The Power of Visual Storytelling

Unfair, though it may be, the way someone looks often creates certain beliefs and assumptions about that person in those they encounter.  The effect of clothing and appearance is undeniably powerful.  The guy covered in tattoos, leaning against a wall wearing a wife-beater and flip-flops, gives a particular impression.  The woman with sweat rings under her arms, rollers in her hair, and a cigarette hanging from her lips as she goes down the grocery aisle gives another.  But these impressions are visual.  Should they, or even can they, be communicated in audio-drama?

There is a magic to visual storytelling.  The famous anecdote about Billy Wilder rewriting a multi-page argument between a married couple (intended to demonstrate that the couple are having marital problems) into a single visual scene in an elevator (the couple are holding hands, a pretty girl gets into the elevator, the husband smiles and – with his free hand – tips his hat, the wife lets go of her husband’s hand and takes a step away) is a master-class in visual story-telling.  But audio-dramas are not a visual medium.  Is it possible to harness visual imagery to achieve this kind of efficiency of story-telling and communication of character in audio?  And if so, how?

Describing what we can see – some guidelines

I’m not sure I’ve been terribly successful, but I’ve been experimenting with this and have come to the conclusion that, to a degree, it is still possible to harness the power of images verbally in audio.  But, that said, there are strong and unsurprising constraints upon their use.

When trying to harness the power of appearances, the visual characteristics we wish to focus on should be few.  In audio drama, the stage is the mind of the listener.  The brain creates visual representations of our characters in the imagination instantly, as soon as the voice is heard.  It will happily update those images as details are added, but the heavy lifting of character design is performed primarily by the listener, embellished through sound and dialog.  If one character asks to borrow another’s watch, the watch will appear in the listener’s imagination even though none had appeared before – and what’s more, for the listener, it will always have been there.  Because of this, three or four such embellishments are all that is needed.  In choosing the visual features that we wish to emphasize, it is best to make them active rather than passive. Use verbs to describe them and ensure they aren’t so much features that a character has, but features that enable or contribute to a character’s action. Further, it is best to include features that prompt an emotional reaction (disgust, admiration, etc.).  Lastly, a good simile can add extra weight to even the most ordinary visual features.

The communication of visual elements in audio drama is always a function of speech, whether dialog or narration and as such the guidelines that apply to any type of exposition apply here also.  Brevity is key.  You don’t want your description to slow down the pace of your story.  It needs to be strictly utilitarian – you want it to seed the listener’s imagination and no more.  If it tries to take center stage, it will distract from what your listeners came for; the story.

Where possible the visual elements should provide contrast – they should, like the ending of a good story, be both surprising and inevitable.  The contrast should cause surprise but seem to belong – like the knife a homeless woman keeps in her tangled hair to fight off would-be rapists as she tries to survive on the street.

The features you choose to highlight should also establish the tone and personality of your character, demonstrating that they are unconventional or conservative, that they are comic or tragic, etc.  If the feature doesn’t say something very specific about the character, it is unnecessary and should be cut.

Another point should be made.  The features you reveal should provoke curiosity with purpose.  They should raise questions for the listener and point to something of significance about the character’s personality or behavior.  Why is her left hand gloved?  What is she going to do with the sapling she always carries with her? Why is there a tattoo of an eye in a pyramid on the back of her neck?  If the details don’t contribute to keeping the audience engaged with the story, they should be dropped.  Also, when you spotlight a visual element, you are making a promise to the audience that the element is significant.  You must pay off on why it matters at some point – and the answer can’t be “because I wanted to be mysterious” – at least it can’t if you want to avoid leaving your audience feeling cheated.

Again, don’t be generic.  If you are going to go to the trouble of highlighting an element of a character’s appearance, then make sure it is something that stands out.  Your listeners will clothe your business man in a generic suit for you.  They won’t add the yellow smiley face button on his lapel.  If you mention it, make sure it stands out as something the audience hasn’t already pictured.

Lastly, there is no necessity to add all the details at once.  So long as you don’t contradict yourself, you can introduce elements of your characters’ appearance slowly and over time without creating confusion.  This helps you to keep things brief and only reveal what is needed at any given moment to support the story.

Examples – Good and Bad

We’ve all seen examples of terrible writing (and if we’re honest, we’ve all written them).  Take the lines below…

JAMES: Hi Karen.  As you know, the blue in your evening gown really matches your eyes.  And those matching stilettoes you’re wearing go perfectly with the daffodil handbag you’re holding with your left hand.

Lines like these are so well known as to be a common punchline among audio writers.  And the advice which helps us avoid them, is almost equally cliché.  Don’t have a character announce what is readily obvious to those with whom they speak – or, to put it differently, never have a character speak a line only for the sake of the audience.

It’s always better to ensure one character has a reason to describe the appearance of another.

In this example, one character describes a character for someone who has never seen him.

JOHN: I’m looking for David Harper.  Seen him?

BARKEEP: Sure, he’s in the back.  You can’t miss him.

JOHN: Why?  What’s he look like?

BARKEEP: Suit so white it glows, face pushed in like a pug, falls soft about the middle… and jittery.

JOHN: Jittery?

BARKEEP: Yeah.  Sweats and twitches… like a ferret under a sunlamp.

In this example, a character comments on himself, hopefully in a way that is natural in its situational context.

MARTY: I can’t let you in, John.

JOHN: Hey, be nice Marty.  I made an effort and put on matching socks just for the occasion.

MARTY: I still can’t let you in.  The boss wouldn’t like it.  You ain’t even wearing a tie.

JOHN: Yeah, yeah.  I’m still wearing yesterday’s suit.  But there’s one part o’ my wardrobe that’s gonna impress the boss no end.

MARTY: Yeah?  What’s that?

JOHN: See the tomato juice under what’s left o’ this jacket?

MARTY: Uh-huh.

JOHN: That’s Tony Zambino’s blood.  When your boss hears I took care of Zambino for him, he’s gonna throw me a parade.  This rumpled suit won’t matter a bit.

Visual description can be provided via external narration (so long as its quick).

NARRATOR: A pusher stumbles into the downstairs bar.  Stoned eyes watch him from deep inside a squat, lumpy body that oozes more than rises from its seat in the corner.

NORTON: (WHINING) Got anything to help me get well, Mitch?  Anything at all?

If the description is quick enough and gives way to attention-grabbing dialog, most listeners will have forgotten it before they even register that it came to them as narration. 

And of course, characters can do their own narration…

JOHN: (NARRATING) She walked into my office – a seventy-six-year-old package of deeply tanned rawhide stretched over too much bone, crammed into a too-small dress that would have made a streetwalker blush.

MRS. ENTICOTT: Don’t just stare, dolt!  Find me John Falwell.

In Summary

To sum up, it’s important to focus on just a few memorable visual traits that the listener can fix in his/her mind, but the real aim is to communicate character.  The traits mentioned should help the listener build a mental image of the character and their behavior that will last long after the scene is complete.  To do this, the picture must be compelling, memorable, active, and evocative.  Characters are what they do, and the elements of their appearance that they can and can’t control affect the audience’s sense of who they are, particularly when demonstrated through behavior.

We can also drip feed the visual information in the dialog.  A neat feature of the human brain is its ability to add elements to an image it creates without confusion so long as the new information doesn’t contradict the old.  The ability of the brain to add in details for itself means that seeding a handful of key details into the dialog is all that is needed to create effective images in the listener’s mind.

DETECTIVE BILL JAMES:  Is that her?

GROCERY STORE MANAGER: Yeah, that’s her.  And she’s filled one of our shopping carts with her rags.

BILL:  Thanks

SOUND:  MALE FOOTSTEPS – ESTABLISH AND UNDER

BILL:  (APPROACHING WENDY AND BLURTING) Whoa.  You stink!

HOMELESS WENDY:  Shut yer ‘ole.  An’ what’s it to yer ‘ow I smell?

BILL:  (EMBARASSED) Sorry, it’s just…

WENDY:  (IGNORING BILL) So I ‘aven’t changed me singlet in a few days.  So what?  I’m on me way to the Laundromat after this, ain’t I? (TAKES A DRAG FROM A CIGARRETTE)

BILL:  That’s a lot of clothes…

WENDY: (EXHALES) I ‘aven’t ‘ad much in the way o’ coin lately. ‘s built up. (BEAT) You gonna get outta my way or what?

BILL:  Alright, sorry. And I think one of your curlers has fallen loose.

WENDY:  Nosey Parker, ain’t ya?  Copper, I’m guessing.  Educated too.  Buttons done up all the way to the top.  I ‘ope that tie strangles yer to death.

BILL:   Hey!  Watch where you’re throwing those cigarette butts.

WENDY:  Just keep outta my way, sonny.  I eat them as is too nosey for breakfast.

BILL:  Thing is though, one of your mates said they saw you with a shirt covered in blood after Harry Bing got stabbed.  I’m going to have to look through your cart.

WENDY:  Bloody coppers.  Always pryin’ into other folks’ business.

So, yeah.  Visual elements can be included in an audio script to help bring characters to life. You need to be sure you need them but, like any tool in our toolkit, for the right job they can do great work.  Experiment and see what works for you

By Philip Robotham, Copyright 2021.

The post Incorporating visual elements into an audio script appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

Where do ideas come from?

Everyone wants to know the answer to this. Many writers resent the question and answer with a joke and a knowing wink.

They might respond with something like, “Ideas may be found growing on the eastern slope of the world’s tallest ice shelf, but… they can only be plucked by those who climb the cliff naked in sub-zero temperatures, and, even then, only on February 29th during a solar eclipse.”

But even those who respond this way will admit, privately, that they love to hear other writers attempts to answer the question.The generation of ideas has a certain mystery to it, even for highly creative folks. We don’t necessarily know where they come from (and the sarcastic answer is an easy way to mask that ignorance).

Our brain engages in an ongoing stream of consciousness. Our thoughts don’t really come from anywhere (except perhaps from our previous thoughts). Our thought about feeling hungry prompts a thought about lunch, that prompts a thought about a nearby restaurant, that reminds us of Hitchcock’s illustration about suspense (the one about the bomb under the restaurant table) which prompts us to wonder why fertilizer is so often used in home-made explosives, leading to thoughts about the gardening we have been putting off, etc.

No wonder, the question of where our ideas come from in writing is a bit intimidating and, possibly, seems a little hard to pin down.That said, there are a number of techniques that writers use to help them generate ideas. After-all, writers actively look for ideas and rarely (and this is crucial) settle on the first ones they come across.

CREATIVITY

Brainstorming

The first strategy for deliberately generating ideas I was ever taught was brainstorming. I still use it. But there are a set of rules that accompany the technique.Grab a blank piece of paper, or a white board, or a blank sheet of poster paper and begin writing ideas.

It can be helpful to narrow your brainstorming topic to something a bit more manageable (like suspicious characters, crimes committed in a mystery, sci-fi gadgets, and what have you) but sometimes broad topics work as well (story ideas, for example).

Firstly, you mustn’t self-censor. Every idea is valid while brainstorming. The really bad idea that you write down may be just the prompt needed to lead to that really good idea you will ultimately use.

Secondly, quantity is more important than quality. The more ideas you generate, the greater the chance that a truly good idea will be found in the mix. The sad reality is this; for every good idea we come up with, we will have had to discard a truck-load of bad and average ideas. BUT – the average and bad ideas are part of the process – you don’t arrive at the good ideas without having the bad and average ideas along the way.

Thirdly, don’t stop too early. Aim to record between thirty and fifty ideas. Studies have shown that the best ideas tend to show up after the first 25 ideas have been recorded. It’s almost as if the brain needs to warm up to the task of being creative, before we get to the best stuff it can come up with.

What if?

Another preferred strategy is to ask “what if?”What if Nicolai Tesla was an alien? What if all the water in the world suddenly turned into champagne? What if thunder was really the speech of the gods and an eight-year-old girl, living in Mumbai, was the only person in the world who could understand it?Brainstorming “what if” can be a particularly useful exercise.

Transformation

A further strategy that I find really helpful is to take my list of ideas and transform them.

Substitution

Take the parts of an idea and switch them for something else. Replace the wheels on cars with mechanical legs, for example. Or replace a natural lifespan with one determined by a person’s contribution to society. Or replace the vacuum of space with a breathable atmosphere that allows travel between planets on open-decked ships.

Combination

Take different ideas and put them together. Combine that idea for a railway heist with that fantasy or sci-fi setting you were considering. Combine human and jellyfish DNA. Combine the features of a village with a military tank.

Adaptation

Put your idea in a different context. Take that civil war story and set it in the far future… or the distant past. Take that story of gang rivalry and set it in a commercial kitchen.

Addition

Add something to your idea. Give your ordinary human protagonist the ability to read minds… or a superpower.

Elimination

Remove something from the idea. Give your protagonist a disability (one eye, a missing hand, etc.)

Change the purpose or motivation

Invent a weapon that causes cooperation. A fast food outlet that seeks to promote weight loss.Reversal.What would this idea look like if it was reversed. The alien invaders are actually our friends. All the dogs in the world are actually cats made from cat DNA. The heist is actually an attempt to return a stolen painting.

ORIGINALITY

We live in a world saturated by stories. This generation has greater access and exposure to stories than any other in human history. It is possible, now, to have read, listened to, and viewed thousands of stories in a lifetime, where people in the past had no such luxury.

For the writer this is a fantastic resource. Every successful writer will tell you that reading is a major part of their professional development. Writers read, and listen, and watch, to learn new techniques, gather inspiration, and develop their personal sense of style.

But this incredible treasure-house of story that surrounds us has a downside as well.

We are so saturated with story that originality is, perhaps, more difficult to come by for this generation of writers than for any other.

We have so many stories stored in our brains that when we begin thinking of ideas to pursue in our own scripts, we unavoidably dredge up large numbers of ideas we have seen and heard over and over before. In fact, these clichés are likely to be the closest to the surface and most easily accessible of ideas.

For many writers, the problem of ideas isn’t one of how to come up with an idea, but rather how to find something original to say.

For this reason, it is essential to distrust, clear out, and disregard those first thoughts we have when trying to come up with an idea for a story or character in a script. The best ideas are buried just a little deeper. As a result, I am a big fan of these creativity strategies, if only as a technique for pushing deeper and arriving at slightly more creative ideas than I might otherwise have done if I had settled for the first couple of things to cross my mind.

CHOOSING AN IDEA

Once you have your list of ideas, it’s time to choose which one to pursue.

The difference between someone who wants to be a writer and someone who is a writer is, to put it indelicately, “the application of the seat of the trousers to the seat of the chair”. You have to start writing and that means making some choices”.During the “idea-generating stage” no self-censorship is allowed. You want to generate ideas. But once that is done, you want to turn that censor back on and find the idea you want to pursue.

In this a number of factors are important. And sometimes the choice is very personal.

For myself, I try to think about my audience (the kind of person I am writing for). That person may have niche tastes, but I try to keep someone in mind who is representative of the real-world group that I would like my stories to entertain. With that person in mind, I want to pick an idea that would appeal to him/her. If an idea wouldn’t work for my target audience, then it should probably be discarded.

I then look for the most original ideas (those that haven’t already been done a thousand times before) in my list. I definitely want to pick something original. If the idea is a cliché, it absolutely must be removed from my list.

Lastly, I look for the idea that excites me the most. In this case, it is the idea that makes me impatient to get started and looks like it has the capacity to carry its weight all the way to the end.

In the best of all possible worlds, I want to choose a story idea that meets all three of those criteria. More often than not, if I’ve done the hard work of generating a good list to begin with, it’s quite possible to do so.

SUMMARY

So, where do you find ideas?

They are found in your own brain. Many are the sum of the stories you have been exposed to over time. The best and most original ideas are rarely at the surface of your thoughts, though. Ideas, the ideas you can turn into the best scripts you can write, often need to be mined out of the granite of your imagination with a bit of hard work. Hopefully, the strategies we discussed today will be of some use to you.

But ideas aren’t enough.

You need to choose the best ones; and the best ones, generally, are those that will appeal to your target audience, are original in nature, and excite you to get writing.

By Philip Robotham, Copyright 2021.

The post The Source of Ideas for Audio Drama appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 who may not be familiar with it, it’s a method used frequently in ensemble shows where two intersecting stories are followed over the length of an episode. For those who are SF fans, Joe Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 made particularly good use of the form.

Here’s the basic principle; a script which might otherwise flag during the second act can maintain interest by switching back and forth between two related stories of differing weight.

Let’s say for example that we have the following two stories…

Story 1 (the A plot) – An assassin arrives in town in the guise of a seller of antiquities with plans to target the curator of the local museum.

Story 2 (the B plot) – The mayor has an important meeting with some out-of-town executives who are considering locating their factory nearby.

Fleshed out the two distinct stories might appear as follows…

Story 1

Character Goal – An assassin arrives in town and wishes to find and kill his target. No picture has been supplied, but the target’s name and place of work (curator of the museum) is given.

Obstacle – The target has taken the day off and the local sherrif is interested in why the assassin is asking questions.

Disaster – The assassin is being hunted for a crime committed outside the town and was caught on camera. He wants to complete this job, get paid, and exit the country.

Unfortunately, his picture is now everywhere… and the Sheriff recognizes him.

Choice – The assassin breaks into the Museum and hides to await his target.

Story 2

Character Goal – The mayor needs to succeed in convincing the investors to establish a factory nearby in order to give her town a badly needed economic boost.

Obstacle – Another town is under consideration as well and one of the investors seems to have already decided in the rival town’s favor.

Disaster – News arrives that an assassin is in town and the mayor tries to keep it quiet.

Choice – The mayor decides to showcase the town’s qualities by taking the investors to the museum for the final negotiations… and calls in the curator to open the building for her.

Rob Patterson, a talented thinker with regard to storytelling, pointed me to a simple storytelling structure used by the writers of South Park. Employing this method you would alternate between BUT and AND SO moments in your scenes to work through the elements of a story (eg. Jim, an off-duty police officer, goes to the local market to buy some milk BUT it is currently being robbed, AND SO he sneaks in through the back, BUT… etc. I’d like to suggest that when integrating the A and B plot we add MEANWHILE to our repertory, e.g…

Example

Protagonist A has a goal BUT there is an obstacle.

MEANWHILE Protagonist B has a goal BUT faces a different obstacle.

AND SO Protagonist A attempts to overcome the obstacle BUT a disaster occurs.

MEANWHILE Protagonist B attempts to overcome the other obstacle BUT a different disaster occurs.

AND SO Protagonist A responds to the disaster by deciding on a course of action (a new goal) BUT it is risky and pursuing it will cause the two stories to intersect.

MEANWHILE Protagonist B responds to the other disaster by deciding on a course of action (a new goal) BUT also involves risk and will likewise draw the two stories together.

AND SO the stories will come together for resolution BUT... etc.

If we think of the A and B story (and this includes the micro-stories of scenes) in terms of goal, obstacle, disaster, and new goal, then the most dramatically exciting place to cut between them will be immediately following the introduction of BUT – that moment which raises a question in the minds of the audience over whether the protagonist can achieve the goal.

Now, admittedly, different writers may employ other preferred structures in their scene design, but the principle of cutting when a dramatically significant question is raised in the audience’s mind is, I think, a helpful one.

