How to write a radio short
This is a guide to writing short radio plays. A major part of my work this year has been the setting up of “Little Wonder Productions”, a production company to produce and publish short radio plays on the internet. You can listen to our first effort here, and we will publish more plays soon. Later in the year we will have a whole run of brand new plays, and I wrote this guide to help my writers. If you’re looking for more information about writing radio shorts, I recommend A More Perfect Ten by Gary Garrison for your Kindle as a great guide on ten-minute plays in theatre (plus excellent examples of ten-minute plays), and if you’re interested in paper books I rather like Writing for Radio by Shaun MacLoughlin.
What is a short radio play?
A short play is a whole story–told fast. It is not a sketch. A sketch is a joke – a setup for a punch-line. A short play is a full story, beginning, middle and end, conflict, character development, the whole deal.
What is a story? Glad you asked. A want something very much. B is stopping them from getting it. A attempts to get past B to what they want but fails because of some flaw in their personality. They attempt to overcome this flaw, and in a final confrontation with B either succeed in changing (comedy!) or fail to change (tragedy!) There were go. Sid Field in one paragraph.
You guys know this stuff already, of course, but there’s a temptation with a short to take one cute idea (or joke), present that as your 10-minute play, and think your work is done. Sorry chaps. The audience wants the full deal. If you give them a punchline in the place of a play they’ll get bored, and they’ll let you know.
How do I tell a full story in time it usually takes me to write one half decent sentence?
You do story however you like, but key to a radio short is to get your want and your obstacle right up there in the first paragraph. The audience has little time to adapt from play to play, so the sooner they can go “oh this is the one about the cow who’s trying to get to the moon but the farmer keeps sabotaging their rocket” the more chance they’ll remember your play amongst the others, and the more free you will be to go break the rules of drama and be all radical or whatever (or just tell a damned good tale).
But write a story not a sketch. Be funny as you like (please do be funny) but force a character to confront a difficult change.
How can you tell you have a sketch and not a story? The easiest way is if you’ve got to about seven pages (or less!) and you find you’ve finished, you’ve probably written a sketch, and your editor will ask you to cut it to two pages. A story with rich characters and proper development will have you ripping your hair out to reduce it to fifteen minutes or less.
So, you’ll know you’re doing it right if at the end of your first draft you’re really struggling to get everything in the page limit, it feels like there’s so much going on and nothing you can cut, and you’re composing desperate emails to the producer in your head for why you need just a few minutes more. With experience you’ll get better at packing story into the right time, but a good short play is dense, packed with meaning, and only contains lines essential to the story.
Why do we need stories not sketches? Well, a ten to fifteen minute sketch is boring. There just isn’t enough to hold the audience’s attention–that’s why sketch shows move so fast. Good jokes come thick and fast, good stories are immersive. You need to bring the story if you want to keep them engaged past the first sixty seconds.
What is special about radio?
Well, first the audience can’t see anything. So, you need to be quick to invoke a sense of space. Action/fight scenes are difficult to pull off (doesn’t stop me from trying every damned time), whereas monologues and narrative speech traditionally work better here than anywhere else (bleurk.) (Yeah, ok, make sure to ignore my prejudices).
Second, there’s a decent chance the listener will be doing something else at the same time as listening. This makes it particularly hard for them to keep track of who is who during a radio play. Less characters works better, and distinctive voices help. Make sure names are used early, although you shouldn’t go overboard on the whole “Oh Mrs Hale, but certainly Mr Dusterly,” because that’ll have the opposite effect than the one desired: all the audience will remember is a flood of indistinguishable names (like turning up at a dinner party and being introduced to twenty people in a row).
Does writing for radio sound crap now? Well, there’s a big benefit.
Because they audience can’t see, they must believe whatever you tell them. That lets you get away with all sorts of crazy shit. There’s a famous radio play about two horses falling for each other via love letters. There’s another one where a whale and a flower pot philosophize about life during a short fall to a splattery end (you might have heard of that play. I, erm, might have made up the first one, I’m not so sure now.) You can collide spaceships without worrying about budget. Of course, you’re will have to use words to make the audience see it. But that’s part of the fun.
The trick is to imagine yourself sitting in your favourite arm chair, with the radio on and about to tell you a story. Close your eyes. What story do you want to hear? Everything from here is the same as every other story your have written, just now you’re sat in the dark, in your most comfortable armchair, wrapped in a blanket, mug of tea in your hands, eyes closed, ready to be told a story. Alternatively, you’re doing the ironing. There’s an ancient tradition linking ironing to radio.
