The Pen is Easier than the Mic

by Bill McKibben - Februrary 2006

I have spent my life as a writer. By that I don't mean anything too fancy—I've written thousands upon thousands of pieces, most of them short: write-ups of basketball games and city council meetings, Talk of the Town stories and book reviews and editorials. I've also written books and long magazine pieces and so on—but the point is, I'm not afraid of writing short.

But I was afraid of writing radio.

Part of the trouble was in the reporting. The great beauty of the writer's life is its simplicity—a stub of pencil, a pocket notebook, and you're in business. The key to getting good quotes from people is not making them forget you're there, but making them interested in the fact that you're there, making them an intimate acquaintance, if only for half an hour. The best way to do this is to ask simple questions, to get them to describe their way of life, making it clear you find it fascinating. And there's no reason, obviously, that you can't do this with a tape recorder. But it does make it harder—especially when, like me, you are still a tyro, focused at least as much on making sure the gizmos and spinning and the lights are lighting up in the right range and the wind isn't blowing past your microphone and…  This is especially tough when you're working outdoors in midwinter (and since my piece was about farmers in midwinter, I didn't have much choice). The speed with which my borrowed DAT deck went through batteries in cold weather would delight any Duracell executive—below zero, their duration could be counted in sentences, not minutes. My wise counselors back in Woods Hole would advise: get your subjects indoors, especially in a room with drapes, and away from the highway, and... They're right, I'm sure, but it's now how I'm used to working; the kind of artificiality that comes from sitting directly across from someone and having them concentrate on what they're saying, as opposed to speaking in a relaxed fashion as they're doing something else, was hard for me to get used to. It increases tenfold my already high admiration for the best practitioners of this craft.

Once I had my tape logged, eliminating those sections where trucks drove by and airplanes roared overhead, I got to work writing. In a sense, I found myself plotting my way from one good snippet to the next. That in itself was not unusual. In fact, it's how I approach a lot of short writing assignments, in essence working out transitions to keep a piece flowing along. But in print, even in short pieces, the aside is often the best part—a paragraph-long excursion down some blind alley that's in there mostly because there's a piece of language too good not to miss. The fantastic economy of radio—I was told to keep the piece to five minutes, preferably less, if it was to have a chance at airing nationally—made those side trips seem an impossible indulgence. The one exception in this piece—Mark Gunther's description of how he churns butter—was simply too good to leave out, though I had to fight for it. The fact that it could be illustrated with music saved it, I think.

There was also the obvious truth that I was much more in the piece than I'm used to. I mean, the print version of this piece (4000 words in Gourmet magazine) was obviously about me too, since it concerned everything I'd eaten for a winter. But the fact that it was my physical voice linking all this together, and not my authorial voice, made the stakes seem higher. In the end, I think I didn't manage a real authenticity; my lede was crankier than I really felt, and there didn't feel like room enough to modulate the tone as I went on. It feels to me as if the flavor of a piece can get overdone—oversalted, if you will—much more easily on radio. In an effort to make it bite, I overbit.

I also found quotes problematic. I'm used to having a lot of them, from a lot of different people, even in a short piece of writing. That means that some will be just a sentence or two long. But a sentence or two alone on the radio sounded blurted to me; they needed more time to establish their voice, become familiar to the listener.

All those things add up to what seems to me the flaw of the piece. I was trying to cram too much in. Better, artistically, to have taken one farmer and just listened to him for three or four minutes. But that would not have provided context enough to make the story nationally newsworthy. Now that I've thought about this dilemma, I can hear it pretty plainly every afternoon on All Things Considered—and it makes me understand why the pieces on This American Life, or Transom, or so on sounded so fresh to my ears when I first heard them, and why they sound so satisfying still. The truth of the matter is, I think radio probably works best as a longer-form medium, even though its economics seem to dictate just the opposite. It's harder to telegraph or compress meaning than in print, in my opinion, at least about any subject more complex than a single person's reminiscences.

I very much want to try again, of course. For one thing, the reaction to the piece, when it aired on Living on Earth, was wonderful; all kinds of people were moved by it. (I heard it myself at 6 in the morning, driving across Kansas as the sun came up.  Great fun, although I think there must have been something amiss with the rental car radio—I don't really sound like that, do I?)  Next time, however, I'll choose a simpler subject. And I'll wait until the temperature is 60 or above.

About Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of nine books on the environment and other topics. His first book, the End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience on global warming; it's now available in 20 foreign languages. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, his work appears in Harpers, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and a variety of other national publications. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is the recipient of Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships and the Lannan Prize in Nonfiction Writing. His most recent book is Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Region, Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.