However, these parallel tracks are a bit rigid. A further key idea to keep in mind is that of “plot weight” (a notion for which I, again, owe Rob Patterson special thanks). The two stories (the A and B plot) are rarely of equal weight. Instead of a simple A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B, etc. structure alternating between each story beat in turn, an A,A,B,A,B,A,B,BA structure is more common (where we spend longer at the beginning on the A plot and BA brings the two plots together for the story climax).

In practice the B plot’s introduction is staggered slightly so that the two stories do not run in sync. When one is having a dramatic valley, the other one is having a peak, and vice versa, adding significantly more structural interest to the overall story.

Example

By way of example, the A plot and B plot outline (above) could be integrated using our structure as follows…

An assassin arrives in town and wishes to find and kill his target BUT no picture has been supplied. Only the target’s name and place of work (curator of the museum) is given. Can he find his target?

AND SO, discovering that the museum is closed for the day, the assassin starts asking questions around town about where to find the curator BUT attracts the attention of the local Sheriff. What will he do?

MEANWHILE, the mayor is informed of the visit of some investors to town. She needs to succeed in convincing them to establish a factory nearby in order to give the town a badly needed economic boost, BUT the meeting has been called at very short notice. Can she handle it?

AND SO the assassin pretends to be a tourist, easing the Sheriff’s suspicions and decides to keep a lower profile BUT federal authorities are aware that the assassin is in the country and his picture is suddenly in newspapers and on tv screens everywhere. The sheriff puts two and two together and calls in a manhunt. How will the assassin evade detection and still complete his contract?

MEANWHILE the mayor discovers that another town is under consideration as well and that one of the investors seems to have already decided in the rival town’s favour. How will she handle this?

AND SO, feeling that things are getting a little too hot for him to remain on the streets, the assassin breaks into the museum and decides to wait for his target to return to work, BUT he has no idea how long that may be. How long will he have to wait and can he remain hidden long enough to do the job and escape?

MEANWHILE the Mayor is shmoozing the investors with some success BUT the Sheriff contacts the mayor with news that a contract killer is in town. She worries regarding the impact this may have on the investors. Can she keep it under wraps?

AND SO, the Sherriff does a bit of research and uncovers an old FBI surveillance photo of the museum curator WITH the killer! She was once a criminal but has been hiding in town under a new identity in Witness Protection. He becomes certain she is the assassin’s target, BUT he doesn’t know where she is. Can he find and protect her in time?

MEANWHILE the Mayor decides to try to sell the investors on the history of the town, calling the curator (who is on her day off) to come into town and unlock the museum for a private tour. BUT, as we know, the killer is waiting at the museum. What will happen when curator and killer are both in the same place along with the mayor and her guests?

All that’s needed now is to resolve the two plots at their point of intersection – Perhaps the mayor saves the curators’ life and gets the needed investment; perhaps the assassin murders the curator and the investors are traumatized; perhaps the assassin is caught but the investors are still traumatized, or perhaps the assassin takes everyone hostage and a new A plot and B plot are introduced (one following the hostages and their captor, the other following the local Sherrif and his attempts to resolve the situation) etc.

This plot structure is great for ongoing serials with ensemble character rosters, but is, perhaps, not so suited to the single protagonist story or serialised novel/mini-series. It is, however, well worth adding to our repertoire of writing tools and is worth remembering at those times when we are struggling to with a second act lull – a B plot might be just what is needed to rescue us.

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any thoughts regarding the A plot, Be plot structure? I’d be very interested to hear from you in the comments below?

The post Integrating A and B plots in Audio Scripts appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 find interesting or helpful (but if you’re young and fit and healthy, well, there’s a chance you won’t relate too much to this)…

I’m getting older. You’d think I wouldn’t be so careless with my life as to keep letting it drain away at the rate of twenty four hours per day, but still, it keeps happening. I keep ageing. And time continues to run out.

Jokes aside, I’m beginning to notice my age. As I get older I feel my mind and body are increasingly at war. I’ve never really gotten along well with physical activity (I was the last kid picked by the captains of every sporting event ever held in my primary school and I got to watch them fight over which team would get stuck with me on numerous occasions). But it never bothered me particularly. I’ve always had a pretty sharp mind and so figured my uncooperative and uncoordinated body could go take a flying leap… so to speak. These days however, my mind is struggling a lot more to stay sharp. Where once I was able to work late into the night, and from early in the morning, on my writing, these days I just don’t have the energy for it. I actually feel my brain getting foggy and losing its edge. I start recycling stale ideas where once creative ideas just seemed to flow. I get tired. My command of language starts to dip. Fatigue sets in. And I get VERY frustrated by it. After all, there’s still SO MUCH I want to accomplish. My best hours in each day are devoted to earning a living as a teacher and trying to be a good parent. Having only the next best hours left to devote to my writing has always been a frustration, but never more so than since I’ve started struggling with fatigue at the end of a long day.

Meeting the Needs of the Body

Suddenly, the needs of my body have become significant (in a way they never were when I was younger) for keeping my mind in condition to write. These comments may be “old-hat” to those of you who have always taken physical health seriously and haven’t, like me, taken that physical health for granted, but I’m going to put them here anyway.

Diet, exercise, and sleep are as important to the brain as they are to the body… especially as we age. There’s no reason a human being can’t function, mentally, at an increasingly high level throughout their lives (alzheimers and dementia etc. notwithstanding). The brain continues to develop as we age and our learning and wisdom continue to increase. But our ability to function efficiently and quickly can certainly deteriorate. When I eat well, exercise, and rest appropriately my ability to write is far superior to those times when I eat poorly, fail to exercise, or burn the candle at both ends. This is far more noticeable now than it has ever been. Even five years ago, my general health and fitness (in terms of diet, exercise, and rest) had almost no impact on my writing. Now, it does. I have to eat well to write well (plenty of greens, low carbs, moderate amounts of protein). When I eat too much fat or sugar (or binge on take-away) my writing suffers measurably. I need to exercise for the sake of energy. And I need to rest to stay sharp. The late night I give myself when caught in the grip of inspiration just isn’t worth it anymore – especially if the result is two weeks of inefficiency because I let myself get run down. The price tag for indulging myself (with regard to poor lifestyle choices) is now noticeably high. I just can’t afford it.

Meeting the Needs of the Mind

But it isn’t just physical exercise I need. I also need mental exercise. I need to read, and soak around in, well-crafted prose. I’m a huge fan of pulp-era writing. The creativity expressed in these old tales is great – but the expression? Well, lets just say there are reasons that very few of these writers ever won a literary award. That’s not to belittle them particularly, but they aren’t, necessarily, great examples of style. A writer who wants to improve, can’t get by on a diet of poorly written material, however fun it may be. I have to read widely and deeply if I want to learn. So, I try to fit regular reading from a wide variety of genre’s into my schedule (classic literature, literary fiction, best sellers, and pulps). My preferred genre for writing is radio fiction, so naturally I read as many plays as I can get my hands on. I read screenplays, stage plays, and, though they are harder to come across, radio plays. I never pass up an opportunity to read the plays of my peers either (there’s just too much good stuff to learn from with regard to what my peers are writing).

As an aside, it’s interesting to me, and a little sad, that there is a good deal of contempt shown by younger audio dramatists for the radio dramas of the past (particularly the dramas of the golden age of radio). I get it. Lots of the drama of those days was churned out on a grueling schedule that resulted in large amounts of cheesy serial writing produced at high volume and without a lot of craft – a kind of fast food entertainment. But to only see that is to miss the point. The sheer volume of material produced resulted in the development of a large body of technique, method, skill, and style, when it came to writing. The better shows, in particular, are a treasure trove of inspiration and education. Gunsmoke stands out as a towering testament to brilliant writing (regardless of how you feel about Westerns as a genre).

As well as the need to maintain a steady diet of high quality reading (from a variety of sources and genres) I also need to practice generating creative ideas. Here are some of the exercises (among many more) I use that form an important part of my writing practice…

Brainstorming (generating as many ideas around a particular theme or question as possible in as short a time as possible – e.g. how many settings could MacBeth be staged in? – a kitchen, a school, feudal japan, a galaxy spanning empire, etc.).

Part changing (what if, instead of a scottish lord, Macbeth was an alien invader), adding to existing ideas (what if the events of MacBeth were interrupted by an alien invasion) .

Three Reasons Why (come up with three new reasons that motivate a character’s action and change the trajectory of the story – e.g. MacBeth plans to murder his wife and so, kills Duncan to appease her and keep her off guard, or MacBeth is actually on the payroll of the King of Norway, or MacBeth is having an affair with Duncan’s queen).

Genre switching (How would MacBeth look as a Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Family Drama etc.?).

And of course it is important to keep practiced at writing itself. I make it my aim to write every single day (but I don’t beat yourself up when life intervenes to prevent it). I write letters. I write stories. I write plays. I write non-fiction articles. I write lessons. I write blog posts. And, of course, I write radio drama.

Final Keys to Staying Sharp

Probably, the most important thing that I do is I try to keep taking risks. I don’t want to stagnate as a writer. And I know I will if I am not getting feedback, learning new things, trying out new ideas and changing things up. The minute I start to feel comfortable – as I have started to do a little just lately – I know I am at risk. When I get comfortable I start to fear what making changes to my work might mean. Fear is the thing that guarantees my ability as a writer will plateau. The moment I become afraid to modify what I am doing (in case the result is worse than what I have already accomplished) is the moment that I stop learning and stop improving. I may never publish my crazy experiments, but they are essential to my development as a writer. Attempting creative new ways to write (whether by attempting stream of consciousness, playing with the chronology or reversing the order in which the story is told, swapping characters around, stripping out dialog or adding it, attempting to tell a story completely with sound effects and zero dialog, etc., lets me add new tools to my writing tool-box (regardless of how happy I am with the result).

