Module 2: great story

AUDIO TUTORIAL TRANSCRIPT

Nate: Hey everyone. I'm Nate Davis, Shelter in Place’s creative director. I’m mostly behind the scenes rather than behind the microphone.  For many years. I worked in advertising, and my standing joke was that Laura was the “real writer” — I was just the ad guy. Laura wrote stories and novels; I just wrote things to get people to buy stuff. 

Partly this joke was self-deprecating humor; partly it was me raising an eyebrow at a society that would value advertising more than literary fiction. But underneath all that, I think a part of me didn’t really believe I was a storyteller. Didn’t really want to aspire to that. Didn’t want to admit that maybe I’d compromised my dreams of being a capital-W Writer by going into the persuasion business. 

Laura: The irony in all of this, of course, is that Nate was winning awards for his writing long before I was. When I met Nate more than twenty years ago, I was a little intimidated by his writing skills. While I was still applying for grad schools and wondering if I had what it took to be a writer, he was completing portfolio school and winning a Mercury Radio Award for an ad he’d written as a student. Here’s the ad that Nate wrote that won that award:

{Can Karma}

Laura: We wanted to start here with this module on Great Story because great stories can happen in all kinds of places. They can be in books or movies or plays or podcast episodes, but they can also be in soundscapes and conversations and yes, even in advertisements like the one you just heard.

Each and every module includes exercises and tools to help you build your own podcast—but we’ll also continually be calling you back to the big picture of the creative life, that why create question we asked you in module one, because we’ve found that whether we’re writing podcast episodes or short stories or personal essays or ads, if we know how to answer that question, all of our work will point us in the direction of that bigger goal—even if the path to get there takes some twists and turns.

We’ll give you the big picture or macro view, and then we’ll zoom in close to help you identify the pieces you need to put together your own project.

In this case, that big picture is story.

Nate: So what are the universal elements of a great story? Or put another way, in podcasting, what are the things that make a listener want to keep listening? What pulls you through as you are creating? 

Laura: At Shelter in Place, we’ve done stories about artists, doctors, musicians, educators, scientists, and theologians. We’ve covered topics ranging from vaccine hesitancy to poetry to mental health to death positivity to dancing. Our episodes have ranged from a montage of voices to just me. The thruline in each and every episode is story.

Put another way, in every single episode, you’ll always find four key elements: conflict, character, setting, and resolution. 

First, conflict. This is where it all begins. It’s what will pull your listeners in, and makes them want to keep listening. It’s the problem you need to solve. It’s what will keep you interested and working when the work starts to feel hard or unwieldy. It’s your why create, but on a smaller scale. We’ll revisit those other elements of great story—character, setting, and resolution—but we’re spending the most time in this module looking at conflict, because as screenwriting guru Robert McKee says, “no conflict, no story.” 
Why does this particular episode need to exist? What’s the conflict you’re hoping to resolve? What makes you curious enough to devote hours or even days or weeks or months to this particular idea? 

These and other questions are ones that you'll find in this week's exercise for building your own podcast, because we know that sometimes it takes asking the question in different ways to get to the heart of your central conflict.

It’s important to note that conflict can be big and dramatic, a cliffhanger moment that has you on the edge of your seat. But it can also be quiet and understated. Maybe it’s a situation that has bothered you for a long time, but you don’t yet fully understand why. Maybe it’s something you’re curious about, that you find yourself thinking about when you fall asleep at night. Maybe it’s the creeping sense that the way things are is not the way they should be—and that there might be a solution that would change that.

Jeremy Enns is a podcaster friend of mine who has some wonderful courses of his own that are complementary to this one. You’ll hear more about him in future modules.

Jeremy talks about the elements of story in a way that I find extremely helpful. He says that every podcast episode needs to hook, engage, and invite. I love this, because it reminds me to put the conflict up front, and then follow it with enough tension or suspense or intrigue to engage my listeners and make them want to keep listening, and then finally invite them into something. We’ll get to that in a minute with resolution. But first, I want to share with you a few different ways that we’ve approached that hook part of hook, engage, and invite here at Shelter in Place.

