The Transom Review
Volume 6/Issue 2
David Kestenbaum |
David Kestenbaum
(Edited by Sydney Lewis)
Manifesto Part 2
 I found a surprisingly good guide to the craft of radio a while ago: The Army's Psychological Operations manual. In addition to tackling the problems of enemies jamming your propaganda transmission – it says this about writing scripts:
"Power of suggestion. The mind of each listener is a vast storehouse of scenery. The radio writer, through speech, music, and other sounds, enables the listener to visualize each scene."
It's a cliché that "radio is a visual medium," and my wife sometimes makes a gagging motion when she hears me say it. But I always think my pieces could be better if they were more visual and had real characters in them.
Q: The story I'm working on doesn't have any scenes.
DK: If there isn't a scene, make one. Take this story by Laura Sullivan on TASERS. And well...I'll just let you listen to the tape.
Listen to clip (MP3)
Much better than just describing it in words. And the whole scene is just so surprising. I love it.
And here's the story I mentioned earlier about how even privacy advocates don't usually bother to encode their email. We end up going door to door at this civil liberties organization to see if anyone encrypted their email, none did. An idea, captured in a scene.
Listen to clip (MP3)
Ideally I'd like EVERY fact in my story to be made visual by some image. I once decided to do a story about nuclear plant licensing (don't ask). On the wall, the reactor folks had a framed photo of a bunch of smiling guys in suits with their hands on a huge stack of documents – all the paperwork leading to a successful license. And when I went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – there it was again – the SAME framed photo, framed in the same way, same mounting. That one image made several points. A) You have to file thousands of pages of paperwork if you want to build a nuclear reactor. B) The government and industry had close ties here – though the NRC is also supposed to be watchdogging the utilities. C) Energy is a business (men in suits). And you remember it – guys in suits with their hands on a huge stack of paper.
And here's a nice piece by Luke Burbank where he demonstrates the distance between Anaheim and Los Angeles in a totally amusing way.
Listen to clip (MP3)
In general, I beg people to DO something, anything.
Q: The story is in California. I live in Illinois.
DK: Non radio people sometimes ask me "so do you get to fly all around the country for your job?" Are you friggin' kidding me? I sit at my desk most of the time talking on the phone, reading through stuff. A scene doesn't have to mean you are there recording someone doing something.
I had a kind of revelation for how to do scenes remotely while on a treadmill at the gym. I was listening to a morning shock-jock show and they had sent a guy out to try to sneak into a secret corporate meeting somewhere. The guy had a cell phone and was wired somehow so it wasn't visible. He could talk to the guys in the radio studio and to everyone out in radioland but it was all hidden. So on live radio they were egging him on "tell the security guard you're looking for the rest room!" or "run for the elevator!" and then you'd hear the guy try it. It was completely hilarious secret agent stuff. And most importantly it was a scene with action. And because the guy was on a cell phone he was giving this kind of vivid running narration that we never get when we are standing next to someone with a microphone.
I tried something similar for this story on gravity waves. The audio quality stinks but its still pretty great radio.
Listen to clip part 1 (MP3)
Listen to clip part 2 (MP3)
Audiophiles hate cell phones, but I think there's something magical about them. I always overhear people giving wonderful radio-style narration, no-matter how mundane. ("Yeah. I'm at the supermarket. The woman in front of me has a really strange dog.")
Q: Hey you cheated, that story was longer than 4:30 – signal characters
DK: True. But sometimes all you need is a single line. I sometimes think of trying to come up with one-sentence biographies of people. My uncle, for instance, for years has thought about what the highest scoring Scrabble play would be if you could arrange the board before your turn however you like. That tells you a lot about him. Another friend of mine named Lars sets his clocks a full hour early ("Lars Standard Time") because otherwise he never leaves enough time for things.
A side point here: It really pays to take the time to find the right character for a story. I once did a story about how DNA was sequenced – and I had heard you could extract DNA in your kitchen. I talked to a lot of educator-types who were willing, but just didn't seem quite right. Somehow I got in touch with a researcher at NIH who said "hmmm we'd need a centrifuge. We could use my clothes dryer! Or.. my salad spinner!" Anyway – clearly he was the right guy, well worth all the phone calls.
I tried to make my wife the main character in a story but found she wasn't the right person. The piece was about software used to patch up people's singing. Professional studios use it with pop stars who sometimes hit a wrong note. My wife really can't sing. I think if I played two notes on the piano she wouldn't know which was higher, and it's somehow adorable to hear her searching for the notes. My editor argued that the listeners needed someone they cared about and knew, and she was right. In the end (Morning Edition host) Renee Montagne bravely attempted "Ain't No Sunshine."
Listen to the clip from NPR.