I can’t emphasise enough that experimental writing is not about “success”. I undertake experiments knowing that they will most likely fail and that I will almost certainly be unhappy with the result. The aim of an experiment is not to produce a successful piece of writing, but instead to learn something new, to stretch my writing beyond its current limits, and to push myself out beyond my comfort zone for the sake of improving my skills.

The best way to improve at creativity is, like everything else in life that I want to improve at, hard work, persistence, and regular practice.

Lastly, I need to rest, even in my writing. I need the distance that rest allows. Part of the reason I regularly switch between types of writing is that it gives me a chance to get that distance and to engage in effective critique of my own work. I may not be the writer, yet, that I want to be, but I know what good writing is and I have a far greater capacity to analyze my own work and move it incrementally closer to what I want it to be when I deliberately put completed work away in a drawer for a few days before coming back to it to analyze and revise.

If I want to continue to work creatively at my writing until my body, at last, fails me entirely and my heart stops beating (and I can’t think of a better way to go) then I need to maintain a proper diet, exercise, and rest (both physically and intellectually).

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any thoughts regarding maintaining creativity? I’d be very interested to hear from you. Why not comment below?

The post The Care and Feeding of Creativity (in the face of ageing) appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 internet was a thing, archivists, librarians, and other information retrieval specialists regularly used transcripts to help navigate, sort, store, and retrieve content. Today transcripts fulfil the same function in the digital realm by making content more accessible, searchable, shareable, and digestible.

Transcripts make a podcast vastly more discoverable and accessible to search-engines.

Podcasts are meant to be heard and this is their great strength. Music, sound effects, and dialog, all combine to create a great auditory theatre experience. But none of these sounds are “searchable” by Google or any of the other search engines. Search engines rely on (digitally) written words. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but if we want our podcasts to be indexed and ranked by search engines then we have to provide words to accompany the link to the audio. And the most search-engine-friendly approach we can take is to post a transcript of the content online with our audio.

I would not be surprised at all to discover that part of Lauren Shippen’s success with The Bright Sessions (apart from the stellar writing and acting etc.) comes, in part, from the fact that all her episodes are accompanied by a web-page transcript that boosts the discoverability of the show in search engines such as Google.

In 2011, This American Life decided to transcribe all their episodes. This show began in 1995 so that was a major project. They then analysed the effects of adding transcripts to podcasts. Over a 27-month period they used Google Analytics to record the number of unique visitors and page views. They saw an increase of 6.28% in the number of unique visitors finding their content through online searches and gained a 3.89% increase in links back to their website and its content along with measurably higher engagement (visitors were staying on, and exploring, their site for longer periods of time).

Transcripts also provide a solid anchor for backlinks (an important factor in determining your search engine ranking).

Transcripts aren’t a particularly saleable commodity. As a script-writer, I have lamented more than once about the fact that people don’t read scripts (despite all the benefits that accrue from the practice). There’s no point putting our scripts up for sale behind a pay-wall and jealously guarding them in this way. The market we might attract by selling our scripts is worth far less to us than the boost in discoverability we can achieve by having transcripts available to search-engines on our websites.

Transcripts are amazingly useful to journalists, fans, and reviewers. The transcript is an automatic source of quotes that can be mined to fill out the promotional pieces journalists and reviewers want to write about our shows and they also provide great fodder for fan-based word of mouth… but only if the transcripts exist and can be accessed.

Transcripts provide a space to deliver extra value to your sponsors. If you include the text of your promotions and advertiser copy in the transcript as well, then you have found a way to give your advertiser extra exposure and a better return on their investment in your show.

Transcripts increase the accessibility of the podcast for disabled audience members. I’ve written before about how grateful (as a person with a hearing impairment) I am when an audio drama supplies transcripts to accompany their recordings. Deaf people aren’t, contrary to popular belief, necessarily excluded from enjoying audio drama. I am completely deaf in one ear but my other is mostly okay. Nonetheless, if the occasional word or part of a word falls into the frequency range that I can’t hear (or if the background sound-bed is a little louder than I can process), it is a huge help to have a transcript I can follow along with. Likewise, non-native speakers, people who are getting older and find it harder to follow rapid-fire conversations, and people who have auditory processing difficulties can still enjoy the production. Dark Adventure Radio Theatre have always made transcripts available with their recordings and, as a result, have kept me as a loyal repeat customer since their very first production.

I personally find it far more disability-friendly for a show to charge for the recordings and make the scripts available for free than for the show to make the recordings free and hide the scripts behind a paywall as special bonus content available to their paying supporters. While producers have every right (and a great need) to generate revenue from every stream available to them, people with disabilities can be forgiven for feeling they are inadvertently being asked to pay extra to get full access to assistive content (by which I mean material like transcripts) that will give them full access to an experience that more able-bodied people get for free. Again, I want to underline the fact that, despite this, I fully support a producers right to monetize any part of their intellectual property that they choose in any fashion they choose.

OBJECTIONS

There are some legitimate objections to be raised that we should also take into account. The protection of intellectual property is a significant issue in this day and age. By releasing transcripts to the world, we increase the chances that someone will come along and try to rip us off – producing our content or attempting to sell it. I suspect that most of us vastly overestimate the commercial interest the wider community has in scripts, but there is no doubt that, even where we carefully copyright our content, this is a risk.

It is also true that shows which have numerous writers and which license the scripts they have produced may have difficulty getting clearance to make the transcripts public. It needs to be acknowledged that not every show is going to want to, or be able to, make transcripts available. But there are also a large number of shows where the producer/writer is the same person who owns the website and who, as the person who has produced the scripts, is able to release them with minimal effort. Take a look at the website for the Bright Sessions to see a great example of how this has been done with simplicity and elegance.

But there is one mistaken idea that I would like to re-emphasize as part of this little article before I finish. Some folks might be thinking that releasing transcripts of the show for free represents lost revenue in terms of what they could be making from script sales. I get that, and, of course, it is every producers right to determine what and whether they will give away part or all of their content. That said, those of us who have tried to sell scripts to the public can attest to how tiny that “market” is and how much more valuable web-traffic is overall. And even if you do release transcripts on your site, you can still attempt to sell the scripts in a nice, bound, dead tree version, if you wish. For those of us who enjoy scripts as a source of reading pleasure, the presence of free online scripts (I can say from experience) is no deterrent to buying them in a nicely organised, bound or e-book form. There is a strong commercial argument to be made for releasing transcripts on the website of a podcast that indicates the increased traffic is far more valuable than the tiny amount of sales revenue that might be generated.

CONCLUSION

The provision of transcripts on a website alongside the recordings of the show increases the discoverability and ranking of a podcast with search engines, provides anchors for back-links, gives journalists and reviewers (and even fans) a handy source of quotes to assist in promoting the show, provides an extra location for your sponsors message to be highlighted, and increases the accessibility of the content to people with disabilities.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a significant boon to our promotion and marketing, and not many reasons for holding back (especially if we have already produced the scripts as part of the production process in the first place). It really wouldn’t take much for us to import this particular technique for improving our ROI from the wider podcasting sphere and put it to work in audio drama.

It’s something to think about, anyway.

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any thoughts regarding transcripts? I’d be very interested to hear from you. Why not comment below?

The post The Mysterious Audience-Growing Power of Transcripts appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 use a very similar method (and one that belies the idea that “we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”.

My own process with regard to choosing audio drama is not all that different to book or film shopping.

First I look for a genre. “I’m in the mood for some sci-fi” or “some horror” or “some urban-fantasy” or whatever.

Then I look for a name I trust. “Narada Theatre Company produced this story”, or “it was written by Tony Sarrechia” (or Jack Ward or Pete Lutz or Mike Murphy or Gregg Taylor or any of several dozen others), or “it’s a Decoder Ring Theatre production” (or a production by Colonial Radio Theatre, or Broken Sea, or Habit Forming Films) etc. And yes, those are the names I personally respond to when I’m looking for something to listen to.

Next I’m often attracted by some cover art and, of course, THE TITLE. The title needs to grab my attention enough to make me consider giving the story a listen.

Of course, if nothing grabs me immediately I might decide to check out an unknown name (that has caught my attention through it’s art and title etc.).

When I’m looking for a book I check genre, producer’s/writer’s name, cover-art , title (roughly in that order). And if I still need convincing then I read the blurb.

Then, if I need further convincing, I’ll read any testimonials.

Finally, I’ll crack open the cover and check out the table of contents and perhaps even read the opening page or two. In audio drama this equates to looking at the list of episode titles and listening to a sample.

For a long time, I’ve been underestimating the importance of the title as a hook.

The Importance of the Gaps Between Content

As an unknown writer, I’ve got to attract the limited attention people are willing to give.

And, as an unknown writer, I’ve made peace with the fact that my material will only be examined after people have looked for the trusted name-brand writers and producers currently operating in the audio drama space and go “well, I’ve just finished listening to all of Narada Radio Theatre’s current backlog, I wonder what else I can check out?”. That’s fine.

An unknown is always going to be the next choice when folks can’t find what they are looking for right away. Horror writer’s who aren’t Stephen King depend upon the gaps between his releases in order to sell. They rely on the customer saying “Stephen King hasn’t put out a new book yet and I’ve read all the others, I wonder what else I can try?”

It’s the nature of the animal, that unknowns get the leavings of those who are better known… but they become a name in their own right when they can attract the eye of consumers who are, in that moment, looking for something new to try.

And there are always folks on the lookout for something new (in their chosen genre). Therein lies a very encouraging truth.

The Title Matters

One of the most important keys to grabbing the attention of those who are, because it is the right psychological moment, looking to try something new, is the title.

A great deal of the marketing advice I have been reading lately deals with the importance of gaining attention. If potential customers and audience members pass over, ignore, or otherwise miss what we’ve got on offer… well, then all they will do is remain potential customers and potential audience members and we’ll never see any growth.

