ADWIT: The Audio Drama Writers' Independent Toolkit
Want there to be more good audio drama? Lindsay and Sarah do. Each episode, they'll discuss an aspect of audio drama, examples from current audio drama podcasts, and writing exercises so writers can play along. Join Sarah Golding and Lindsay Harris Friel on a voyage of discovery on the seas of audio drama podcasts.
ADWIT: The Audio Drama Writers' Independent Toolkit
From Idea to Outline: Make Your Audio Drama's Story Sustainable
Click here to tell us what you think!
Ideas constantly surround us—emerging from single words, current events, or persistent questions. From Rajiv Joseph finding a newspaper article about a Bengal tiger killed by American soldiers (which eventually became a Broadway play starring Robin Williams) to Lynn Nottage crafting "Ruined" as a commentary on conflict minerals powering our smartphones, we examine how to refine these ideas into compelling fictional narratives using real-world connections.
While concepts like Space Pirates might initially excite us as creators, what matters is premise—the underlying message giving a story significance beyond its setting. We demonstrate how seemingly different stories (Star Trek TOS: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge") can share the same fundamental premise about understanding those different from ourselves.
We introduce practical tools like audio mood boards—collections of sounds, music, and contextual elements that help steer your idea toward an outline. We also tackle crucial questions about sustainability: Do you have the resources to write and produce your concept? Will the format work for audio? And we explain what it means when a story has "legs."
Connect with us through writersadwit@gmail.com or join our Discord server to continue the conversation about transforming your creative sparks into actionable outlines. Next episode, we'll dive into plotting versus "pantsing" approaches to storytelling!
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Dramatists Play Service)
Ruined (Dramatists Play Service)
One Flea Spare (Broadway Play Publishing)
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield on Memory Alpha
A View From The Bridge from BBC Bitesize
Sample audio drama inspiration board on Milanote
Sound effects from freesound.org:
Guitars in Auditorium by kevp888
Soundwalk In Black-Forest Thunderstorm by RandomRecord19
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Thank you!
Sarah and Lindsay
Welcome to the Audio Drama.
Speaker 1:Welcome back.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the audio drama writer's independent toolkit so exciting and delicious to be back in your beautiful, hopefully well-coiffured ears. Don't know what that means, oh yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, well-styled. Or your lovely transcribed eyes.
Speaker 2:Indeed, if you're reading us Even more exciting.
Speaker 1:Yes, I am Lindsay Harris Friel and I'm Sarah Gilding. Yes, I am Lindsay Harris-Friel and I'm Sarah Golding. Hello, yes, you are the one and only ubiquitous, unstoppable, unbreakable Sarah Golding. I don't know about unbreakable but we'll go with that. Yes, and this is the Audio Drama Writers Independent Toolkit. We are here to give you the tools to get that story out into the world and make your own audio drama podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're talking about, from that very gem germination of synapses colliding to make that beautiful idea to the starting line, right? This is what today is all about. So come on, lindsay, let's talk to me. Talk to me about formulating ideas. How do they happen? How can we nurture that?
Speaker 1:well, it's one of those things where people say where do you get your ideas from? And it's more like why won't they stop? Yeah?
Speaker 2:sometimes you're just like why won't?
Speaker 1:these like yes, oh, what was it? Was it a good one? It?
Speaker 2:was just um, it's about a podcast about lots of bryans, because I've seen the word brian and you know, I just just thought of all the Bryans I know and then thought why don't we make a podcast called it's Brian, right, and each episode is going to be about a different Brian, I mean you know, I think it should be Bryans of Britain, bryans of Britain.
Speaker 2:I love it, but, sorry, we must shun that idea for talking about what we're going to talk about. So yes, as you say, ideas can come at any second from just a single word, a name, a spark, a thing a color a mood.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you're being plagued by something and you're thinking about something all the time and you say to yourself maybe I'll write a play about that.
Speaker 2:Why aren't there pirates in space?
Speaker 1:Sometimes current events will get you.
Speaker 2:That happens a lot because, as we said, you get plagued by ideas and you know something keeps coming. Moon logs were inspired by the moon landings of 69 and the 50th anniversary of that. So that's the only reason that Quirky Voices Project came into fruition. Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 1:And I remember I really enjoyed that a lot. One of my favorite examples of it is the play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. I believe it's just called Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. I hope it's not the Bengal Tiger, I'll feel stupid. What happened was playwright Rajiv Joseph was in graduate school and he was flipping through the New York Times and he found out that a Bengal tiger at a zoo in Iraq had been killed by American soldiers. This is terrible for a lot of reasons. One of them is there are fewer than 2,700 Bengal tigers currently living in the world. But the other thing was that it was American soldiers who were having some kind of a party in the zoo and they were feeding the tiger and the tiger bit off a soldier's hand. So they freaked out and shot the tiger, and the moral of the story is be very careful with tigers okay, I have a little bit of tiger grief now, but yeah, it's a sad story, but rajiv joseph read this when he was a grad student.
Speaker 1:He thought about it, he wrote a 10-minute play about it and then he said, yeah, stuck it in a drawer for a few years bloody, oh, that bloody drawer. Yeah, oh, the drawer, the bloody drawer.
Speaker 2:Get your scripts out of the drawer.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, sometimes they need to sit in that drawer, do you? Know what, sometimes they need it. It's a good thing in his case, the drawer was a nice little place for it to marinate for a while, because then, after a few years, he picked it up again and wrote what ended up being on Broadway with Robin Williams playing the titular tiger, which sounds like a horrible phrase A titular tiger.
Speaker 2:I would be a titular tiger.
Speaker 1:He would do 20 minutes on titular tiger if you were here today. I think he was actually described as the soul of a tiger, but it was also robin williams's great opportunity to completely grow his hair and beard out to the level at which it was fully intended to be brilliant, I could just face paint right, but yeah, I think that that sounds truly fascinating.
Speaker 2:As much as you know. It sounds like a very moving, exciting thing to come out of such a tragic event, but also raising awareness right and talking about how we can be better human beings.
Speaker 1:The tiger was a metaphor for sort of how wild people are. In any case, read it. I highly recommend it. Another one that I also highly recommend is Ruined by Lynn Nottage. She wanted to write Mother Courage in Africa. She had been working as the press officer for Amnesty International. Here's a quote. Actually, Sarah, why don't you read the quote? Because you're the voice actress. You get in there and dig it.
Speaker 2:Dig in, baby. This is where now I can't speak. A quote because you're the voice actress. You get in there and dig it. The war was dig in, baby. This is where now I can't speak. The war that's being waged in the congo right now is a war being waged for foreign minerals considerite, coltan, copper, gold. Considerite and coltan are used to fuel our cell phones and laptops. We're incredibly dependent on the congo, so we can't turn our backs to what's going on because we are partially responsible for that war.
Speaker 1:Well, there we go. The play takes place in a tavern that this woman runs in the Congo for minors. Stuff for so many good stories in a pub right, exactly, yeah, and it's about how women survive the atrocities that are going on. And it's also it's one of those things where you go to see the play and then you, as you're walking out, you go to call an Uber, you open your phone and what is in it that is making that phone work? It's minerals from these African conflicts, autowned countries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And again, like raising awareness and thinking about yeah, the depth of our throwaway societies foibles things we should rectify. What about ideas that are also being a metaphor for something else?
Speaker 1:Sure, I mean. Shakespeare used to do this all the time. He would write about a local conflict by setting it in an island out in the middle of nowhere, or set it in Italy, where all the lovers are. The play One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace.
Speaker 1:The play was originally commissioned by the Bush Theater because they wanted her to write a play about the LA riots that happened after the Rodney King verdict in the 1990s, and her thought was what if South Central invaded Beverly Hills?
Speaker 1:So what she wrote about is the inhabitants of a wealthy house in London during the plague in the 1600s and a couple of people who are either aristocrats falling on hard times or very poor themselves break into the house and then they can't leave. So they all have to stay there together, and it's about what happens amongst the four of them in this plague-ridden environment, and if you haven't read it or seen it, I highly recommend it. But what that metaphor has in common with the LA riots is what's a situation where the rich are infiltrated by the poor, and the poor have a very good reason to do them harm. Yeah, current events often can inspire what you want to do, and we've also talked about a metaphor for something else. If you see something happening in your daily lives or you see something happening in the news, often making it a metaphor for something else can help you have sort of a richer experience of understanding it. And then there's always wish fulfillment Indeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just want to have fun with my writing too. Right when you started with pirates?
Speaker 1:and you were working on space pirates. What were you doing?
Speaker 2:I was just loving the fact that I would have this groovy situation where spaceships were properly looking like galleons and roving the universe to steal from these poncy people in their other nice spaceships and yeah, so so you've got your ragtag bobtail crew with them, you know, blue knitted plaited beards and stuff, and yeah, I just I just had this lovely playful idea about just yeah, it's sort of like a heist movie for your ears in space.
Speaker 1:There's tons of idea generation methods too, yes, but what really matters, in my opinion, is your premise, right? Yes, that yeah, yes, that yeah, yes. Let's take like, for example I'm going to give you two shows that should seem completely different from each other, sarah. I want you to read this description of a Star Trek episode Let that be your last battlefield.
Speaker 2:In the episode, the Enterprise encounters two survivors of a war-torn planet, each half black and half white, though on opposite sides from each other, each committed to destroying the other. The episode guest stars Lou Antonio and Frank Gorshin.
Speaker 1:Now there's a detailed summary available if you're interested. Well, we're going to link to that. Pop in the show notes. You've probably seen memes of these guys. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you may have seen Frank Gorshin going around with that half-black, half-white face. Another story which I think has a lot to share with this Sarah, you want to tell us all about A View from the Bridge.
Speaker 2:I love this show view from a bridge by amazing arthur miller. It's two-act play set by the ducks of red hooker working class part of brooklyn, new york, and it's narrated by a lawyer, alfieri, and revolves around the carbone family eddie, his wife beatrice, and then he's catherine. The family are first seen awaiting the arrival from sicily of beatrice's cousins, marco and Rodolfo. Sicily is the island which looks like the football on the end of Italy's boot. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:I love that. This description that the BBC has been kind enough to give us tells us which island Sicily is and what it's shaped like, and how it looks like it's getting kicked by the rest of Italy.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, it's definite. Yeah things to read into there. The cousins arrive late one night and the carbone family welcome them. Catherine and rodolfo are attracted to each other, which annoys eddie a lot. He finds more and more things to dislike about rodolfo as the young couple grow closer over the following weeks. When they decide to get married, eddie does a terrible thing. He reports the cousins as illegal immigrants. This makes his family and all the neighbors hate Eddie and Marco comes to get revenge on him. But Eddie produces a knife during the fight which Marco uses to stab him and he dies in Beatrice's arms. I mean this drama and then the sunlight.
Speaker 1:It's a great American tragedy and we probably should have warned everybody. Spoilers for A View from the Bridge. But seeing as it was written like probably 70 years ago, where have you been? You've had adequate time. Yeah, so, sarah, how are these two stories different?
Speaker 2:Oh, how are they different from each other? Well, they're set in different times and places, exactly. They have different attitudes and they've talked about different places, planets, people, Culturally, socially historically different Yep.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, how are these stories alike?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, we've got two people appearing in a place that is not necessarily known to them and shaking it up and creating alliances and enemies. Well, I don't know, I don't know with the other one how it ends, but, of course, like it's sort of a the civil war of each piece, really isn't it? They've both got a raging jealousy, they've both got a foot in societal norms and playing with those right and it's also very obvious on the surface.
Speaker 1:this is about people who perceive each other as different. In the case of A View from the Bridge, they're related the cousins are, even though they're not from the same country and they're not from the same kind of lived experience, they're family. I think what both stories boil down to is, if you think somebody is different from you and you feel threatened by a loss of power because they're different, going after them with violence and force is the wrong answer.
Speaker 2:Ends in tragedy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to. Just yeah, love is all you need, right?
Speaker 1:As much as we get excited in audio drama about space pirates or, you know, sex vampires or whatever.
Speaker 2:Sex vampires in space. No, stop it, Sarah. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:It's all getting there as much as we get really excited about that stuff. We really got to think about premise. So we really got to think about how do these stories make their point. Once you've got that initial idea of like hey, wouldn't it be cool if I lived in a place that was all trees and then a dragon suddenly crawls out of a cave, I've still got to think about why I need to tell this story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I was going to ask you what does premise actually mean? I know we have done episodes on this, but if someone was just jumping in today, would you be able to give us a groovy definition of what premise means?
Speaker 1:Sure, the premise is basically if you look at that Star Trek episode, the premise is hating people who are superficially different from you and going after them with force. Right is pointless and people need to try to understand each other rather than these two guys end up being the last living inhabitants of their home planet. So if you don't at least try to be open to understanding each other from the beginning, you're going to have nothing but each other at the end. In the case of A View from the Bridge, it's very similar, because you have this guy, eddie, who is the king of his castle, and the women in his family love him and treat him like a king. And then these two new guys come in and they're both good looking, they're smart, they're really good at what they do, and he is so threatened by that.
Speaker 1:These guys speak two languages and can balance. There's a scene where a guy one of the Italians shows his physical strength by picking up a chair and balancing it on his fingers, because he doesn't try to understand why his wife and his niece think that these guys are so important and special. Because he fails to even try to understand that and he just tries to push everybody around, he gets stabbed. So that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:So what are ways in which we can really have a pull of that premise down from a longer description to something more concise? What can we use to help us find that premise down from a longer kind of description to something more concise? What can we use to help us find that premises?
Speaker 1:It's sort of the. If you watch an episode of South Park and you listen to the end when Kyle always goes I learned something today, stan. It's the. I learned something today, stan, but it's not the best ones. Don't have it right out in the open. Have your premise right out in the open. It's the message, it's the reason for the story having resonance. So finding that premise can be it doesn't have to be difficult, it's a summary right, the summary?
Speaker 1:No, no, no, I wouldn't call it a summary, and here's why A summary, for example, would be like A View from the Bridge is about a family that lives in Red Hook, new Jersey, and takes in the cousins of the wife, who are immigrants, and the guy who's the king of his castle can't stand it. That would be a summary. The premise is going to be mutual understanding is necessary in order to prevent violence in the future, or force doesn't work. Your premise is the thing that is. For example, I can see a view from the bridge and have never lived in the 50s, have never been to Red Hook, have never been to Sicily and have never had any of the things in the play happen to me, yet it's still meaningful for me when I see it. Here's an easier example. Let's take it back to Can you Help Me Find my Mom? The premise of that is it's about and, and paying attention and listening and being kind and understanding when other people are confused and scared and upset.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it puts you in the position of learning that as the piece develops I think.
Speaker 1:I mean it's about a need for compassion, I think so. That would be the premise, even though the plot would be a young girl is lost and runs into a bodega to try to get help and nobody can help her, you know, so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:If you don't know, consoling for my Mom, it's from the Truth podcast, and have a look in the show notes. We'll pop a link in there again. Yes, so how else can we help our writing then to focus it once we have these ideas? Have you ever used mood boards, for example?
Speaker 1:I'm a big fan of mood boards, but I think they should be handled very carefully for audio drama because they tend to be very visual. Yeah, they tend to be very visual. They tend to be very visual. Yeah, they tend to be very visual. My experience with them is in grad school. I wrote an adaptation of the Rocking Horse Winner by DH Lawrence and I wanted it to take place in Kentucky in the 1950s, in that whole world around the Kentucky Derby Hats in there, yes, exactly All the ostentatious displays of wealth and all that stuff and that's what I was excited about.
Speaker 1:So my teacher had me make a mood board and it was part storyboard, part mood board. Part storyboard, part mood board. It was a lot of things like a photograph of horses running against sort of these giant shadowy black wild horses running against a red background. Yeah, because the kid in the Rocking Horse Winner is just haunted by these dreams that he has of the races and the idea that I wanted to have that I storyboarded out was I wanted him to have shadow puppets of these wild horse races on his walls and the other thing is Zoetrope.
Speaker 2:Is it that's called Zoetrope?
Speaker 1:Yes, something like that.
Speaker 2:Heliscope. I think that's it yes.
Speaker 1:Cool, we'll put a link in the. If you really want to know, write to us at writers ad. We know what it is. It's a scopey scope, it's a zip scope, it spins or it's a spinoscope. But yeah, making a pinterest board is a good way to help with information and research because generally once you go looking for information you find more and it's a good way to organize that information. But I just found recently within the last month, I'd say I found an article about how Pacific Content makes audio mood boards for their Pacific.
Speaker 1:Content. What is Pacific Content? Pacific Content is a company that makes podcasts for brands. It would be kind of like if your shoe store wants a podcast about shoes, you call Pacific Content and they make this wonderful thing for you. But they make these audio mood boards that are about tone, music, atmosphere, ways to show with sound the overall tone that they want to convey. So I started playing with this tool called Milanote.
