Reality Radio: “Cigarettes and Dance Steps” by Alan Hall

This post concerns Alan Hall’s essay “Cigarettes and Dance Ateps,” as presented in Reality Radio. What follows are the sections of his essay that prompted me to evaluate my own production.

Alan Hall in his essay, “Cigarettes and Dance Steps” discusses structuring his stories.

[music, "Dim Blue Voices," solo piano crossfades with jazz trio version]

WILL [voice-over]: When I came back, one of the first things I wanted to do obviously was to play some piano…Yeah, I’m gonna turn the air back on-it’s a bit hot…Alright, let’s go outside. I wanna smoke a cigarette.

[sound of lighter]

WILL: It was rough. It was rough, definitely, but I kinda liked the things I learned about myself…

…..

[sound of train]

[jazz trio crossfades with solo piano]

Above, is the transcription of a script that Alan Hall provided in the essay, where the sound effects support and punctuate the piece. This script reminds me of sound designs I created for college theater. In theater the words always come first, and you really have to think hard about whether what you’re adding to the piece supports those words or whether those words distract from the main thread unnecessarily. Because I haven’t been scripting, I haven’t been sound designing my scripts. I’ve been treating sound effects as “a thing I can use to make transitions less awkward.” This attitude is pragmatic, but not artful. I need to write scripts first and then treat them as I would a theatrical script and see what sounds and music I should add to support the emotional tone and environment of the piece. Previously, I’ve been inspired to produce ambiances and sound collages when I get an incredibly vivid mind picture while hearing someone speak and wanting to help support their words by expanding on them audibly. I think there will still be room to create these sound pictures, but I can make the experience of listening to a piece deeper and richer if I begin to focus clearly on sound designing the piece, rather than sound effecting the piece.

For the feature maker, sound – pure sound – is as potent a substance as any carefully weighted word or well-chosen musical figuration. Possibly even more potent. It should be used with care: no sound is innocent.

Choices matter. Everything I’m reading is saying the same thing. The choices you make matter, so do not treat them lightly. Do not make them at the end of the night when you just want a little shut eye, give them the time and reflection they deserve.

…Gunfire, like that in Will’s recordings, immediately lends a report weight and urgency, though soon the words of the reporter are likely to assume center stage. Further sound effects, if they do appear again, will function either as punctuation, dividing scenes and thoughts, or they will directly illustrate the story.

When I read Ira Glass’ essay, “Harnessing Luck as an Industrial Product,” I realized that I do not have enough field ambiances and enough things that place the listener in the scene. Ira Glass told me what I needed to find, Alan Hall is telling me how to use it. I can use these grounding and placement cues in a variety of ways to improve the texture of the story.

This is why sound is so important to the feature maker. In crafting radio features, the producer is using sound not only for its everyday, informational qualities-we do not hear a match being struck only to inform us that a cigarette is being lit-but for its metaphoric qualities. These are musical, poetic, or even balletic.

I am not poetic. I think it would be a good idea to try to be. I also like the idea of establishing sound effect themes for subjects in my interviews. It could be a good way to transition clips between multiple voices, but these themes have to be native to the environment we’re recording in or to the life of the speaker, otherwise they will ring false.

Assignment: Identify emotional themes in pieces. Support them with appropriate sound cues.

The key sound metaphor that unlocked the emotional narrative was a rocking chair on a porch, on a summer’s evening, “among the sounds of the night.”

Alan Hall talks about a piece he did on Knoxville, Tennessee. He shows a script with quotes and ambiences and effects. I would like to start making similar sound art pieces that explore the essence of a location through sound. Franklin Ave, Prospect Park, The library, the zoo all are in walking distance and easily accessible. I also think that that exercise would help me to pursue building a personal sound effects library and to begin contributing more to FreeSound.org, a website that has been a great boon to this production.

Assignment: Contribute to FreeSound, when making sound art pieces.

Rather than being merely a platform for delivering information, radio production can be considered an “art” that exists in linear time, occupying a territory that lies somewhere between the concert hall and the cinema.

I get into fights about RadioLab because people hate the sound embellishments and flourishes they pursue. What do I want to do? Report or make art or tell stories? Or all three? Can you do all three? This is something that I’m going to have to keep pondering.

To this day, I believe that holding a magnifying glass-or magnifying microphone-to the most mundane aspect of the everyday will reveal some sort of poetry, some sort of music. Scratch the surface of the street and reveal art. Strike a match and illuminate the human condition.