According to most marketers the purpose of a title is to gain attention and get people to read the next sentence.

And the next sentence (and the sentence that follows etc.) exists to get the reader to the call to action.

And the call to action exists to turn the prospective customer or audience member into an actual customer or audience member.

If we ignore the importance of our titles then we ignore one of the chief tools available to us for building an audience.

So what makes a compelling title?

Firstly, compelling titles grab attention. They want the passer-by to notice them. They have personality. And they shout. As such they are surprising, or emotional, or familiar, or intriguing, or all of the above.

Secondly, they are easy to remember. They need to stick in the memory while the prospect is glancing around at the other titles nearby and as they talk to friends about what they are reading or listening to. If the title doesn’t stay in the memory it won’t be in the running when the prospect goes to make their final decision. Good titles often create a picture in the memory for just this reason. If you can picture it easily you can remember it. They are also relatively short.

Thirdly, they are informative. Good titles communicate. They let the prospect know what the story is about and invite them to read or listen. They have a specific target audience in mind and emphasise their uniqueness (make the story stand out from the crowd).

Finally, they are easy to say and non-embarrassing, again, so that they can be passed around via word of mouth. We want people to notice, remember and share my title with others.

An example of a title that succeeds wonderfully at this is “We’re alive – a zombie podcast”. To be honest, I didn’t like this title at first, though I enjoyed the show a great deal. But, I have since come to realise, it does everything a title should – and it does it well.

It demands attention. It is literally a shout, a cry both desperate and triumphant, and it arouses curiosity. It implies a threat that the characters have survived. It makes us curious to know what that threat is/was and how it was overcome.

It’s memorable. It is short, and carries a tonne of emotional freight and this makes it memorable. It’s not the most visual of titles, but it succeeds in being memorable nonetheless.

It communicates. You know the story is about survival just by reading it. And – part of the real genius of the title – it has a tagline that situates the story in its genre. We know it is about zombies from the outset. The audience is identified in the title (and its tagline). The story is for those who like survival stories (specifically survival horror within the zombie apocalypse genre).

Lastly, the title is easy to say and talk about with others.

Episode and Chapter Titles

And what about the episode titles? In my view, the episode titles in “We’re Alive” are some of the best in the biz. They remind me of the evocative titles that J.M. Straczynski gave to his Babylon 5 episodes. A quick glance at We’re Alive’s episode titles reveals titles like “Blood, Sweat and Fears”, “Where do you go when you go to Sleep?”, “The Road to Living Death”, “Separate Dying Embers”, “Mark of the Beast”, “The Harder they Fall”, “Last Dying Breath”, “Red Winter”, “Scorched Earth”, “Eye of the Storm”, “Chasing Ghosts”, “The Darkness Ahead”, and “Distorted Truths”. The titles in the episode-listing draw me in and make me want to listen.

All in all, show and episode titles should be created to draw an audience in. A well-designed title is a key feature of audience building – the delivery mechanism of our first invitation to our prospective audience members to give us their valuable time. As such we shouldn’t underestimate their importance or cut corners on the thought that should be given to them.

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any tips regarding titles? I’d be very interested to hear from you.

The post Crafting Compelling Titles appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 and entice someone into giving the plays a read. It’s a form of elevator pitch aimed at giving folks a super-quick overall picture of the story in a way that invites curiosity and creates a desire to read it.

All of the landing pages for my plays over at www.weirdworldstudios.com present visitors with a short “blurb”, “promo”, “logline” or “elevator pitch”. I have experienced how attaching these bits of text has increased the click-through rate on my site (and they are now attached to the top of each of the plays themselves).

This technique didn’t originate with me. I learned it from Alex White, the author of “The Gearheart”, a great little fantasy steam-punk adventure (audio book) over at http://www.thegearheart.com/.

The technique is made up of four parts; the carry, the crossover, the complication, and the call to action.

The Carry

The Carry is what takes us (carries us) into the world of the story. It is the place in which I describe the ordinary world in which my protagonist(s) live. This “ordinary” world can’t be dull, however, so I also introduce the character’s basic conflict (or source of conflict) in that world.
Here are five example “carry” lines from some of my plays…

From The Alligator Menace…

Trent Stone and Tess Carter are in Star City to participate as junior members in the League of Adventure Seekers’ annual dinner.

From Predator’s Row

Reporter for the Star City Tribune, Claire Templeton, uncovers a pattern of grisly murders that look like the work of a strange new predator and presents her findings to Detective Tony Wells.

c) From The Visitor from the Gloria Scott

The case that sets Sherlock Holmes on the path that will forever dominate and define his life occurs while holidaying with a friend during his final year at university.

d) From Graduation Day

Sarah Tanner and Jeff Chase are top of their graduating class in the Solar Patrol.

e) From The Girl in the Ivy Gate

Jess is an ordinary girl at the very exclusive Seareach Boarding School. Most days all she has to contend with are the sneers of the trust-fund girls who want to look down on her for being a scholarship student.

2) The Crossover

The Crossover refers to the events that take my protagonists into the second act of the story. It establishes the protagonist’s goals and the general trajectory they are pursuing. Here’s where I try to reveal the key conflict of the story and perhaps even the antagonist.
Here are five example “crossover” lines from some of my plays…

From The Alligator Menace…

However, when the dinner (and a number of other key events throughout the city) is broken up by a horde of remotely controlled albino sewer alligators, Trent and Tess are launched into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an insane genius bent on controlling the city’s underworld.

From Predator’s Row

When Tony finds a seven year old witness to one of the murders, her unbelievable story sets him on a path that will shake his hard boiled certainty about the nature of reality to its core.

From The Visitor from the Gloria Scott

When his holiday-companion’s dog is killed under mysterious circumstances, Holmes begins an investigation that will pit him against the very forces of darkness.

From Graduation Day

When the graduation ceremony itself is interrupted by a sudden sneak attack from space pirates, Sarah and Jeff are launched into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the Galaxy’s most dangerous foe.

From The Girl in the Ivy Gate

But when her best friend is killed in a dog attack at the full moon, just in time to make way for a new and unsettling female student to become enrolled, she finds herself teaming up with the nosiest girl in school to investigate a deepening mystery with some decidedly weird complications.

The Complication

The complication is where I introduce the surprising twist and major selling point of my story. It is where I try to showcase what is unique in my story and give the potential audience a taste of what they are likely to encounter in it that is surprising, unpredictable, and interesting.
Here are five example “complication” lines from some of my plays…

From The Alligator Menace…

In order to overcome this villain our heroes must navigate a dangerous world of organised crime bosses, gang war, exploding alligators, and weird science.

From Predator’s Row

Caught in a web of intrigue between faery courts, a nightmare world where Trolls fight for scraps beneath the bridges of the modern world, and a magical sword that has an agenda all it’s own, Wells must work to uncover a murderer in order to prevent a war among the immortals from spilling over into the mundane realm.

From The Visitor from the Gloria Scott

With the help of Martha Hudson, Holmes sets out to uncover the true nature of the evil that has settled in “Donnithorpe”. On the way he encounters spectral possession, evil enchantment, and a hidden sorcerer of immense power.

From Graduation Day

In order to overcome this villain our heroes must locate and infiltrate the Pirate’s mobile base, survive capture, recruit the aid of numerous alien species, and return to earth with the secrets of the pirate’s alien technology.

From The Girl in the Ivy Gate

Mysterious books, howls in the night, strangers meeting in the nearby woods, and a misdirected attempt at blackmail leads her through an adventure that could very well cost her more than her O-levels.

4) The Call to Action

The call to action is where I ask people to give the story a try. I raise a question in the mind of my potential audience, and I invite the audience to find the answer to that question by completing an action (usually reading the play, or watching it, or listening to it). A simple clear call to action adds just the extra imperative that people need in order to take the final step of actually reading the play (or listening to it, or watching it) etc.
Here are five example “call to action” lines from some of my plays…

From The Alligator Menace…

Can they locate the villain before his plans reach their fruition? Tune in to “The Alligator Menace” and experience this exciting adventure for yourself.

From Predator’s Row

Can he solve this mystery in time before the world of nightmares becomes a reality for all humanity? Tune in to “Predator’s Row” and marvel at a world of magic and intrigue that lies just beneath the surface of the world you know.

From The Visitor from the Gloria Scott

Will Holmes’ deductive abilities and expertise in folklore carry the day? Tune in to “The visitor from the Gloria Scott” and uncover the terrifying truth for yourself.

From Graduation Day

Can they locate the base before another devastating attack on the Earth is launched? Tune in to “Graduation Day” and experience this exciting adventure for yourself.

From The Girl in the Ivy Gate

Will she be able to uncover the secrets hiding within Seareach before the body count rises to include her own? Tune in to “The Girl in the Ivy Gate” and thrill as the investigation progresses towards its startling conclusion.

These may not be the best written “blurbs” or “pitches” in the world, but I have proven in my own experience that my work gets a larger audience with these “blurbs” than without.

FIVE COMPLETE BLURBS

Here are the above five example “blurbs” with all the elements (from the examples) put together.

From The Alligator Menace…

Trent Stone and Tess Carter are in Star City to participate as junior members in the League of Adventure Seekers’ annual dinner. However, when the dinner (and a number of other key events throughout the city) is broken up by a horde of remotely controlled albino sewer alligators, Trent and Tess are launched into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an insane genius bent on controlling the city’s underworld. In order to overcome this villain our heroes must navigate a dangerous world of organised crime bosses, gang war, exploding alligators, and weird science. Can they locate the villain before his plans reach their fruition? Tune in to “The Alligator Menace” and experience this exciting adventure for yourself.