Speaker 2:Milanote, m-i-l-a-n-o-t-e.
Speaker 1:Okay, yes, and I made this. So what we have here Beautiful pictures.
Speaker 2:There's a massive gnarly tree that looks like a personality of itself, with a red-coated lady and a wolf and it's kind of sepia in the background so the coat stuns out. And then there's beautiful kind of Germanic-looking buildings when that's some Smithsonian folk quiz recordings, so a Germany flag, I'm talking about those. And then there's some pictures of looking like composers there and some sound files too. Talk me through this groovy thing.
Speaker 1:So what I wanted to do was I wanted to make an example of a mood board for, let's say, I was writing a audio drama adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, yeah, and what we've got here is, as he said, we've got a picture by I can't remember. Now I want to say Arthur Rackham and we've got a link to Smithsonian Folkways recordings of music from around the time that Little Red Riding Hood obviously is an ancient story, but around the time that the Brothers Grimm would have put this in print. So we've got some music from that period and we've also got some sounds here. I've got a bunch of links from Free Sound. Here. There are things like I've got a wolf howling, I've got some guitars playing 16th century German music.
Speaker 1:As I'm looking at this, I'm also noticing. I looked up, I thought to myself, okay, well, what's happening in Germany that makes this story important at the time? And I'm finding this stuff here about how what was going on socially, finding this stuff here about how what was going on socially. The interesting thing is that women, it says here, the lot of women in particular had deteriorated About 1500,. Many German women had been at work in numerous urban occupations, but a century later they have been crowded out of all but the most demeaning trades, as economic pressures reinforcing ancient prejudices eliminated them wherever they offered competition to male craftsmen, which is why you start getting the witch craze.
Speaker 2:Right. So, there's those people who hated women.
Speaker 1:Yes, in a lot of ways the story of Little Red Riding Hood is a cautionary tale about well, little girl, if you go out into the woods by yourself, whatever you do, don't talk to strangers. But some of it is also hey, little girl, if you should go into the woods with a bag of treats for your granny and get into that weird, dark woodsy place so that you have power like your red cloak that's a super fun way of like kind of looking at a bigger picture, of pulling some other ways into thinking about your ideas, right?
Speaker 2:so you're not just thinking exactly, you're kind of thinking context and colors and textures and and your own visuals to play with.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how have you found that to be helpful? I mean, I'm just trying to think as well, like with being able to play music and look at those sounds. Why do you think that's a useful way of working?
Speaker 1:Well, like some people like to have some music to listen to while they're working yeah, while they're writing. I like having a playlist. I prefer having music that does not have lyrics at all, or if it does, it's in another language, okay, so that I can't really understand it or, for some reason, radiohead I. I don't know why.
Speaker 2:It's just sort of all sounds like it's just sort of all sounds like.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Well, that one's pretty clear. That's like the 20th century great drinking song.
Speaker 2:I think you should just put the Bridgerton soundtrack on. That's got loads of Radiohead in it, hasn't it? That makes me laugh.
Speaker 1:It probably does. So, yeah, a mood board is a very good way for you to when you're not ready to outline yet. Yeah, you to when you're not ready to outline yet. Yeah, it's sort of a good way to make a mind map or a scatter plot, or whatever you want to call it, of all the ideas that you need to gather yeah, to garner an identity kind of together get a a more formulated plan.
Speaker 2:So it's a way of using the visual and audio to plan rather than starting with the words. Right?
Speaker 1:exactly, and it also helps your sense of play.
Speaker 2:I think I love that. Yeah, we all need to play more.
Speaker 1:I agree, yes we do, and it helps your sense of play because you can look up these if you go to freesoundorg and you, you, you know, at one point I just typed in Germany what does the sound of Germany sound like?
Speaker 2:It's the sound of Germany. What did you get? Yeah?
Speaker 1:Fortunately, I was able to find forests right away. In any case, once you got that mood board, it helps you think about the old expression that you hear a lot in screenwriting.
Speaker 2:Go on tell us, what that old expression was, that old expression does it have legs?
