Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama
Drama for the dinner table
At one level, nothing changes when telling stories for younger audiences. A show that is designed for kids has all the same requirements, with regard to good storytelling, as shows for other audiences. The story must have conflict, compelling characters, a strong structure with plenty of interesting incident, a great setting, and a well-explored theme. […]
Conversation is research I’m a shy person and fairly introspective. I need people, but I don’t spend a lot of time seeking them out – I live with the constant fear that if I pursue them, I will bore them (and I REALLY don’t want to be “that friend” that everyone avoids). And, worse, I’m […]
Designing Effective Character Growth and Change in Audio Drama All stories are about change. Time in stories can be linear or circular, but change is a given. Inevitably we think about change in terms of character and there are a variety of ways we deal with character change. Aristotle Aristotle argued that there were two […]
There are at least four types of time that are commonly used by authors when writing scripts; Real time Concurrent time Disjointed (or Flexible) time And Elided time. Real time is experienced with the characters moment by moment. While I call it “real time” it is, in fact, only an approximation of real-world time. The […]
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. […]