I think the key to all these shenanigans (as Ira Glass sometimes calls them) is that they have to make a point that's essential to your story. The scenes or character details can't be gratuitous. Especially if you've only got 4:30.
Hillary - May 27, 2006 - #33
I'm two years out of college and I don't really know what I want to do with my life. I've decided to take two loves, photography & radio, on a trip around the country in a few months and the full weight of this decision is finally beginning to hit me. I want to do podcasts from wherever I end up but I'm not a journalist, reporter or producer. I don't even know how to podcast but I'm trying to learn as quickly as I can….
One of my problems is that when I get out there and I'm traveling around from place to place what do I talk about so that it's not just a bunch of ramblings about the landscape and the food? I know why I'm going but I'm not sure that I should be talking about how I'm afraid of living with regrets, living a life I never meant to live, and that even though the idea of traveling around the country by myself is somewhat terrifying it is thrilling and I know I want to go. I have to go despite by fear. Is that something that people would want to listen to? If it is then how do I talk about it from podcast to podcast so that they make sense together?
I don't even know how to ask what I want to ask. Focusing has always been a difficulty of mine.
If you have any advice on how else I might approach writing these podcasts I would really appreciate it.
David Kestenbaum - May 28, 2006 - #34
Great idea. I'm wandering around southern africa right now and wishing i had a tape recorder. have you thought about doing short little audio postcards? maybe just 3 minutes long - but with lots of nice sound, and just telling a little story?
i was in a mud hut yesterday in swaziland meeting a traditional healer. i thought it could be nice to have a little story about the things people come to him for. in some ways it's the same as the U.S. people complain of headaches, insomnia, impotence. i asked him about my baldness and he shrugged though.
he wears monkey skins when he works and has a love potion, and a powder from the bone of a lion that could make me strong for boxing. "enough to fight mike tyson," he said. "could i BEAT mike tyson?" i asked. he laughed and said yes. then we talked about HIV - he tells the people he can't cure it. anyway it was a great little scene. he had a good sense of humor and it gave you a flavor for life in this little village.
i think those kind of moments from around the country would be nice. i don't have much experience with podcasts, but i think the shorter the better, especially if you want people to really listen. maybe you could make some just a short profile of interesting people. the conductor on the train - follow him around for a day. maybe you could post a photo for each podcast.
I'd stay away from longer stuff unless you have a good narrative that really builds to some kind of surprising moment.
Jackson Braider - May 28, 2006 - #36
…It's not that baldness is as critical a subject as AIDS, of course, but it seems that it's the question leaping unbidden from the lips that brings an interview (if not a story itself) to life.
And that point leads to a question: How do you, as an interviewer, keep loose? It feels as if your spontaneity might invite a certain unguardedness on the part of your interviewee.
Jackson Braider - May 29, 2006 - #37
let me throw these further questions into the mix:
a) Do you have a bunch of people who serve as your "first responders" -- a team you go to when you might not be entirely aware of what the subject really is to the proposed story?
b) How much preparation do you feel you need to have to do a story?…
David Kestenbaum - June 6, 2006 - #41
I don't know if the baldness question would make it into a story about traditional healers (and AIDS), but I'd certainly think about it. I think the thing that you end up telling your friends when you get back from a reporting trip certainly bears consideration. It stuck in your mind for some reason, and it's likely to stick with the listeners.
And to answer your questions:
a) I certainly have a list of people I typically consult. They tend to be experts, but also people who don't mind talking things through. Hopefully they're insiders and they know the real story. Sometimes you can waste a day of reporting if you just talk to the easy-to-reach folks who have one point of view. I try to call the person who can shoot it all down. That helps me measure what I've got quickly.
b) Ideally I'll work on a story until I reach some sort of end-point, until I feel like I've talked to enough of the people involved to understand and document what's going on. One nice thing about having beats is that this process gets shorter. But then the lights will go out on the east coast and I'll realize I know nothing about how the electrical grid is operated, and the story has to be on in an hour. You report what you know, and no more. You attribute things that aren't established facts. And then you keep digging and advance the story the next day.
I guess my instinct is to over-report everything - but you have to be careful. You don't want to spend an afternoon reading through some 300-page background report unless you think it's really likely to help the story.
Jackson Braider - June 6, 2006 - #43
I'm intrigued by the concept of scene-setting in radio and realized that as someone working somewhere other than the major radio magazines, I have become addicted to letting music define the scene. New tune = new scene. Incredibly simple…
In your work, is the concept of "scene" always linked to "place"? Another person can be placed elsewhere with a phone. But much of my experience of labs so far has been categorized by blowers and a/c and desktop computer fans.
If you would, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about what makes a scene in radio -- I'll note that I enjoyed the curious delay loop slapback in your audio sample.
Now that was something that said that person wasn't *here*...