Randall Munroe says this. Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad say this. Planet Earth in HD says this. Everything is fascinating if you zoom in enough.

A more intimate relationship with the subject is possible when there are no barriers, no intermediares, between the story and the listener’s ear.

This is the pervasive manner of telling rather than showing, though I suspect stories are often better served by not placing a reporter between the subject and the listener.

These two lines conflict directly with Ira Glass’ strategy of writing illuminating, presentational intros in order to produce a story. They also conflict with Ira’s suggestion to beginning reporters, that rookie reporters should get themselves on tape talking with and cajoling their subjects. I wonder if Alan Hall’s advice is targeted at more advanced radio producers who have the skills and craftsmanship to present and frame a story without including themselves in the piece, or if we’re talking about two different kinds of radio. Alan Hall throughout this essay focuses on delivering an experience. Ira Glass is caught somewhere between a report and story. I’m starting to understand that telling a story might be easier than delivering an experience. Or at least easier than delivering a meaningful experience. The type of experience Alan Hall is talking about is the compressed essence of a time, place, location, people, and rhythm. A story according to Ira Glass is plot and reflection. To create a compressed experience of the kind that Alan Hall refers to, I would need to master rhythm, pacing, tone, get a ton of field recordings, and shape scripts in accordance with those rhythms instead of in a logical and easy to understand organizational structure. It’s essentially a musical composition of words. Creating experiences may need to be a side project. Generally, though, delivering an experience is something I need to practice, because musical composition is not a skill I’ve developed.

When the clip finished I saw one of the sports producers shrug. “SFW!” she said. I asked what she meant, “SFW?” Her reply opened up for me a chasm between, on the one hand, the world of the imagination–an understanding of the deeper resonances of things–and on the other, the everyday demands and expectations of an information-driven medium: “So Fucking What!”

This quote is another example of what might be an inherent conflict between a story driven radio piece and an experience driven one. I’ve been reading a few more articles in this book and I think I’m going to keep seeing this divide. Am I a reporter, an artist, an archivist? Right now, probably citizen journalist which is code for: kid with a tape recorder. Which of those do I want to be? I’m not sure yet. I know I want to tell stories, more than I want to tell the truth, more than I want to record history. If making an artful composition will help me tell a good story than that’s another tool I need to add to my bag.

Reality Radio: Harnessing Luck as an Industrial Product

Full disclosure, when I entered into this essay I was pretty sure I hated Ira Glass’ theories on radio. Consider this line:

There’s the plot where someone has some sort of experience. And then there are the moments of reflection, where this person (or another character in the story or the narrator) says something interesting about what’s happened.

I find this formula tired. I remember how relieved I felt to discover that others felt the same way. I was listening to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast commentators talk about a refreshing story from the 70′s that didn’t conform to the plot-epiphany-rinse-repeat formula. Not that the formula doesn’t have its place; it works well for This American Life. But this line is the example Ira Glass trots out in all his pedagogy. This is the rough-hewn methodology of someone with no natural talent. I know this because, it’s my old formula for successfully producing scenic designs. Don’t have creative visions or a natural sense of color and beauty? Follow these steps and you’ll at least end up with a joker mallet design that beats people over the head with Your Point. Whether or not that point is worth sharing…Well, who cares? It’s done, right?

But, once I let go of my preconceptions, I came to find that in context this point makes some sense, more on that later (see interesting point #6). Here are my main takeaways from “Harnessing Luck as an Industrial Product.”

Interesting Point #1: Developing mad skills takes time, yo.

I think for anyone starting off in any kind of creative work, this is the most daunting thing about it, this period when you’re lost, not very skilled, and you have no idea if you’ll ever get the skills you’re hoping for. For some people just lasts a year or two. For me, it took eight years.

Eight years is a long, long, very long time. But, this amount of time mirrors what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Merlin Mann and every other productivity guru I’ve been reading has said about gaining skills. It takes time. Seven years to be good at anything. Seven years before you can innovate. Seven years before it matters. Get to work.

Interesting Point #2- Special projects will help you progress:

And I created little projects for myself. Many of these were designed to sidestep my shortcomings as a writer and reporter. I’d interview people, get them to tell me amazing anecdotes from their lives, and then edit myself out completely. To make the transitions work from quote to quote, I’d use music.

I have ideas about what I am doing wrong with these podcasts. But tackling all of them at once is overwhelming. Mr. Glass a has shown me a solution. Do a special project to focus intensely on addressing one problem. An example: my pieces are too expansive. They aren’t edited tightly enough. Why? I start to like my interview subjects. Or I like this one nice line someone says, even though that line has little to do with the rest of the story. These moments and this affection for these people fatten up episodes. A good special project would be to assign myself strictly time limited pieces to release as shorts. This will develop my editing muscles. These smaller episodes could be non-Electric Sheep related. Perhaps I could create short sound art pieces? Or maybe I could produce Electric Sheep related sound art pieces? I could capture the audio essence of a variety of nerd environments.

Assignment: Make some 5 minute sound art pieces, between each podcast and post them to this blog.

…on any given story, in addition to whatever my editor wanted, I had my own goals. For instance, every story-even the stories thrown together in one day-had to have a tape-to-tape transition. That is, the story would go from one quote directly to the next…or from a quote to location sound to another quote, with no narration. This was to keep me alert to pacing. Too many radio stories get into this rhythm of script then quote then script then quote then script then quote. That’s poor craftsmanship. And boring.

My pieces need to have more world building. I want to take people there; I’m less interested in delivering a report and more interested in delivering an experience. The sense of being there that shows create, is usually what turns me into a fan, rather than a listener. Creating that same total immersion experience is one of my goals.

Assignment: Collect more field recordings during interviews, use these recordings to establish time and place.

Interesting Point #3 – Indulging your entertainment center is fine.

Every story had to have some moment that was there just to amuse me. A funny moment, an emotional moment some original observation that I’d made on the scene that no other reporter had. This could be just one nice line in the script.

I worry that my sound collage finales, are gimmicky. But I find they help me find the lait motifs in my pieces. I need to think about their value to the podcast.  Should I decide they’re too gimmicky, I’ll do them for myself and use that process to to script a conclusion. Mr. Glass clearly thinks that moments of personal amusement for the creator are fine, if they keep the creator active and interested. So I feel comfortable toying with this concept a little longer.

Interesting Point #4-Ground your stories.

Every story had to have someone who was more than a talking head, spouting policy points. Someone had to have human flesh to them, human motivation, a little humor, a real emotion.

Grounding the piece seems obvious, but in the field, I occasionally forget to collect the down to earth moments. When walking around on-site I gradually forget what it feels like be new to the world I’m exploring. I fail to collect these grounding moments that simplify and clarify things for people. In addition to writing down big ideas in advance, I need to expect and look for the little moments.

Assignment: Write down little moments in advance to program my brain to look for them. Collect the good little moments that I find.

Interesting Point #5 – It is not weird or unusual to be embarrassed by yourself.

Like most beginning radio reporters I didn’t like to hear myself  I didn’t like how I sounded asking the questions. I was awkward. I was cloying. Trying too hard one way or another. It was embarrassing. But at some point I decided that omitting this kind of tape meant I was also eliminating a certain drama from my stories, throwing away one of the most powerful tools at my disposal, and I forced myself through it, in story after story. Slowly, I got better at asking questions on tape. I still think the quickest way beginning radio reporters can make their stories more interesting is to get themselves on tape, asking tough questions, cajoling, joking, really talking to the interviewee.

I find myself embarrassing, but I’m starting to find what Ira found. I can learn to sound formal and professional on tape, but to a certain extent it’s interesting to listen to me interact with my interviewees realistically. I have this especially embarrassing bit of tape I was tempted to cut in “Come Out and Play,” where I get into a play fight with a teammate. In the moment it felt fun, everyone was having a good time. But audio doesn’t communicate the grins on the participants faces, so we sound like we’re at each others’ throats and I sound like a petulant child. However, the clip is dramatic and it pushes the story forward.  I’ve decided to sacrifice my pride on the altar of story and keep it. It’s good to know I’m not the only one who’s had to do this.

Interesting Point # 6- Look at how other shows are structured and written.

Ira also mentions making real-time transcripts of radio pieces to learn about clips, stories, and pacing. I think I need to do this for a RadioLab show and examine how they pace things out. I will examine their technique in order to discover what makes the show feel seamless.

He later mentions an example of a boring intro to a story clip. Unfortunately, it sounds like most of my intros. I need to work on this. The reason I do a get-this-out-of-the-way type intro is a desire to get out of the way of the story. I don’t want to hear myself, I bore me. I want to show you this cool thing I found! But by not creating a sense of occasion, I’m doing a disservice to the cool thing I found and making it seem boring. So in order to properly show you the cool thing I found, I need to properly introduce you to it.

