Storytelling Moves
A. Finding a story or subject
The tools you need to find a story depend a lot on what you're after. But in most cases, finding a good story involves a lot of persistence, and some creative ways of searching. Latif Nasser, who works on Radiolab, wrote about how he finds stories on transom.org.
Radiolab interviewed Latif Nasser about his story-finding techniques in December, 2018
B. Conducting an interview
Congratulations, you have an interview set up! Here are some tips for getting great material for your podcast:
Before the interview, find out as much information as you can about the person you’ll be interviewing, and what you’re hoping to get from the interview.
Start with some ice-breaking questions (“What did you have for breakfast?” “Do you have any pets?”). This allows you to check the audio levels without missing crucial points, and it helps your subject to loosen up --you can hear it when someone is stiff.
You want to elicit both a story and honest emotion/reflection. To get the interviewee describing a sequence of events, use phrases like “Tell me about…” “Describe the moment when…” “What were the steps that got you…”. To elicit emotion and reflection, ask the interviewee “How did that make you feel…?” It’s not cheesy--it’s effective!
To get your interviewee to articulate their experiences in story-form, look for the following:
CONTEXT – Who are they, where are they, and what do they do?
CHALLENGE – What obstacles and hurdles did they face before they got to where they are now. What could have prevented them from succeeding?
ACTION – What did they do to overcome those barriers? What actions did they take, and what changes did they make or encounter in their lives?
EPIPHANY – What were those great moments of clarity, inciting incidents, and breakthroughs that led to that person making a final push to where they are now?
CLIMAX – How did things all come together? And what is it like to be where they are and do what they do now?
Ask the interviewee to restate the question when possible, to give you the most flexibility to use their audio to tell the story.
For more, check out “Conduct Better Podcast Interviews with This Simple 6-Step Preparation Process”
C. Shaping a narrative
According to Ira Glass, host of This American Life, two core elements, the anecdote and the moment of reflection, form the core of nearly any narrative podcast.
Anecdotes are simply events in sequence: this happened, then this happened, then this happened.
Moments of reflection are the payoff of each anecdote. These could come from the subject, who stops to take stock of where they are after the events they’ve described, or they could come from the presenter, who interprets the story we’ve just heard and tells us what we can learn from it.
In an academic podcast, the anecdote serves as a form of data, and the moments of reflection are an opportunity for interpretive analysis.
D. Writing and speaking for radio
Listening to a podcast is an intimate experience – It’s your voice, directly plugged into someone’s head. If it sounds scripted, it sounds insincere, and distant.
Podcasts need to be easily audibly digestible – We write in compound or run-on sentences, with big words, and beautiful visual imagery. But we speak in short, straightforward sentences (most of us). When you read you have time to digest the information, linger over a word or phrase, or return to a previous sentence. When you’re listening to someone speak, you follow every sentence and word sequentially.
E. Incorporating sound and music
You’ll probably want to spruce up your bare audio tracks with additional audio. There are several different types of audio you might want to use:
Music - Serves to underlie transitions between sections, or to smooth out edits or breaks in a conversation, or as background mood or energy.
Sound effects - Provide a sense of place, and imagery. It’s often useful, in a journalistic audio piece, to set the scene with some generic background noise (the low murmur of a coffee shop, or more energetic noise of a crowd at a market, a rally, or other public place) or with more specific sounds (cash registers, transportation noises, or other specific noises that you might be talking about).
Room tone - Helps make your edits less obvious. Nearly any recording setup, even if it’s mostly silent, will feature some perceptible background noise: the hum of the HVAC, muted traffic noises, etc. If you cut a clip and then leave a gap (to cover over a cough, an awkward silence, or to connect to separate lines of speech into a coherent thought), the sudden complete silence will be conspicuous. For these situations, it’s good to isolate and use short samples of room tone.
Some Sources of Free Sound and Music include: