Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama
Drama for the dinner table
Believable Dialog Dialog concentrates meaning. While speech in real life sprawls and weaves and contradicts itself and follows tangents and gets lost and sometimes finds its way to the point via a circuitous route, dialog (with appropriate allowances for characterisation) homes in on the essential meaning in what is being said. This is, in my […]
Cliché and curiosity-quenching prose are the twin enemies of the writer of good dialog. And first drafts are often filled with both. Cliché is the Enemy Because we are saturated with story, conversation, prose, poetry, and music lyrics, etc., our attempts at writing (at least in the first draft) are prone to include dull, conventional, […]
EXPOSITION I’ve been thinking about exposition in audio drama lately and thought I’d take a moment to sum up some of the conclusions I’ve reached regarding how to deliver it. ON THE NOSE EXPOSITION Exposition is incredibly easy to get wrong – something I have proved in my own writing more than I’d like to […]
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, […]
THE INFINITE TELESCOPE – ADAPTING A STORY FOR AUDIO (PART 2) Between any two scenes in a work of fiction lie an infinite number of possibilities, or maybe I should say this is true between any intention and outcome expressed in a story. Scott McLoud used to (perhaps even still does) engage in a thought […]
HOW TO ADAPT A STORY TO AUDIO DRAMA – PART 1 Some of us enjoy adapting stories for audio production… but frankly, it’s not an easy task. Today I thought I’d talk about one technique (among the many a writer might try) that I find helpful for adapting a prose piece to audio. Ready, here […]
This article was prompted by an excellent blog post by Jack Ward, on how an audio drama can lose an audience. I’ve expanded on those thoughts here to help us look at the slightly different topic of why some audio dramas are so easily forgotten and how this can be avoided by carefully employing Audio […]
Scripting Audio Drama In our last lesson we worked on preparing and presenting a radio play live before an audience. In particular we looked at the skills of voice acting, preparation of sound effects and musical cues, and the actual performance of the play. This lesson takes approximately x hours to complete. There are no […]
Hi folks, I’m taking another look this week at the advice offered by Erik Barnouw in his Handbook of Radio Writing (1947). This time the attention is focused on dialog. Dialog is the heart and soul fo a radio play. Mr Barnau provides some great advice (particularly regarding casting). This was a particularly useful chapter […]