Your hook can be as simple as you greeting your listeners and telling them what’s coming. You can tell them up front what they’re going to get. Here’s one example of that:

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.” 

“Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” 

“I’ve been searching for ways to heal myself, and I’ve found that kindness is the best way.”

“Kindness. It’s such a small thing, but it can make a huge difference.” 

Those statements came from the Jewish theologian and rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the American author Henry James, the Dalai Lama, and Lady Gaga, respectively.

This past week I revisited one of our earliest episodes from season 1, the Surprising Power of Kindness. Even though a lot has changed since then, some of the ideas that helped me most in those early days of the pandemic are helping me still. So today, I want to revisit that episode, with a few additions and updates.

It’s important to note that conflict doesn’t have to be big. It just needs to present a problem to solve. It can be quiet, like our collective need for rest in a frenetic world.

In the example you just heard, which was from “Kindness Revisited,” a rerelease of a season 1 episode that was all about the ways that being kind is actually good for our health, the conflict wasn’t big and dramatic. 

If you dig a little, the conflict in this episode—or the problem to solve—is that many of us are lonely or unhappy or discontent. But we never state that outright. Instead the conflict was presented as something to be curious about, a rabbit trail to follow.

If your episode includes an interview, you can start with a bit of interview tape that either piques their curiosity or puts the conflict front and center. 

Melissa: My dad gave me the paper. It felt like this slip of paper was the key to a part of my identity I didn’t even know I had. 

And I lost it.

That came from an episode called Hyphenated Identity, which was Melissa Lent’s story of reconnecting with her the Chinese part of her Chinese-Dominican-American identity in the wake of Asian hate crimes.

You can also drop your listeners into your conflict by telling them a story that introduces the conflict.

Here’s the opening to an episode called Stuck on the Staircase:

Laura: It was a Christmas party straight out of the movies: lots of guests in fancy dresses and tuxes, a string quartet, and even waiters offering hors d'oeuvres. My family was there, and all of my friends were there too, toasting each other with glasses of champagne. But while my loved ones were celebrating, I was in the corner of the room talking with a freelance client, who was asking me to complete her project by 5 p.m. that same day—even though it was Christmas Eve. 

This was the dream I startled awake from at 5 a.m. this past Saturday. After I got over the initial relief that no one was asking me to work on Christmas and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I got up and decided I might as well get that freelance work done.

I used to have these kinds of dreams all the time, back when I was a collegiate coach regularly working overtime. I’d wake up feeling resentful that even in sleep I was working. What puzzled me about this dream was that my life now is nothing like it was then. Yes, I’m tired a lot, and working too much, and still doing those freelance jobs to pay the bills, but I’m choosing this work in a way I wasn’t able to back then. I feel more certain than ever before that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. There was also this fascinating little detail: I was anxious about my deadline, but at the same time, a part of me was still enjoying the party. 

Psychologists say that one of the best ways to begin to deal with negative emotions is to name them, and it turns out that there’s a word for what I was feeling in my dream: “languishing.” 

One of the exercises you’ll see in this week’s module is to write a scene that drops you into the conflict you’ll be exploring in your episode. It’s an exercise we use often, and one I used in the audio clip you just heard.

So why this scene and this tone? 

Stuck on the Staircase is an episode all about languishing. The conflict in this episode is this: many of us are struggling. We’re feeling worn down by life and the pandemic and there are no easy answers. The character in this case is me, and as the episode continues, it’s also all of us who are languishing. The resolution comes toward the end of the episode, not a neat and tidy ending, but an a nod to the research developing a beginner’s mindset 

Finding my conflict for this episode was the easy part, and I had a hunch that this conflict would resonate with a lot of our listeners. But figuring out how to set that conflict up—how to provide that hook—was harder, because as I was writing, I was languishing. My first attempts at writing the episode were so heavy that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to keep listening. 

