Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama
Drama for the dinner table
Have you ever been in “the zone”? You know, that experience where everything just flows and you write with uninterrupted joy and it all just comes together naturally and pours out onto the page? That’s what writing is supposed to be like, right? Well, maybe. But more often than not, the stuff I produce in […]
Beating Insecurity Am I an artist? A question on a facebook page recently got me thinking – “Do you think of yourself as an artist?” It’s a pretty simple question and it should have an easy answer. But it doesn’t. That’s because answering it out loud (that is, publicly) gives reign to all manner of […]
Read Scripts to Become a Better Audio Drama Writer – and Have Fun While you do it Why Reading matters Good writers read. It’s a commonplace truth in the world of prose fiction and non-fiction writing that to be a good writer you need to immerse yourself in the written word of your fellow writers […]
WRITING FOR KIDS This is a long post, so here’s the tldr (Too Long so Didn’t Read) version; Writing for kids is the same as writing for adults (requiring the same skills, plot structures, and character depth etc.) and only differs in that it requires the writer to place hope at the heart of their […]
TECHNIQUES AND STRUCTURES FOR WRITING ROMANCE A TEMPLATE FOR ROMANCE? More from the side project this week… but first, an admission. There are numerous kinds of scenes that I struggle with. I find romance hard to write. I find action scenes devilishly difficult. Comedy is not my strong suit… and neither is tragedy. That’s whole […]
TECHNIQUES FOR BUILDING SUSPENSE I’ve mentioned before that I have a side project where I write short pieces (scenes and stories) to explore different script writing techniques. I thought that this week I’d share an example in which I explored some ideas around building suspense. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS Here are some general observations on building suspense… […]
A MODEL FOR WRITING SCARY STORIES Quick disclaimer: A model is an abstraction. It’s an artificial way of simplifying and organising ideas so that they can be applied in some practical way. Models are useful so long as we understand their limitations and don’t try to put too much weight on them. They all have […]
IT IS TO LAUGH… I’ve been doing some thinking about writing comedy for audio drama; both its attractions and its dangers. I like to use humor throughout my plays (though none of them are, strictly speaking, comedies). I do this because the audience finds it a welcome release from both the more expositional sections of […]
TALKING GENRE: IT’S NOIR BABY! A friend of mine and I were talking recently about creating Noir stories. This is a summary of my understanding of how those old thrillers and detective tales are constructed. Noir isn’t necessarily reliant on the 30’s and 40’s setting. One of my favourite modern audio dramas is Harry Strange. […]
IT’S JUST A (TIME, SETTING, GENRE) JUMP TO THE LEFT – ADAPTING A STORY FOR AUDIO (PART 3 and Final) One of the most interesting things about truly good stories for me is the extent to which they are independent of setting. In the previous two articles of this series I’ve been commenting on some […]
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 […]