Speaker 1:Does it have legs? And we don't mean literal legs, no that would be silly, sarah, exactly. Think of it as like here's your idea floating up in your headspace. Meanwhile, back on the ground or in the real world, there's stuff going on. What connects your story's idea to the real world? That's your legs. Yeah, like, for example, why does barbie have legs?
Speaker 2:why does barbie have legs to keep her pants up? But I'm boom, thank you. Yeah, it's because girls. Thank you, because girls run the world Exactly. Yeah, I mean we are more than mummies and sexy things, aren't we?
Speaker 1:Lindsay I'd like to think so. I mean, obviously, sarah, you are the sexiest thing that ever walked the planet, but you're so much more than that. You're a voice artist, you're a person who can dissect a script as incisively as a brain surgeon, and individuals are greater than their gender roles.
Speaker 2:Yes, we are all greater than our gender roles.
Speaker 1:Yes, why do you think let's use can you help me find my mom again as an example? Why does that story have legs?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, it talks about that aging population that we so know and love, and we wouldn't be here without right, and also the relationship with the caregiver there and how makes you reflect on your own, perhaps, relationships and if you're not, in those particular um places, idioms, uh, parts of life, you will definitely know people who are right exactly, yeah and then and also what's it like when you're in a situation where you don't recognize anyone around you?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, I I mean, that's a scary thing, isn't? I have had relatives who've sadly had had dementia alzheimer's and so on. And, yeah, I think the need for connectivity and the patience to still remember that they are the loved one, and this behavior, just you know, is scared, it can't be helped, it's just part of the condition, and so on. It's frustrating, scary, and if you're in that position, you want people to be kind and careful with you, right, exactly?
Speaker 1:and another thing, too, is that they've got an elderly woman played by a little girl and we. It sort of shows how we all feel like we're all kids inside. We truly are lindsay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we I mean I've discussed this many times, but I'm 22 sometimes, but about I don't know nine other times kind of go between the two, um, but yeah we are all children inside, aren't we? Because we're still the same intrinsic soul. We started with and you know, things we learned as kids we still do, right, I think there's that whole thing of that childlike, a sense of wonder and beauty and amazement we sometimes try and recapture, don't we? Yeah, yeah, I mean with also that kind of idea, right, it's the sustainability of it.
Speaker 2:You say about the legs of it, and I've heard sustainability banded about a lot in the last 10 years or so with regards to yeah, okay, you've got this season, it's all well and good, but but what's next? What have you got next? Why next? What next? So have you got something that can be, you know, potentially picked up and either sponsored or given some pennies because of the potential for it to excite and have more and more seasons?
Speaker 1:I'd say it's even more. The sustainability argument is even simpler than that. The phrase that always pops into my head is will I be able to move that couch? It's like, do I have the resources not only to commit to this idea and finish writing it, but do I also have the resources to produce it? I mean, if you look at mockery manner, which has you know so many characters love it so much.
Speaker 1:So many characters, so many voices. You get the sense they're always in. Every time they're in the park there's always a crowd of people, so many voices. But I really don't. I hope this doesn't make anyone angry, but Lawrence and Lindsay are playing more than half of those roles. Yeah, in fact, they're probably taking all the roles in most of the scenes.
Speaker 2:They're living the dream. They're living the dream. But also doing it with beautiful nuance and playfulness and a sense of fun behind it that is just infectious and beautiful and inspiring. So, yeah, no, I no. I love, love, love their work. And how about your own work, though, with yonsex arising?
Speaker 1:with yonsex arising, I wrote. I wrote the play sort of a let's just see what happens kind of thing. Okay, and then Okay, and then we had a play reading and it was not sustainable as a play in my opinion because I just wouldn't have been able to do it. I wouldn't have been able to produce it myself. Have a theater company, theater Pro Rana in Minneapolis. She was the one who gave me the initial idea. She said well, why don't we do a read-through here in Minneapolis and see how it goes? People responded really well to it. She said this isn't right for my theater company, but if you're willing to produce it, I'll direct it and we can cast it here in town. It, I'll direct it and we can cast it here in town. And we recorded it. We had a week of readings and discussion and rewrites and then recorded it over one weekend.