Mr. Glass talks about tying your stories to universal truths. This structure is the one thing the consistently irks me about This American Life. Not everything means something. Some things just are and it’s interesting that they are. But he has a point. If something doesn’t connect to a universal truth, I do need to find a reason for the listener to pay attention. It needs to be high action and compelling for some other reason. And anyway my resistance to epiphanies could be the lizard brain talking. It’s afraid I’ll look pompous and presumptuous, which of course I am. But I don’t need other people knowing that! Perhaps, it would be a good exercise to try and tie it all together for an episode. What’s it going to hurt? I can always cut it later if I hate it.

Assignment: Do a grand sweeping conclusion to the “Do It Yourself” episode a la This American Life.

Interesting Point #7 : Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Ira Glass wrote about how in the quest for big ideas he asks a ton of questions. I read his article before I started collecting “Do It Yourself” interviews and I realized I could push for more detail. I could ask the same question in a slightly different way and get a more interesting response. I tried it out at NYCResistor and it worked! I recorded better tape than I would have otherwise.

Interesting Point #8: Put yourself out there.

But I’ve made peace with the idea that doing this kind of work always amounts to going out in the world, poking around, trying one thing after another and waiting for luck to strike. If you want to get hit by lightening, you have to wander around in the rain for a while.

I enjoyed reading World Mythology Series books when I was in elementary school. The school library had a limited selection, so I ended up re-reading a few. Suffice it to say, I knew my Greek and Roman gods. But I didn’t understand a basic theme that appeared in all of these stories. People were sacrificing animals; they were willing to give up valuable livestock to make the gods happy. Gods who were notoriously fickle, and whom they had never even seen. Why would people put up with that and think it was working? My Dad decided not to go for the lecture on how people don’t always behave rationally and instead choose to explain it this way. He asked himself a question. If he believed in those gods now and wanted to make the finance god happy, what would he do? His answer was that he would contribute to his retirement fund, make a savings plan, do things that would please the god of responsible financial planning. (Pleasing the god of responsible financial planning was a major theme of my childhood, he consistently managed to work a lecture on pleasing that particular god into seemingly unrelated lectures). So worshiping these gods for the Greeks and the Romans was a guided practical meditation. If you spend a lot of time thinking about something, you become a big receiver for any and all information on that wavelength. You find that the world has these chunks of data that throw themselves at you. If you are looking for solutions to x problem, then you will be able to see solutions to problem x, you stop ignoring those solutions as extraneous noise. Mr. Glass’ definition of luck resonates. I found out about the Come Out and Play festival, because I have communication channels open and am constantly scanning for events. Then all I have do is put myself out there.  It’s about aligning your brain waves and walking out the door.

Interesting Point #9 – Have fun. If you don’t care why should anyone else?:

The easiest way to make something that other people will love is to be out for my own fun.

When I’m tired and I don’t want to record, it comes out in my voice. So I need to remember why it’s fun and communicate the enthusiasm and excitement I felt when I initially started working on an episode to my listeners. If I don’t care why should they?

Reality Radio: “No Holes were drilled in the Heads of Animals in the Making of This Radio Show” by Jad Abumrad

Oh, man! I was excited to read this. RadioLab is one of the main reasons I became interested in picking podcasting up. I’ve been dying to know how they produce the coherent, flowing, sound story that they produce once a month. The overall format of the essay is Jad Abumrad annotating a RadioLab script. Having read a variety of articles that follow the “war story” format, the annotated script strategy works much better than just talking about a methodology. To steal Jad’s comment “why tell when you can show.” I’ve been spending time re-listening to old RadioLab episodes in attempt to analyze structure. But because I do this while drafting, I find myself getting distracted. As I’m listening, I end up focused on the story instead of focusing on the architecture of the show. Having the script presented in this visual manner is fantastic. There were some disappointments and some, to borrow a turn of phrase from Robert Krulwich, delights.

Disappointment #1:

Jad’s scoring, the sound design and musical composition of the shows are for me it’s strongest note. Jad’s comment on working with music is the response I see the most frequently and hate the most: it’s a question of taste. Here’s the actual quote:

…on musical sting: We use lots and lots of music. But, as a guide, I keep the following quote from the great film editor Walter Murch taped above my desk: “Many film makers use music the way an athlete uses steroids. No question music can produce strong emotion, but -like steroids-it can also damage the organism in the long run.

As I’m scoring a piece, Walter Murch often gets mad at me (he’s become a voice in my head) and reminds me not to “juice” the narrative with emotional information. But the Murch voice sometimes loses to a different voice that tells me that there are times when the music wants to be a character in the story too, with its own point of view (which can sometimes be at odds with the real characters in the story).

