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Paul and Paul

Notes on the Piece

This piece is a personal narrative about a Vietnam veteran and a college student - myself. It was a challenge to try to create some kind of unique voice in the onslaught of media coverage about the war in Afghanistan. I think in some ways it was successful at doing that, but it still needs polishing.

This piece originally aired in October, 2001 on Brown Student Radio in Providence, RI - but it was a completely different piece back then. Six months later, Jay proposed that we work together on re-editing the piece, and my first instinct was: no, this piece was so topical, everyone is sick of hearing about the war in Afghanistan. I don't even have the same feelings now that I did then - let's just bury it and forget about it. But then I realized the possibilities that having such distance on a piece of work opened up, and it seemed like a good exercise, even if wouldn't ever hit the airwaves.

I had the perspective on the piece to look back at it in a fresh way, and hear possibilities with the tape that I hadn't heard before. I had enough distance to realize the mistakes I made, and enough distance to try to make something out of those mistakes.

Especially when you're working on a piece where you're one of the characters, it seems absolutely critical to have plenty of distance from your product, so it doesn't turn into diary mush. Of course, sometimes you want the immediacy of emotion that being in the midst of a story provides, but it's a difficult beast to tame. I'm still learning to get that distance as I work on pieces that have short deadlines, but editing this long-deadline piece gave me easy access to critical distance. I really recommend trying this for anyone who's new to first-person writing.

It's a work in progress, so I'd love to get feedback about how to re-work it. Mostly I'm concerned about the setup and intro of the piece, so let me know if you have ideas. I'll be lurking in the "talk" section of transom.

Tech Notes

The interview was recorded with an AT-835b shotgun mic and a Sharp MD-722 minidisk recorder. The narration was recorded with a Shure SM-7 mic and all audio was loaded into a G4 mac using the Tascam US-428 USB interface. A pro Sony minidisk deck with digital outs was used to get an all-digital transfer from minidisk to Tascam to computer. The piece was edited and mixed in Pro Tools Free with no processing aside from basic mixing and cutting. Once it was finished, the piece was converted to MP3 format and Realaudio format using iTunes and Realproducer -- both free programs that can be easily downloaded. Then everything was emailed to Transom -- and not a single tape went in the mail. When editing earlier drafts of the piece, I did the same thing, emailing MP3s of the different versions to Jay.

About Paul McCarthy

I just graduated from Brown University, where I produced a story/documentary radio show called Inside Out (http://insideout.bsrlive.com). I've interned for Lost & Found Sound and This American Life, and did lots of editing and administrating while running the radio show at Brown, but I haven't ever done much producing, to tell you the truth. I'm starting to step out the door into the independent freelancer world, but it's cold out there.

Support for this work provided by the

with funding from the


and
The National Endowment for the Arts

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