Speaker 1:So the story that I could not put on stage was easy to do as a podcast, and I think Gideon Media does a lot of these too. They did an episode recently which I will link in the show notes, about their behind the scenes process. They said that Give Me Away is the first show that they've done where it's been a let's do a season and then let's do another season and see what happens, kind of thing. As opposed to. Here is a play. Yeah, it was written by Mac Rogers. The example actually that I really want to bring up is Almalem, which I hope I am pronouncing in a clear way. Almalem is the name of one of the characters in it. The play is about the last days of Jesus Christ. Jesus never comes on stage in the play it's about the people around him.
Speaker 2:It's very good.
Speaker 1:You should go listen to it. Unfortunately, we're going to have to spoil it in the next episode. Oh, by the way, if you don't know how Jesus died, you might want to look it up, but in any, case what they had you know why I'm laughing. Why Spoilers? Spoilers for the life of Christ. It's been a couple thousand years. Where have you been?
Speaker 2:We're cyclical storytelling. We're doing that again, groove, again, groove.
Speaker 1:yeah, there's a lot of different source material we can they took the whole yeah, they took the whole play and broke it down into episodes. Yes, big bang, yeah, and it's got some cliffhangers in it that will blow your mind, even if you're like, but I already know how j Jesus did his stuff. Yeah, well, you haven't heard this story yet, so buckle up, you really should.
Speaker 2:It's all about perspective people yes.
Speaker 1:I mean in the case of Yarn Socks, it was a two-hour story and we broke it down into 10 episodes. We broke it down into a finite number of episodes and the story has a definite ending. It keeps the story from wearing out its welcome, because I believe it was PT Barnum who said always leave people wanting a little bit more.
Speaker 2:I've asked you why? For all of those questions? Why? And that would take us another 10 hundred hours to answer all of those questions. But, yeah, why do you break it down? Why should you leave people wanting more? Why, lindsay? Why to sate their need?
Speaker 1:for story.
Speaker 2:Yes, you gotta get there. It's like that's the premise of everything storytelling because we want more, because we need more and because it helps our beautiful souls to live better in this crazy, amazing, unbelievable world, right story is that crazy story?
Speaker 1:is an emotional petri dish I don't like that because that makes it sound like germs it sounds disgusting and it sounds like germs, but what it is is like if you want to do an experiment in a lab and you want to say I want to see what happens when you put vinegar on baking soda, you use a petri dish. Yes, in this case, you have what happens when you put vinegar on baking soda, you use a Petri dish. Yes, in this case, you have what happens if you have a whole bunch of pirates in outer space and then suddenly one of them gets religion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ooh.
Speaker 2:Yes, beer, religion of beer. Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, that's another episode. Now I have to write. Thanks, lindsay.
Speaker 1:What happens if one of them suddenly becomes very religious? Or what happens if one of them finds a treasure that is more valuable than anything else they've ever found and wants it for themselves and isn't willing to play nicely with the rest of the crew anymore? I think you need a finite ending because you want to always leave people wanting a little bit more. But yeah, um, a story is how we learn how to deal with the world isn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, and then the next thing we can really kind of, uh, take apart is like do we plot that or do we just make it up as we go along and we don't have time for that today? Do we Lindsay no, because we want to leave you wanting more, don't we Lindsay?
Speaker 1:We do so we're going to talk about plots versus pantsing.
Speaker 2:Next time aren't we Lindsay yes?
Speaker 1:we are going to talk about plot versus pants.
Speaker 2:Pants with pockets, plots without holes. Who knows what we'll be talking about, but you must join us for our next episode of AdWit, coming soon, to your brilliant, favouritest podcatchers ever.
Speaker 1:Sarah, do you want to tell everybody how they can find us and tell us what they think?
Speaker 2:Yes, you can find us on adwitorg on your internet or just search your favourite podcatcher for AdWit and send us any messages, queries, questions or even what we should be talking about for you to help you make better audio drama too. Writersadvit at gmailcom. Yes, and happy writing folks.
Speaker 1:Happy writing. Don't forget, we also have a Discord server, that's really important.
Speaker 2:Yes, a new adventure, and it's new.
Speaker 1:It's new-ish by the time you hear this. You can come and you know. Tell us what you think.
Speaker 2:Tell us what you want. Tell us what you need, talk about specifics and let us know how we're doing as well. That would be super.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go make another mood board because I really like those. I think it's fun.
Speaker 2:I'm going to write another episode of Space Pirates.
Speaker 1:Happy writing. People Take care. Happy writing, avanti. Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye 6630 Productions.