From Predator’s Row…

Reporter for the Star City Tribune, Claire Templeton, uncovers a pattern of grisly murders that look like the work of a strange new predator and presents her findings to Detective Tony Wells. When Tony finds a seven year old witness to one of the murders, her unbelievable story sets him on a path that will shake his hard boiled certainty about the nature of reality to its core. Caught in a web of intrigue between faery courts, a nightmare world where Trolls fight for scraps beneath the bridges of the modern world, and a magical sword that has an agenda all it’s own, Wells must work to uncover a murderer in order to prevent a war among the immortals from spilling over into the mundane realm. Can he solve this mystery in time before the world of nightmares becomes a reality for all humanity? Tune in to “Predator’s Row” and marvel at a world of magic and intrigue that lies just beneath the surface of the world you know.

From The Visitor from the Gloria Scott…

The case that sets Sherlock Holmes on the path that will forever dominate and define his life occurs while holidaying with a friend during his final year at university. When his holiday-companion’s dog is killed under mysterious circumstances, Holmes begins an investigation that will pit him against the very forces of darkness. With the help of Martha Hudson, Holmes sets out to uncover the true nature of the evil that has settled in “Donnithorpe”. On the way he encounters spectral possession, evil enchantment, and a hidden sorcerer of immense power. Will Holmes’ deductive abilities and expertise in folklore carry the day? Tune in to “The visitor from the Gloria Scott” and uncover the terrifying truth for yourself.

From Graduation Day…

Sarah Tanner and Jeff Chase are top of their graduating class in the Solar Patrol. When the graduation ceremony itself is interrupted by a sudden sneak attack from space pirates, Sarah and Jeff are launched into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the Galaxy’s most dangerous foe. In order to overcome this villain our heroes must locate and infiltrate the Pirate’s mobile base, survive capture, recruit the aid of numerous alien species, and return to earth with the secrets of the pirate’s alien technology. Can they locate the base before another devastating attack on the Earth is launched? Tune in to “Graduation Day” and experience this exciting adventure for yourself.

From The Girl in the Ivy Gate

Jess is an ordinary girl at the very exclusive Seareach Boarding School. Most days all she has to contend with are the sneers of the trust-fund girls who want to look down on her for being a scholarship student. But when her best friend is killed in a dog attack at the full moon, just in time to make way for a new and unsettling female student to become enrolled, she finds herself teaming up with the nosiest girl in school to investigate a deepening mystery with some decidedly weird complications. Mysterious books, howls in the night, strangers meeting in the nearby woods, and a misdirected attempt at blackmail leads her through an adventure that could very well cost her more than her O-levels. Will she be able to uncover the secrets hiding within Seareach before the body count rises to include her own? Tune in to “The Girl in the Ivy Gate” and thrill as the investigation progresses towards its startling conclusion.

Do you have a method or technique you find particularly helpful? Please share it on the thread.

This article is © 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, what’s your opinion on loglines and how they should be used?  Do you agree with our point of view?  Do you disagree?  Let us know in the comments below.

The post How to Write a Simple yet Powerful Elevator Pitch, Logline, Promo, or Blurb that helps Catch the Attention of your Audience (with 5 Simple Examples) appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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, there are some good reasons to do so (and some methods that are far better to use than others).

The older we get the more difficult it is to remember things and in a world that overloads us with information on a regular basis, it can take even young audience members a few moments to reorient themselves to where a particular story and story-world is up to. You can help the members of your audience plug directly into the story at the point an episode takes it up again by doing a little of the heavy lifting (in terms of remembering where everything is up to) for them.

Okay, so it’s probably a good idea to provide a recap, but how should it be done?
That’s a valid question. Especially in light of the following fact: Recaps are BORING.
While it is no bad thing to help your audience out with an occasional (or even a regular) recap, it is essential to make sure the recap is short! Five-sentences-or-fewer short, if possible. And there are some specific beats to hit that are worth keeping in mind.

A suggested content model

Here’s a simple 4-part model for what needs to be included in a recap.

1. Start by identifying the protagonists’ current goal and the reason for it.
2. Have you noticed that TV shows never say “last episode on [[show name]]”, but instead say “previously”? As stories have grown more complex, knowing what happened in the last episode is simply not enough. The audience needs to be brought up to speed on all the important things that impact the current episode from the past.
   It’s also okay (while not recommended where you can avoid it) to throw in the occasional outright lie. You might be amazed to discover just how common it is in television to add things to the recap that didn’t actually happen (or juxtapose things in such a way that they lead the audience to a conclusion that was never there in the previous episodes that are being referred to – Farscape was notorious for it. Recap whatever is needed to make sense of the story.
3. Outline the major beats from the most recent episode. Make sure you identify key character moments as well as plot events.
4. Lastly, transition into the current episode (whether by segueing into the titles or via a short connective narration).

Some recap techniques

There aren’t that many techniques used to provide a recap. Here are four that are particularly common.

Firstly, the recap can be provided by a flashback pastiche, a series of connected soundbites from previous episodes that bring the audience up to date. This can be a very effective technique, but can also be very inefficient. It is REALLY important not to let the pastiche drag on. Pick the lines you want to borrow from past episodes very carefully… and make sure they communicate what you want to say. It may be necessary to record some new lines that make your intention clear.

A second common technique is to simply use the dialog from one of your characters to introduce the episode. This also can be an inefficient form of delivery. It can be hard to put the words needed for a recap into the mouth of your characters and keep it sounding natural.

A third common technique is to supply the recap through a narration. This can be as simple as scripting the five lines from the model. I prefer it for its simplicity, but it isn’t the most fashionable technique in use.

Lastly, in the days of Old Time Radio it was fairly common for a serial to replay the last scene of the previous episode at the beginning of each new episode as a means of keeping audience members oriented to where the story was up to.

An example narration

Let’s imagine our show (The Heights) is about a mother (Karen) trying to find her son in a post-apocalyptic world (referred to as the Heights because the lowlands are too radioactive to be safe). Lets further imagine she works as a mercenary in order to have the freedom of movement needed to search for her son and that the show has a recurring villain, a kidnapper of children, who is about to rear her head once more in the current episode. Let’s assume our villain uses kids as slave labor but her labor force has been decimated by some kind of new disease. The current episode will concern itself with the villain’s attempt to kidnap the community’s doctor in order to deal with the outbreak.

We would need to establish in the first paragraph the setting, who our protagonist is, and what she wants.

NARRATOR: The human world has been reduced to a wasteland of swirling radioactive particles in the aftermath of a war (referred to as “the burning times”) most survivors never even knew was coming. Small groups of humans scrape out a hand to mouth existence in highland areas that were less affected by the global calamity. Karen Ross, a mercenary, uses her skills to stay mobile and search for her son among the scattered communities.

We would need to remind viewers of the last run-in between Karen and the villain (and the villain’s aims and activities and any reason she feels particular animosity towards Karen).

NARRATOR: Two years ago Karen and her team came across a raiding party that was kidnapping children from survivor communities, brutalizing them and turning them into child soldiers to be sold to the highest bidder. They destroyed the gang’s training facilities, earning the ongoing enmity of the gang’s leader, Tanya Small.

We would need to remind viewers of any key character moments and plot moments that have an impact on the current episode (Karen’s unrequited attraction to the community’s doctor for example, and how rare and prized individuals with medical training are among the survivor community).

NARRATOR: Dr. Jim Cameron has been part of her team for 18 months. He’s a skilled medic, one of the few to survive “the burning times” and, despite their growing attraction, Jim has been reticent about forming any sort of ongoing attachment with Karen.

We would need to bring to mind the events of the most recent episode.

NARRATOR: In the last episode Tanya and her team took part in an attack on a group of nomadic bandits that had been raiding outlying settlements and threatening the community’s food stores for the coming winter. The food supplies were successfully secured but her Lieutenant, Terry Smith, was badly injured and is now recovering (leaving her slightly short-handed).

We would need to add any information that had not been previously revealed that is necessary for understanding the current story.

NARRATOR: Tanya Small has begun raiding again and recently killed a doctor who had been showing a little too much sympathy towards her young prisoners by attempting to smuggle them out of her camp. She is now starting to feel the lack of medical expertise within her community…

And we would need to transition into the story (perhaps with a teaser scene).

TEASER: Tanya’s camp.

At 260 words the above (when all put together) is a two-minute long introduction to the current episode (and therefore, too long).

A Better, More Succinct Version

Here’s an edited down version.

NARRATOR: The human world has been reduced to a wasteland of radioactivity. Karen Ross, a mercenary, uses her skills to stay mobile and search for her son among the scattered survivor communities. Two years ago her team destroyed the training facilities of a gang of child abductors who were selling child soldiers on the black market. In the last episode, despite the way her growing attraction to Dr. Jim Cameron is complicating her life, her team secured the community’s food supplies against bandits, but now the leader of the child-abduction-gang is back, in search of a doctor to fill out her ranks…

This version clocks in at a much more reasonable 45 seconds and still hits all the required beats.

A Pastiche Example

Pastiche (stringing together a series of clips and scenes from past episodes, perhaps with a sound transition between each, can be an effective alternative to narration as a means of providing a recap…

NARRATOR: Previously on ‘The Heights’…

COLONEL JIMINEZ: No-one even remembers what the world was like before it was blanketed in radiation.

SOUND: SCENE BREAK (WHOOSH)

KAREN ROSS: I’m Karen Ross. This is my team. We’re mercs for hire. We’ll do whatever job you’ve got!

SOUND: SCENE BREAK (WHOOSH)

JOHNNY ANGLE: That’s Karen Ross. She’s spent the last few years searching for her son. She’s never given up, despite everything. She never lets up. You sure you want to join her team, doc?

DR. JIM CAMERON: I’ve got my own reasons, but yeah. This is the team I want to be part of.

