Want to write a successful radio play? Don’t build steadily to a big ending. Start with a bang!
Last year I had the privilege of reading more than 300 entries to our Little Wonder Radio Play Competition. I read every single one and gave feedback to almost a hundred. This was an incredible opportunity for me to see on a large scale what does and doesn’t work in a play. And one of the most common mistakes made by our playwrights was that they thought a good play should look like this:
This seems to make sense. Start calm, introduce a mystery, steadily build tension until you blow their mind M. Night Shyamalan style with an ending they’ll never forget. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work at all. In this article I’ll show you what this approach looks like, I’ll explain why it doesn’t work and I’ll show you the alternative that will keep your listeners listening.
So, you’ve read your screenwriting books. You know you need to introduce your characters, their needs and their obstacle early on. Then something changes for your protagonist at around 15% into the script, which leads them too a mid-point conflict where they either change who they are or descend into tragedy. Great.
The Death Point is 2 minutes
So, we start of our play introducing the characters. We give them a nice setting, some good dialogue, and start establishing our conflict. Great, right? Nope. Because you’ve already passed the dreaded death point:
One of the interesting things I can do with an internet-based radio play podcast is see the exact point where people switch off. And most of the time it’s at two minutes. You heard me right. Two minutes. If a play isn’t doing well, then there is a huge horrible chunk of listeners who gave you exactly 120 seconds before they decided to go and do something less boring instead.
I lied. It’s less than two minutes.
It’s worse than you think. A good chunk of that 2 minutes is taken up by the intro music, jingle and opening credits. All you have are 160-200 words to grab the intention of your audience. That means you just can’t afford to start at 0% – you don’t have the words for hellos, how do you do’s, oops my name is etc… You have to grab the audience straight away. By the bottom of the first page there has to be character, there has to be conflict and it had damned well better be interesting.
If your opening lines do not immediately place your characters in danger (physical, emotional, metaphysical – whatever – just a whacking great sense that something is about to go wrong) then 80% of your listeners will switch off at 2 minutes. The internet is a harsh place. Use your 200 words well.
Great, so we start at 30% tension?
Not that easy. You might be thinking – great. I’ll start with some threat. That meeting conversation is in a boat that’s sinking. And now we can steadily increase to my explosive Shyamalan ending, woo hoo! Nope. You’re about to meet the “maybe we should just be friends” point.
You’ve made it past the death point. Well done! But that only wins you another few minutes. The second point where people quit listening in droves it somewhere around the half way point. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: the mid-point is an essential part of story structure, when the protagonist is forced to confront the truth and make a change (if none of this is making any sense and you’d like an article about story structure, just leave a comment at the end of this article.)
But what’s going wrong? Here you are. You’ve started with action. You’ve been steadily building tension. Why are your listeners giving up?
You climax in the middle (cue sex jokes)
Let’s put it this way. You’re on the internet. You are literally in competition with everything else on the planet. The mid-point of your play needs to be the most interesting thing they could possibly be listening to right now.
It comes down to a fault in thinking. Plays don’t build steadily to a climax. The climax of 6th sense, Shyamalan’s best work, is not when Bruce Willis realises the significance of the colour red at the end (although that is just awesome). It’s when, about half way through (what a surprise), the little boy decides to share his secret – and everything goes to hell. Notice: a decision that has consequences. You could make an argument for the scene with the tent (you know the scene I mean, I’m shivering now) – but the point is that the climax, the moment of maximum tension for your play, comes at the mid-point.
100% tension has to be at half way through. If it isn’t then your audience will go listen to something more exciting.
So, what am I supposed to do? Keep climaxing for the next 5 minutes?(Told you there would be sex jokes.)
Quite the opposite, actually. Your two danger points are two minutes in, and half way through. But once your protagonists walk through fire at the mid-point, any audience that are still here will likely to stick to the end. But not for more explosions. Now they want to know who things work out. Thus, if anything, you get a steady winding down of tensions as you resolve plot threads, dole out happy and unhappy endings, and reach your conclusion (ideally not more than a minute before the end. Nobody wants a Return of the Kings style epilogue. At the cinema they couldn’t just switch it off – here they can).
Your ideal progression looks a little like this: Start with a bang, build to nuclear apocalypse, then steadily clean things up to a tidy end.
Woah, woah, woah: too much maths!
Hang on, says you, how do I know that I have 78% tension at 4 minutes?
You don’t need to have 78% tension at 4 minutes – I mean, 78% tension doesn’t even mean anything.
The take home message from our graph is this: there are two points in a radio short where the audience is most likely to switch off.
The first is at around two minutes. To avoid this, you must have introduced characters that the audience care about in some sort of difficulty within your first 160-200 words! That isn’t very many words, but if you don’ get the job done by then it doesn’t matter how the rest of you play is.
The second is that the most exciting, most dramatic question posed in the play should happen around the middle of the play. This is just about the point where the people intrigued by your opening are wondering if they can be bothered to stay listening. You need to hit them hard with something big. What is this play about? What is the problem so difficult for the central character that they had to have a play about them?
After that, don’t worry about the maths. Just start big, and climax in the middle.
But what about my Shyamalan ending?
You can totally still have that. You don’t have to end at 0% tension. If you want a cliff-hanger for the next episode, a twist ending that gets the audience thinking or really just to mess with everybody’s heads – go ahead and throw in a twist. But don’t ever, ever save the best for last. The best has to be in the middle. Or nobody will make it to the end.
This was the first of nine articles I intend to write off the back of the competition. As I get them written, I’ll put links here. If you have any questions or simply enjoyed an article, please leave a comment and share!
- Don’t build to a climax: start with a bang
- Waiting for an interview in purgatory: on originality
- How to format a radio play. Again.
- Calculating length and what should happen when
- Casts and Cast Lists: Your underappreciated friends.
- The Delights and Dangers of Offence
- Preaching to the Choir is Boring for the Choir
- How to Earn your Ending
- How to stop writing crap dialogue.