David Kestenbaum - June 12, 2006 - #46
I really can't use music in a news story unless it occurs pretty naturally. I certainly can't play it underneath the Energy Secretary announcing some new policy. But where it makes sense, it's certainly a nice way to change or set a scene. Or the end of a song obviously.
My limited experience scoring a story with music came during those few months at This American Life. I was amazed (and terrified) by how a story changed with different soundtracks. A sad ending became funny, or ironic. At its best I think music works like lighting in film. It can highlight something or set a mood.
Check out Jad Abumrad's session at the last Third Coast conference. "Music: A Force For Good (And Sometimes Evil)"
To answer your other question - yes I tend to think of scene being tied to something happening in a specific place, a scene you can paint in your head. I don't think you have to have ambience of blowers in a lab - if someone is telling a good story and it's set it a lab – that's enough. The ambience helps hold you there, kind of adds depth, but the story is the important thing.
Joecool - June 3, 2006 - #38
I just got hired at a local college radio station doing news stories, and I'm new at this. I tried using your techniques of creating scenes with ambient sounds, images, and humor -- and people have called in and really like the stories! The problem is, our news director doesn't like them, and she thinks the stories should be more sterile, in other words . . . more like strict news.
She doesn't want me to use the pronoun "I", or ever refer to myself. And she never wants my voice in any audio clips. For instance, if I were interviewing someone, and they said, "I hate cheese," I wouldn't be able to ask "why?"
The taser story, for example, would be impossible for me to do.
My question is, should news be completely void of personality?
David Kestenbaum - June 6, 2006 - #40
Ouch. I agree these things can be taken too far - and that when we try and fail it's particularly painful. But given the listener feedback it sounds like you haven't done that. Can you put a link up to one of the pieces? (Or email it to me if you want to be anonymous.)
My colleague John Nielsen has this rule about using one of his questions in a story - which is that it can't just be there to make YOU the reporter look clever. If you say something funny or illuminating - the person you're talking to has to come back with something even better. (Unless of course you're asking a tough question - in which case a long pause and a 'yes' or 'no' from them may work.)
In general I think you are there as a proxy for the listener - and it is your duty to ask the "why do you hate cheese" question.
Can you sit down and have a discussion with your editor about this? Maybe play a piece like the Taser one and talk about whether it would be better with our without that moment.
I can say that at NPR there is a big push right now to recommit ourselves to making better livelier radio, to vary the rhythm, and get away from the ax+trax drone.
Joecool - June 6, 2006 - #42
Here's my first radio story. It was about a boring subject -- $3.9 million for renovations at the local college science lab. I tried my best to make it interesting, using your techniques of DOING something. I asked the science director to lead me around the building showing me lab rats and stuff. Here's how it turned out.
Keep in mind this is for a college radio station, and our news director thinks it breaks too many rules. And also keep in mind that I'm a music major, and I've never taken any journalism classes.
David Kestenbaum - June 12, 2006 - #45
Nice job! Good radio writing and use of scenes. I think there's probably a happy middle ground between you and your editor. You (as a character) can keep a lower profile – instead of saying "I went to see where all the money is going" you could just say, "where is all this money going?" for instance. Or introduce Greg by saying, "Greg M is really happy about the new money. He's tired of plaster falling from the ceiling in his office," (or some detail like that) then go to the tour.
I would shorten the tour – you've got three scenes in there that all make the same point. Maybe just use the anatomy lab – it's wonderfully visual and kind of funny with your question about it being smelly. I can just picture him there in the hallway outside whispering to you while the class is going on. Then I'd simply mention the fact that the hallway had to be patched multiple times, and maybe a third thing that the money will fix. But you don't need a scene to demonstrate each. Maybe the patched hallway goes earlier – "we walk down a stairwell, where Greg M says the ceiling has been patched and re-patched for 18 years… and end up at an anatomy lab." Then have the anatomy lab scene, then the tape of him explaining that the college has been expanding but these buildings have not been updated.
I also wonder if there aren't other places you could take the piece. Bonds can cause real budget problems in later years, and as you point out the funding here isn't exactly a done deal. Did some lawmakers oppose the bond? Was it really a feat for your president to get this added in? If so – maybe the political back-story is worth more discussion – how the school lobbied to get the funding. And did some other program get cut to make room? Etc. etc.
Also did you consider putting the tape from your president closer to the top – he does a nice job laying out that this is a big deal ("biggest bonding project ever…") Then you could say "so how did this happen? Well Davenport went on a trip with the governor. And sat next to him on the plane. And pestered him." Then play the tape from the governor. (I wouldn't use the word "tutored" since the governor does). Also that clip of the governor might come off more smoothly if you establish him first with some other short piece of clip.
Keep experimenting!
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