ROSS: So, you’re a doctor are you Cameron? Welcome to the team.

SOUND: SCENE BREAK (WHOOSH)

MOTHER: (TEARFUL) They took our children. They make soldiers out of kids and sell them to monsters.

ANGLE: If we destroy that training camp, we’ll only have destroyed an arm of the monster, not the head. And we’ll have made a powerful enemy.

ROSS: I don’t care. Tanya Small’s stealing kids. She’s going to pay.

SOUND: SCENE BREAK (WHOOSH)

SFX: Explosions

TANYA SMALL: Who’s responsible for this.

LIEUTENANT: Ma’am, the word is this was Karen Ross’s team.

SMALL: She’s cost us all of our profits and then some.

LIEUTENANT: She’s long gone, Ma’am.

SMALL: Yeah, well. I won’t forget this.

SOUND: SCENE BREAK (WHOOSH)

LIEUTENANT: Ma’am. Somethings happening in the compound. The kids. They’re sick.

SMALL: How sick?

LIEUTENANT: Real sick. Too sick. One died last night, and another this morning.

SMALL: Damnit. I’m not losing my investment. We need to find ourselves a doctor.

LIEUTENANT: That’s not going to be easy.

SMALL: Easier than you think. And it might earn me a little revenge at the same time.

MUSIC: OPENING THEME – LET IT FINISH.

This example is also approximately 2 minutes long and made up of pieces put together from previous episodes (separated by quick transition effects – in this case, a whooshing sound). Because it is a pastiche of dialog, it can get away with being longer than a standard introductory narration.

A Dialog Example (using Character Exposition)

A scripted scene is a third technique that can be used to provide a recap.

SOUND: OUTDOOR AMBIANCE – BREEZE, BIRDS ETC. – ESTABLISH AND UNDER.

GRUNT#1: It’s not going to work.

GRUNT#2: You tell her that

GRUNT#1: No way. You think I want to end up like the Doc.

GRUNT#2: (SARCASTIC) What? You got an objection to getting your brains splattered all over the floor? (BEAT) Besides, he had it coming. Trying to smuggle those kids outta the camp right under Small’s nose was stupid.

GRUNT#1: A lot of good killing him as a punishment did her, though. We’ve got a major epidemic in the camp. It’s cutting into her profits. And now she wants to raid Ross’ team to nab their doctor? It ain’t gonna work, I tell ya.

GRUNT#2: You always say that, but Tanya Small’s no dope. She’s thought this through and they’ll never know what hit ’em. (BEAT) Besides, she’s been aching for an opportunity to hit back at that bitch, Ross, since her team blew up our training compound.

GRUNT#1: Yeah, I heard they didn’t even get paid for that one. That makes it personal.

GRUNT#2: Yeah, well. We missed out on plenty of paydays when we couldn’t sell any more of those kids to the warlords. Small’s got a good thing going here, training kid soldiers. It’s taken us a long time to get back on our feet. Ross’ got no call messing with our business.

GRUNT#1: Which one’s Ross?

GRUNT#2: See down there by the hospital hut? The tall blonde standing just a little too close to the doctor? Another one of her team’s in there.

GRUNT#1: Yeah, I see her. So that’s why Small picked a doctor so far from home. She wants to hurt Ross.

GRUNT#2: That’s about the sum of it.

GRUNT#1: They say she’s got a soft spot for kids too. Spends all her time trying to find her missing boy.

GRUNT#2: That just shows she’s nuts. The boy’s dead alongside the million or so other corpses created by the war. He died down in the low lands of radiation poisoning like everyone else.

GRUNT#1: Yeah. You got that right. (BEAT) Why do you think they’re looking so relaxed down there?

GRUNT#2: Everyone’s been celebrating. Ross’s team just got back from securing their winter food supplies. (BEAT) You ask me, that’ll be one of the first places that Small hits on her way here.

GRUNT#1: C’mon, let’s get outta here. We gotta report back.

GRUNT#2: Had enough reconnaissance have you? (BEAT) Yeah, I guess it’s time.

MUSIC: OPENING THEME – LET IT FINISH.

This introduction comes in at just under 3 minutes. It’s longer than the other two (and a little clumsy, since it’s just a hastily thrown together example) but it draws the audience into the drama, and hits all the beats, by enacting them. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to hit all the beats necessary to bring new (and old) audience members up to speed without it sounding overly expositional and clunky. Audiences tend to be more forgiving of a quickly completed introductory narration than they are of ham-fisted dialog.

Replay the Last Scene of the Previous Episode

One last technique worth mentioning is the replay. A common choice in the days of old time radio was for a serial to replay the last scene of the previous episode at the beginning of each new episode. While this may be enough to help your regular audience members get back into the story it does nothing to connect them with important developments from episodes prior to the last one and introduce new listeners to the story. That said, it can still be helpful from time to time.

My Own Preference

Generally speaking, I want to get to the meat of the story as quickly as possible. The old rule of “start the story at the most interesting point possible” is a good one. A quick couple of lines of narration can let me hit the beats of a recap with as much economy as possible and then, having got it out of the way, move on to what matters most (at least to me). As a result, a short piece of narration tends to be my first preference, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the other recap techniques, and lots of producers make very effective use of them.

When, however, producers of ongoing serials don’t make use of recaps in some form – especially if the story they are trying to tell is complex and layered – they make it much more difficult to keep their audience up to date and ease new listeners into their world.
What do you think is essential to include in a “recap” and what are your preferred techniques for recapping the content of your serial episodes? Let me know in the comments.

This article is © 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, what’s your opinion on recaps and how they should be used?  Do you agree with our point of view?  Do you disagree?  Let us know in the comments below.

The post The Art of the Recap appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 the popular hate levelled at narration amongst modern audio-dramatists arises from its misuse (or from its inexpert use) rather than from a genuine problem inherent in narration itself.

I grew up listening to old time radio. Narration was a constant feature of those stories (and I am very used to it, so perhaps I am conditioned to not notice it as much). In my view, it can be a very efficient tool in the audio-dramatist’s tool-box. A moment or two of narration can introduce a story, set a scene, and/or shift a scene very quickly… and where brevity matters (and it almost always does), that can be helpful. It can also clarify a soundscape that would otherwise be ambiguous or difficult for the audience to decode.

THE REASON FOR NARRATION’S BAD REPUTATION

For some modern listeners, it has to be admitted, narration can break the fourth wall unnecessarily and destroys their sense of immersion, but, delivered quickly, in a single sentence or two, it can achieve its intended effect with barely any notice being taken. When delivered with immediacy (in the present tense) and via a character (either in dialog or voice-over) it can be even less intrusive.

More often than not, I believe, narration gets its bad name from being done badly. Bad narration takes a megaphone and draws attention to itself (breaking the sense of immersion created by the story). Usually, this is a function of length (too many words) or overloading (too many details).

For narration to work it must be brief and evoke rather than describe.

EFFECTIVE NARRATION

Audio drama can’t spend a lot of time painting scenes in the minds of its audience. It needs to get underway quickly and hook its listeners fast. We can, in our writing, rely on the audience’s imaginations to help us create our scenes, so few words are needed.

The words “in an office downtown…” are sufficient to bring a detailed downtown office to life in the minds of our listeners. These four words of narration can evoke the office, without describing it, and move us on to the action of the scene quickly. If the narration is short and the action starts right away, the audience will have forgotten the preceding narration before it has time to consciously register it (but it will have still accomplished its scene-setting purpose).

As noted earlier, this can be really helpful where time is a factor in our storytelling.

We could also set the scene through sound and dialog, of course (showing rather than telling), but it will usually take longer. There’s nothing wrong with this, but there is a trade-off at work and we need to understand that, when we avoid narration, we often sacrifice pace in order to supply the same information in a different way.

Badly handled narration, however, is far more problematic than poorly executed or slow-paced drama. Describing the decor, and the way the light filters through the begrimed window, and the fly that buzzes nearby the overhead fan, while evocative in its own way, is more likely to intrude in a drama and draws attention to itself as prose and away from the story.

Poor narration, clearly, has many problems, but I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Narration can still be used very effectively as a tool for scene setting, clarifying action, and pacing (so long as brevity is emphasised). If you narrate no more than is strictly essential to your purpose, and if you use it to quickly focus attention on the drama, it can be helpful. Overuse narration, or indulge in long detail-laden monologues, and it will distract from the story it is trying to serve.

THE UNIQUE NEEDS AND LIMITATIONS OF AUDIO DRAMA

On the issue of “show, don’t tell”, I had a long discussion with a novelist friend of mine not long ago. In the novel, description is helpful, but you want to reveal detail through action (character interaction etc.) wherever possible. This is equally true of audio-drama. However, audio-drama has a number of unique features and challenges that the novel does not. Likewise, it differs significantly from live theatre and film/television in some unique ways.

The audio drama, regardless of its reach, has an audience of one. The action plays out behind the audience member’s eyes, on the viewscreen of their imagination. In this regard, it is much more like a book than it is like a play or tv performance. We don’t get the benefit of crowd psychology (the engagement that occurs when viewing something with a crowd around us), but the writer doesn’t need to do as much work setting scenes either.

The fact that we tell our stories to single audience members rather than groups means we don’t have to command attention in the same way as public performances do. We don’t have to signal that it is time to begin listening. We can just begin. And we don’t have to dress our sets with rich detail and spend time describing them in order to convince our audience members that they are real – the audience member builds our sets for us.

We do, however, have to make the action clear without the aid of the visual sense. Sometimes, therefore, showing is necessarily a function of description – and that description can be fairly artificial – after all, no-one in real life says “Look out, Pam. Charlie’s got a gun”. In real-life (or on the silver screen) its apparent to everyone that Charlie has a gun and the event requires no such pronouncements. For this reason characters in an audio drama often verbalize actions that would never be spoken aloud in the real world or that would simply be shown on screen.