Soundscapes and Getting Started
People are rubbish at identifying things by sound. Seriously, seriously rubbish. Play them the sound of a horse and cart and they’ll think they hear water running. DO NOT RELY ON SOUND TO CONVEY ACTION. Instead, everything needs to come from the dialogue. Sounds supports, creates a sense of mood and a sense of place. The rest of the time you need your characters to tell the story.
This creates a rather obvious problem. How do you “show not tell” in a medium in which you can only tell? Well, here’s a famous example of how not to do it from Timothy West’s spoof This Gun That I Have In My Right Hand is Loaded. (Stolen from p59 of “Writing for Radio” by Shaun Macloughlin”)
LAURA: What’s that you’ve got under your arm, Clive?
CLIVE: It’s an evening paper, Laura.
PAPER NOISE
I’ve just been reading about the Oppenheim smuggling case. Good gracious, it’s nice to sit down after that long train journey from the insurance office in the city.
LAURA: Let me get you a drink, Clive darling.
(LENGTHY POURING, CLINK)
CLIVE: Thank you, Laura my dear
(CLINK, SIP, GULP)
Aah, Amontillado eh? Good stuff. What are you having?
LAURA: I think I’ll have a whiskey, if it’s all the same to you
(CLINK, POURING, SYPHON)
CLIVE: Whisky, eh? That’s a strange drink for an attractive, auburn-haired girl of twenty-nine – anything wrong?
LAURA: No, it’s nothing, Clive, I –
CLIVE: Yes?
LAURA: No, really, I –
CLIVE: You’re my wife, Laura. Whatever it is you can tell me, I’m your husband.
Writing radio will force you to write better dialogue. Focus on what the characters need to say to each other and allow your actors and the soundscape to give the audience their own space to build image. As always, only have your characters say things to each other that they would actually say! So how do you write a radio play? By writing really, really good dialogue that sounds true to the characters in a fashion that means you would understand what they were doing if you overheard them on the train, or at the bus-stop, or with your ear to a glass on the separating wall in your semi-detached.
Now you are completely intimated, here are four approaches to getting started:
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Call and response
Sit where you are and have a listen. Start mind-mapping all the sounds you can hear. If a sound you hear makes you think of another sound, stick it on your map.
Now, pick one sound at random and write it as the first line of your script. Then write a line of dialogue. Pick a second sound. Write a second line of dialogue. This gets you thinking about how sound and dialogue work together. Now you have words on the page, go explore: why are we hearing these sounds, and why are your characters responding this way?
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Starting from a soundscape
When learning to write radio plays, it’s very helpful to try out some recording yourself. Take out a very simple recording device (if you’ve made it into the 21st century your mobile phone will almost certainly do the trick) and go record a couple of soundscapes. A soundscape can be anything you like: a busy road, a field full of sheep, yourself walking down the stairs – just go somewhere and record for a minute or two.
One you have some recordings, pick one and write a description of what you hear. Then, as soon as the description is done, write your first line of dialogue. This line will inevitably stem from the soundscape–and there you have the starting point for your play. Why is your character where they are? What are they doing? And why did they say what they said?
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Linking sound to conflict
This is very similar to the first call and response exercise but drives you straight into conflict–so can be an easier way to get stuck into the action. Do your mind map of sounds and pick one just like before. Write your first sound effect. This sound, for some reason, is either very good or very bad for character A, and you will now write a line of dialogue that reflects this. Now repeat the sound, but this time it is character B who speaks and in doing so tells a blatant lie about the sound–a lie that is harmful to A. From there, to borrow the mathematical parlance, resolve for A.
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Plays in the dark
This is a different approach to the three precedent, designed for writers who have a very visual approach (often, for example, film directors will write like this.) The key to the exercise is to set your play up in such a way that visuals are useless. The most obvious (and one with endless potential) is to write a play set in the dark. Alternatively, you could have a play that takes place over CB radio calls, or a conversation between toilet cubicles, or anything where the characters cannot see each other. This forces you to move from the visual to the aural: an essential component of a radio play.
It’s as easy as that!
That’s it, Keith’s quick guide to writing a short radio play. There are as many ways to write as there are writers, so the crucial bit is to take whatever was useful and do whatever it takes to keep writing. Most of all, have fun, don’t be intimidated and don’t quit. Radio is perhaps the freest form of group performance. Take advantage of that freedom to write something amazing.
