Writing for radio

Getting to grips with a new medium

As a kid, I never used to enjoy audio dramas: they were old-fashioned entertainment that my mum and my great-aunt listened to. I was a modern boy, and I demanded television! I made an exception for The Goons, Round the Horne and a few other vintage radio comedies, but otherwise, radio was right out.

That all changed about ten years ago, when I realized that I could listen to stories while I was doing other things: washing dishes, cleaning the house, making models, shaving, doing DIY, and so on. I discovered the Big Finish Doctor Who series, and various Lovecraft adaptations. I spent hours browsing the Internet Archive and Spotify podcasts. And then one day I became nostalgic for home, and found myself listening to radio plays on BBC Radio 4.

But I realized that, with a very few exceptions, I really don’t care for audiobooks. I generally don’t want to listen to one person reading a story for hour upon hour. I get bored of the sound of their voice, and I often find that the story drags. Powerful, descriptive writing that works well on the page doesn’t always work well when spoken. That’s even more true of dialogue: most of just don’t talk the way we write speech. Long, flowery speeches make for great reading, and can create memorable dramatic moments on a theatrical stage, but they rarely sound good when narrated.

Instead, I found myself drawn to audio dramas - effectively TV with no pictures. Like TV, they have a full cast, music and sound effects - they just don’t have visuals. This gives them three unique advantages over TV.

If you’re looking at something else while you’re listening to a show, you’re not missing out. You know that frustrating feeling when you’re watching TV while you’re eating dinner, you look away from the screen, and you miss something vital? Doesn’t happen with audio. The medium is pretty much designed for multi-taskers.

They’re much cheaper to produce. No cameras. No sets or locations. No costumes. No expensive video editing. No vast production crew. That means you can afford to put things in your story that would be prohibitively expensive for a TV show. Huge space battles, underwater cities, monsters, huge action scenes, recreations of ancient Sumer… if you can imagine it, you can put in in your story, just like you can when you’re writing a book. That makes them perfect for science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical fiction, or thrillers.

And, as Alistair Cooke once said, “I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better." You’re allowing the listener to create their own visuals. They’re not going to be complaining that the CG is terrible or that ancient Sumer doesn’t look like that. Just give them some sounds, and let their imaginations do the rest of the work.

A whole new way of writing

I really want to try my hand at writing audio dramas, but it’s nothing like anything I’ve ever done before. Even though it’s still scriptwriting, it’s not the same as writing for video, because you can’t rely on showing things on screen to tell your story. The entire story has to be carried by the sound alone. This means you have to be very conscious of several things.

You don’t get to use descriptive writing to convey emotion or action. You can’t talk about a tear running down someone’s cheek or the sweat running down their back on an oppressively hot day or a mangy dog giving someone a frightened look. You can’t describe a creepy old house or an ornate costume or the character’s memory of her grandmother.

You can get around some of these limitations by using a narrator, but this can often come across as awkward and contrived. This means that the characters have to say things that may not be entirely natural, as it’s often the only way to convey vital information to the listener. If there’s a wrecked carriage blocking the road ahead, someone has to verbally point this out, even if that’s not something that would be said in real life because it’s blindingly obvious to all the characters. But somehow, you have to make it sound natural.

Sound effects are critical. As a writer, you need to be conscious of the sound design, and work the sounds into the narrative. You can’t show what’s happening: instead, you have to provide the listeners with audio cues and ambiences that allow them to understand what they can’t see. You need to use soundscapes to create your settings, but it’s essential to ensure you’re not obscuring the speech. But unlike writing for TV, where you generally leave all of that to the director and their team, you have to put the sound directions into the script.

It’s also vital to keep the pace up. Long scenes tend to bore the listener. It’s much more effective to write shorter scenes, and cut back and forth between different locations or perspectives. While this is a standard narrative technique in prose, in audio, you have to be quite extreme: the ideal length for some scenes may be just a few lines of dialogue.

And finally, the language that you use for radio is, as I mentioned earlier, completely different to the way we write for prose. Writing for audio drama is, first and foremost, writing conversation. Short, partial sentences and interjections are vital: a well-timed “uh-huh” can be extremely powerful. An audio script often looks cheesy and pathetic, but with good acting and sound, it can work well.

“Professor, what’s that?”

FX: door creaks

“They’ve found us - AAARGH!”

There are, of course, all sorts of other constraints. If you’re writing for commercial radio, for example, you have to be very aware of fitting in with time constraints. If they want a 15 minute episode, which has to include intro and credits, you’ve got to hit that length exactly: you can’t just jam a few extra minutes in or hit your cliffhanger a few minutes early.

And then then there’s the challenge of finding voice actors, but that’s a topic for another post.

Trial and error

There are tons of books and courses on writing novels or TV and film scripts. However, there’s next to nothing on writing audio dramas. There are a few odd blog posts and videos here and there. but nothing substantial. To be honest, I’m really not sure where to start, so I’ll be pretty much making it up as I go along.

I want to get a couple of other projects finished off first, but I’d really like to start working on my first show over the winter. I have an idea for a story inspired by Coelho’s The Witch of Portobello which I think could work well as audio.

If I can get a half-decent script written by the time the snow clears, I’ll be extremely happy with myself. But I’m realistic about this. There’s a good chance that it’ll end up in the bin. Writing for this medium isn’t easy, and I’m going to write a lot of garbage before I produce anything good - if I ever do.

But still, I’d like to give it a shot and see what happen

Have any of you ever written audio dramas for radio or podcasts? Got any advice for me? I’d love to hear from you.