Likewise, the audio-dramatist needs to provide narrative cues for those sounds that are ambiguous. And many sounds are ambiguous. Crackling cellophane can be used both to indicate a fire, and a thundershower. What makes the difference? The listener’s imagination, prodded by the scriptwriter!

Ambiguous sounds require “stage-setting” or guidance from the writer. This stage-setting should generally occur before the sound is introduced to prevent confusion. If the listener is thinking “conveyor-belt” before the sound is identified as a “waterfall”, then confusion will result.

Generally, the identification of a sound is made through dialogue or narration, but occasionally through other sounds. It doesn’t need to be explicit; an implied identification is often all that is required.

In many cases, sounds become clear through context (through the plot itself), via perfectly natural references in dialogue and narration.

Sounds which always need identification include rain, a waterfall, a river, manufacturing noises, thunder, an automobile, and an aeroplane.

Despite the surface similarity to the novel that arises as a result of the “audience of one” phenomena, the immediacy of audio drama results in a faster pace. Long scene building introductions, physical descriptions, and verbal explorations of emotion and inner life, are not merely unnecessary but tend to turn our audiences off.

The reader of a novel can skip about and control the pace of the work themselves (skipping boring sections entirely, if they so choose). This is not true of (or at least much harder for) the listener to an audio-drama. They must follow the story at the pace it is presented (and for this reason, the pace of drama is necessarily much faster than that of the novel).

The story contained in a novel that takes twelve hours to read, can be dramatized in less than one-third of that time. A dramatization is expected to present the action with economy and to not waste its listeners’ time. If the pacing is clunky, audience members will abandon the story rather than skip forward. As such the action must be continually moving forward with economy (even in a contemplative work).

Narration that slows the pace unnecessarily (and there are times when slowing the pace is necessary) and draws attention to itself rather than moving the story forward, is our enemy. But where it moves the story forward, clarifies the action, is delivered with brevity (without an unnecessary word) and harnesses the imagination of the audience to quickly evoke details, mood etc., it is our friend.

USING NARRATION WELL

There are at least three places where narration can be helpful. It is not essential to use narration in these locations, but short narration can be a good fit here.

1. The Opening of the Story.

   A typical audio drama needs to establish who, where, and when as quickly as possible. A quick narration is among the most economical ways of dealing with the opening. The introductory narration may be carried by one or more voices or it may be dramatized, but there’s no denying that two or three lines of narration can establish the opening faster than a dramatic dialog.

   NARRATOR: Deep in the Kentucky Woods, two men creep from room to room in the darkened Westerley mansion, unaware of the dark presence that haunts its halls…

2. The Opening of a Scene and its Transition.

   While rarely necessary, a narrated transition between scenes can save time, establishing the new scene (time, place, mood etc.) in a sentence or two without feeling like clunky character exposition, essentially moving the story forward more quickly than would occur if the scene had to be established through dialog alone.

   NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Sam returns to his down-at-heel rented office in search of a fresh shirt and a bottle of rye…

3. The Closing of the Story.

   Once the climax of the story has been reached, there is often little in the denouement to keep the audience’s attention. For the story to feel complete, of course, there must be a denouement (an opportunity to see our characters enjoying the fruits of their victories). This can be dramatized, but, for the sake of brevity, can also be covered quickly via a few lines of narration. The clear advantage of this is that it allows the listener to quickly exit the story after the moment of highest dramatic interest, maintaining the climax as the focus of the story.

   NARRATOR: A few days later, Alice and Jim sit on the balcony overlooking the park and toasting the memory of the friends they lost to the monster of sixth street…

In each case above, narration is useful as a means of establishing context and then getting out of the way of the key elements of the dramatic presentation. It is effectively a time-saving way to get to the most interesting (from an audience’s point of view) moments in the story by compressing the least interesting (descriptive) elements. Where time is not a factor, a more leisurely approach is of course quite legitimate and the scene setting, transition, and closure can all be handled with sound and dramatic dialog. But, even here, it is no crime to opt for brevity through narration. After all, our audiences are hardly likely to object if we use the tools available to us to quickly focus their attention on the most interesting dramatic moments in the story and minimize the time spent on less important things.

CONCLUSION

Does narration destroy the illusion of immersion? Sometimes, but often no more than a clunky piece of scene-setting dramatic dialog, or a difficult to interpret soundscape. The extent to which immersion is broken varies from listener to listener as well. Perhaps I’ll leave the last word to Erik Barnouw, who wrote, back in 1947, …

Some producers feel that a narrator injected into the middle of the program “spoils the illusion.” This is doubtful. An illusion, after all, is not something foisted on the listener against his will.

Some debates are, simply, never-ending. As a writer, I feel its best to choose the tool that I feel is right for the job and wield it with as much expertise as I can, without discarding it simply because it has been used badly in the past.

This article is © 2017 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

What’s your view on narration?  Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  Let me know in the comments below.

The post In Defense of (limited) Narration appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

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 wait, trembling, for the verdict of our public… and our public can be HARSH!

And when the harsh or unfair criticism comes our way, it hurts like hell – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Especially if the criticism is particularly stupid and unfair, or, worse, provided by a professional troll that gets their kicks from providing “joke” reviews of other people’s work.

No amount of telling yourself “this is what I signed up for” makes it any easier to take. Most of the time, as creators, we are met with a discouraging wall of silence. We’re left wondering “Do people like what I’m doing?”, “Do they even know?”, “Yep, I’m getting plenty of downloads. But what does it mean?”. And then we’ll finally see someone’s added something in the comments or reviews. But our excitement turns to shock when they criticise our post-apocalyptic story for its poor characterisation of artificial intelligence when we’ve NEVER actually included an artificial intelligence in our story.

The temptation is to set the story straight, to correct the misapprehension or misrepresentation about our work, to mock and belittle the poster for their obvious stupidity, and perhaps even publicly shame them – after all, they came after our work publicly, didn’t they? Yep, the temptation can be really strong.

There are a thousand reasons why we’d be justified in doing just that, but there is one overriding reason why we NEVER should; it’s NEVER EVER a good look.

Seriously, going after our fans, criticising them for the long silences, explaining our intentions whenever we have been misunderstood, defending ourselves against false comments, berating our audience for a perceived lack of support (financial or otherwise), and/or any of the above (and many more besides), only ever makes US look bad.

When we respond defensively to criticism (even unfair criticism) we only ever lose. We look like whingers and sooks. We look thin-skinned. We look petty. And, dare I say it, we look unprofessional.

Yes, it’s completely unfair. But that doesn’t change how it looks.

I’ve had some utterly horrible comments and emails from “fans” over time. I’ve had some nice comments as well, and plenty of constructive criticism too, but such messages are rarely as memorable as the horrible ones. Some have been so egregiously unfair as to leave me wondering if the scripts were actually even read before the comments were posted. I have been accused of being a “social justice warrior and apologist for the left”, a “culture warrior and crypto-fascist apologist for the right”, a “misogynist”, a “feminazi”, an “example of politically correct culture run amok”, and an “enemy of disabled people everywhere”. And all while telling, what I thought, were fairly innocuous little stories about giant albino alligators, pulp adventurers, occult detectives, goblins, ghosts, zombie cowboys, and alien warfare. Despite this I have managed, thus far, to avoid responding in anger.

Here are some of the things I keep in mind regarding my work…

Silence is support

At the very least, silence is not negative. If people are visiting my content and downloading it, that’s not nothing. Most people who enjoy a piece of entertainment (the vast majority in fact) don’t stop and drop the author a line to encourage them. If they like it they come back (repeat visits and downloads are the best guides to popularity). Silence should never be viewed negatively.

Criticism represents one opinion only

A critical comment represents the thoughts of just one (and only one) person in your audience. That isn’t to say that other audience members may not feel the same way (they might) but the only evidence you have of that is the comment in front of you and that comment only gives you access to the thoughts of one individual. Anything else is just speculation.

Criticism ALWAYS presents us with a learning opportunity

Even the craziest criticisms I have ever received provide a learning opportunity for me, if only in so far as they force me to evaluate what I’m doing once more. I have to actively force myself to ask the question “is there something here that I need to hear?” It can be way too easy to dismiss even the “knucklehead” stuff because my feelings have been hurt. The act of thinking about the criticism and forcing myself to take it seriously (even when it’s, on first blush, nuts) is valuable even when I ultimately reject it. Why? Because, by thinking it through, I get a stronger sense of the real merits (or otherwise) of my work. If the criticism is unfounded, I at least know why and feel secure in rejecting it. If the criticism has merit, then I’ve learned something and my writing profits by it.

Always thank the detractors

I know this sounds totally counter-intuitive, but I learned it from the example of the late Harlan Ellison. I’m not a huge fan of Mr Ellison’s real-life escapades but I have to hand it to him regarding this. A few years back he was giving a talk at a science fiction convention. An older couple in the back was finding the content a little confronting and chose to walk out. Ellison’s response? “Thanks for visiting. I’m sorry it wasn’t what you were looking for”.

That response was all class. It’s hard to imagine how you could possibly make a bad impression responding like that. We’d all look much more professional if we did likewise.

There are always going to be those to whom our work doesn’t appeal. Some of them, because we didn’t write a family drama, a romance, a thriller, or whatever type of story appeals to them personally, will think our work is necessarily bad. That’s going to happen. Some people won’t like our work and will provide the oddest of reasons for it. Some people will be civil. Some won’t. We won’t always be liked and some people will be quite vocal about why. Hurtful as it is, that’s ultimately their right. We cannot control what other people do or think or communicate about our work. We can only control how we respond…

And some responses are far more professional than others.

This article is © 2017 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

The post Staying Professional in the Face of Criticism appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.