By Philip Craig Robotham
Hi folks,
Welcome to the Weirdworldstudios.com blog. I hope you enjoy the content you find here. It is presented by “Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama” scripts and, as the blog’s title suggests contains information and ramblings regarding radio drama and other obsessions. So, without further ado…
In my continuing effort to try and learn my craft I have been reading Erik Barnouw’s (1947) Handbook of Radio Writing.
It’s still under copyright folks, so I can’t give you the text, but I have been taking copious notes and thought I’d share what I’ve been learning.Radio’s audience is not a crowd audience, like the theater’s, but one of individuals. The individuals may be gathered in small groups, but this rarely results in the kind of group response that occurs in a crowd.
Unlike movies or live theatre, Radio’s audience unit is an individual.
When you write for radio you share a book writer’s problem: both address people in armchair isolation, psychologically independent.
Absence of the visual element means that radio drama really exists only in the imagination of the listener. In the theatre, dramas have an actual external existence, on stage or screen.
The drama unfolds in the listener’s mind and has little correspondence with what is actually occuring in the recording studio because radio’s stage is the imagination.
Here’s Barnouw’s list of the Features of audio production
- Audio communication is direct and begins straightaway – no need for attention grabbing announcements – and no replacement for attention grabbing action.
- Audio must be high paced in order to maintain attention.
- Audio requires small casts of characters so that listeners can keep track of them all comfortably.
- Audio does not need or require distracting sounds beyond scene setting and plot related action support. Plot is king!
- Audio needs only hint at a location for it to appear fully formed in the listener’s imagination and does not require extensive description.
- Audio has the freedom to go to impossible places (the far reaches of space, the interior of a dinosaur’s stomach).
- Audio has the freedom to use as many or as few scenes as required.
- Audio allows the use of first person narration.
- Audio involves the collaboration of the listener, and the writer must look for opportunities to involve and stimulate the listener’s imagination.
- Audio engages the imagination’s capacity to create a vase of roses at the moment they are required and then have them disappear from view the moment they are no longer needed.
- Audio can shine a spotlight upon the details it desires and ignore the others, secure in the knowledge that the listener will supply all the required background.
In his first chapter Barnouw spends some time discussing the unique requirements of radio writing;
He points out that the radio writer deals with an imagined mind-world resembling that of the reader reading a book, but adds to this the vibrancy and aliveness of human voice, sound and music. This world is in no sense one-dimensional, nor is it only an aural world. It may be steeped, as any radio listener knows, in excitements to all the senses: cold and heat, softness and harshness, sunlight and dark. It is the writer’s job to call these forth.
For radio, the ear is the route to the imagination of the listener.
This gives the writer an instantaneous passport to wide worlds of fact and fancy.
Radio’s peculiarities commit it forever to the quick start, the simple plot, the unprecedented concentration on plot essentials, but its enlistment of the human imagination is its most important fact, the very core of its flexibility and storytelling power.I hope I haven’t mangled Barnouw’s ideas too much in this little summary. Tune in soon and I’ll try and provide a summary of chapter two.
Oh, and if you haven’t done so, check out our Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama scripts of adventure, mystery, and suspense over at http://www.weirdworldstudios.com/products.html .
– Philip Craig Robotham
