do achieves the perfection we want it to, and then […]
Beating Insecurity Am I an artist? A question on a facebook page recently got me thinking – “Do you think of yourself as an artist?” It’s a pretty simple question and it should have an easy answer. But it doesn’t. That’s because answering it out loud (that is, publicly) gives reign to all manner of […]