But that’s not the case here. This sting is used simply as a form of “musical punctuation.” It’s a big fat comma that separates two thoughts. And because of where it falls, the sting also serves to underline the word death.

Jad’s saying use your judgment. My interpretation of the Walter Murch quote is, if you use too much music you’re artificially embellishing your narrative and your audience will feel manipulated and used. It’s lying, which is not what I want. But Jad’s saying that it’s okay for the music to have a strong presence. It’s up to you as a creator to use your own taste. …sigh…When is it not about taste and balance?

Delightful Moment #1:

On the other hand, the above statement about character is good encouragement for me to explore an idea I had in the last podcast. One of the things RadioLab has is a fun back and forth between Jad and Robert. I lack a co-host, which is problematic, because monologues get boring. In this last podcast, I started to use sound effects in one or two places to provide a counterpoint to what I was saying or to act as a voice for the audience. It’s possible that this is gimmicky, but I’d like to explore it in the next one and see how I feel about it. Jad’s description of sound design as a character with it’s own voice means that there might be a tasteful way to do this. As Jad comments later in the essay while explaining another musical sting, “The Murch voice is right, people don’t want to be told what to feel…but they do want to be told what to pay attention to.”

Delightful Moment #2:

Jad describes how one of RadioLab’s reporters/contributors Any Heppermann got her interviewee, Dr. Schenck, to create the noise he heard when one of his professors played a tape of a cat sleeping for a class. Here’s the description:

She said, ‘Dr. Schenck, rewind in your mind back to the moment you first heard that sound and describe it without using the past tense.’ And remarkably, this simple change in tense flipped him into a different storytelling mode. He was suddenly much more concerned ‘with getting it just right.’ So he rummaged around his desk until he found a metal pen and then banged that pen on his metal desk for a few minutes until he produced the right sound. Somehow, Ann forcing him back to the present compelled him to re-experience the moment rather than merely describe it from a distance. That was a real lesson.

First of all, this specific idea that asking someone to tell a story in the present tense makes for more exciting narrative is illuminating. But also, I CAN ASK PEOPLE TO RETELL SOMETHING. Sound Reporting has suggested letting people know that they can go back and rephrase, but this means I can TELL them to rephrase. Presumably in a nice way. In a “Would you mind trying it this way?” kind of way. This is awesome, literally this strategy inspires awe (not to be confused with awww).

Disappointment #2(Ok Ok it’s a reach.):

This essay is too short!  Also, a lot of the other notes center on working with a co-host (Robert), or were things not really applicable to my specific venture.

Delightful moment #3:

Jad discusses anchoring the narrative. This made me aware of a technique I used unconsciously on the Chiptune cast that I failed to utilize with the “Art Meets Tech” cast. I’ll let Jad explain how anchoring works and then come back to this point. He explains why he included the sound of his cat purring in a serious piece of journalism?…Sammy is an anchoring device. The science of sleep, fascinating as it might be, is still science. And science by its very nature wants to obliterate antidote and metaphor and personal reflection in favor of pure data. This was an attempt to ‘concretize’ the science. Ideas are intoxicating, but they’re also dangerous. They can quickly drag you away from something that’s genuine and real. Like a cat.

My Chiptune podcast wasn’t about science, it was about art (actually really the not so subtle theme is the allure of community). But a good portion of the production is interviews with artists about their art. Which means that an outside perspective, that of an audience member, could help ground the idea behind the work they produced to explain the actual experience of the show. Does it matter what they artists are saying about what they do if that perspective isn’t experienced out on the dance floor? Chromix, Tom McClean, might say that he wants to get everybody moving, but it’s not until you talk to someone who comes to the shows specifically to bounce around in front of the stage that you understand that the connection he’s describing is real. I’m not sure that all of the actual interviews entirely fulfilled that potential, but I think that’s something I need to look for in the future. I need to talk to the big thinkers, but I also need to talk to the little people on the ground. I should have attempted to talk to some spectators at ITP’s Winter Show or at least done a better job of narrating my own reactions to pieces at the show. This would communicate the effect they had on your average viewer, not just the intent behind the pieces. So action item for my next cast. Privacy: have an average user describe the process of making decisions related to privacy and the choices they make on a moment to moment basis. Perhaps have myself  record, in the course of an average day, all the moments I’m being watched or recorded or aggregated, either voluntarily or not.

Here’s Jad’s wrap up: Humans have two cranial hemisphere. There’s the analytical left brain, which wants ‘explanation.’ And then there’s the free-associative right brain, which wants ‘experience.’ (This is a terrible oversimplification, of course, but hey). The point, if you’re a storyteller, is simply this: the story you tell should speak to both halves. A good story shows there’s magic in experience. And that magic is what keeps butts in seats. (It occurs to me now that maybe the reason we improvise so much, sometimes to the point of crushing inefficiency, is that that’s our way of staying connected to the actual ‘experience’ of storytelling). On the other hand, the best stories connect experience to something larger. An idea, a slightly new perspective, a sense of something universal that’s shared, human to human. Maybe even human to duck.“

*Since we’re talking about RadioLab, a note on Lulu Miller. Lulu Miller is a producer for RadioLab who just left the show to go off to grad school for writing. This made me really sad. Why? Well, this piece is one reason, another reason is her story at the end of the Morality podcast. Her pieces are tight and stand up on their own. I’m debating the idea of trying to reduce and do tighter better produced 20 minute non Electric Sheep stories to really take my time with things and produce a more focused tighter product.  I need to think about this more, and see where it goes.

Radio On

This American Life has a great portal to getting started in making radio. One of the book recommendations it provides is Radio: An Illustrated Guide, which was written by Ira Glass and Jessica Abel in 1999, illustrated by Abel. I picked up a few things from it, but I took issue with some of the advice. I would say that this is a great start if you’re sticking your toe in the water of radio, but some of the equipment based material is a little dated.

Useful points:

-Create transcripts of the audio you record so that you can see the words and push them around better. (I’ve been performing this process by cutting apart beats in interviews and then pushing them around in Audition, but if my interviews get longer this will fail to work.) I’m going to try this on the next cast and see if it offers me a better understanding of the material I have on hand. There’s a process called “logging” which is where you type the contents in real time. It’s sort of like skim writing. This is how Ira Glass describes it in the comic:

A log is like a transcript, but less exact. You don’t need every word. You can type or handwrite. The key is: You want to take notes on what’s in the tape without ever stopping it…Have a word or phrase for each sentence. You’ll need this later, when you’re editing, choosing which sentences to keep. The log will be a map of what’s there.

-Be pushy about where you get your interview. All of my ‘casts have background noise issues. Radio On is pushy about trying to record in small rooms with carpets and no echos. This might be hard for me now if I’m going to live events and getting on-the-street interviews, but it’s something I will try to work on.

Editing: Preserve the rhythm of normal speech. I absolutely have not been doing this. Oftentimes during the interview I’ve been responding with “right” or “yeah” and then cutting this when I edit. This leads to jumpy interview segments where there’s no breath or air between the interviewees statement. Radio On points out that I can grab umms or breaths from other areas in the recording or use some generic room noise that I should grab for two minutes after the interview to fill that gap, and bring that rhythm back into the speech pattern.

Stuff I have qualms with:

I’m going to read you this quote and then break it down.

Radio is  a peculiarly didactic medium. It’s not enough to tell a little story. You also have to explain what it means. That’s the way news programs work, that’s how call-in shows work, that’s at the heart of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern and everyone else people love on the radio…this is the structure of every story on our program-there’s an anecdote, that is a sequence of actions where someone says “this happened then this happened then this happened” – and then there’s a moment of reflection about what that sequence means, and then on to the next sequence of actions. It is an ancient storytelling structure, really. It’s the structure, essentially, of a sermon; you hear a little story from the Bible, then the clergyperson tells you what it means. Anecdote then reflection over and over.

I’ve been dabbling around on transom.org as well and this seems to be Ira Glass’ standard pitch on how to make a radio story. But the 16 year old that fell in love with Vonnegut hates this whole search for meaning thing. I think you need a theme or a note to explore, but I don’t think I need to find meaning.  I want to take my listeners on a romp inside the thought processes of people who do interesting things and try to figure out their perspectives on the world, but those perspectives have all been tailored to a unique set of goals and interests. I’m not going to find a universal lesson to impart and I think that the constant search for the epiphany moment, sometimes leads This American Life astray and is why people complain about it being preachy or stuck up.  I think it could be okay to just go on the adventure. But the trick is the adventure has to be an actual adventure.

Firsties!!!

This blog is a place for me to think out loud about the writing and radio production essays, books, and comics I’ve been reading. It’s a way for me to become better at making radio, which will of course dovetail nicely with my plans for total world domination.