Then one night I was gifted with this stress dream that I found kind of funny, but that was also kind of perfect for the episode. Sometimes your subconscious will do that for you when you’re working on a script and you’re feeling stumped. I got up, wrote my dream, and suddenly I had a way to hook my listener that was fun, engaging, and had enough of the central conflict to make people wonder what was going to happen next. 

The engage part of hook, engage, invite came with a bit of research and a definition of the term languishing, which then led into the rest of the episode and the larger story of my own languishing even as I saw our world languishing around me. I’ll bring you back into the tail end of that hook so you can hear how it leads from hook to engage.

Psychologists say that one of the best ways to begin to deal with negative emotions is to name them, and it turns out that there’s a word for what I was feeling in my dream: “languishing.” 

Sociologist Corey Keyes coined the term back in 2002 to identify the “state of being characterized by generally disinterested or dreary affect, minimal goal-seeking behaviors, and the perception of poor social support systems.” Keyes saw languishing as a point on a continuum of mental health, with flourishing at the opposite end. You’re not depressed, but you’re also not thriving.

Sometimes your hook can come through a scene in your interview tape. I’ll often ask questions in interviews that are likely to prompt my guest to tell me a story because it’s a great way to not only understand the history that shaped the person you’re talking to, but it gives you some fantastic interview tape to work with to set up your episode. 

Here’s an example of this in an episode we did called What You Make of It. It’s an interview with Justin McRoberts, who among other things is a singer-songwriter, author, coach, and for a time, a pastor of a church. What you’re about to hear was his response when I asked him to tell me when he first started to see himself as an artist. We used sound effects and music to bring that scene to life and set the tone for who Justin was as a character in the episode.

Justin: It starts as a high school kid. I'm in a speech class with Mr. Ross. I'm talking to the kid behind me and he says, “Mr. McRoberts,” and I walk towards the front of the classroom.  And he goes to this prop closet, opens it up, and he has this large inflated cactus, and he sets it down next to me. And then he walks out and sits down in my desk. He says, “okay, Mr. McRoberts, you clearly like to entertain. The floor's yours for five minutes.” And I was frozen. I don't know how long I was standing there with nothing to say. The kid goes, “Oh gosh, come on. Just pretend like you're in the desert. It's just a cactus.” And Mr. Ross says, right to me, he says, “no, it's not. It's whatever you make it.” 

And that little seed got in my head. I transitioned to theater. Performance became something more than communication. Seth Godin says that art is anything you create that facilitates connection between people. It was never about theater in and of itself. It was about connection. It was about how do I use the gifts, the talents, the strengths and whatever I have in me to form connections with people?

In both of these examples, you’re being dropped into a scene. One was a scene I wrote to fit the episode. The other was from interview tape. In both cases, the tone of these scenes was extremely light-hearted and fun, and in both cases, the episode topics themselves were extremely heavy. What You Make of It was about the history of the church and the LGBTQ+ community, and Justin talks about his father’s suicide and the grief he still feels over his church community splitting up. We included a trigger warning in this episode because we wanted our listeners to not feel blindsided, but the decision to start in such a lighthearted way was intentional, because Justin’s story is an important one. He’s attempting to sort through the more complicated nuances of church history on this particular issue without offering pat answers. 

What you use as a hook for your episodes is entirely up to you. The list of examples I gave you just now are by no means exhaustive. But as you’re working on your own podcast, I encourage you to think about how you might use these examples as jumping off points.

Is there a scene you can create to draw your listener in?
A bit of interview tape to pique their curiosity and give them a glimpse of who this character is?
A story you can tell that leads them into the conflict or introduces them to the characters or the setting where the conflict is taking place?

Or maybe this is a situation where you can just say: this is the thing we’ll be talking about in this episode, and here’s why I can’t stop thinking about it.

Nate: One of the exercises you’ll find in this module is called ”Person in Hole.”  We learned about it from Kurt Vonnegut, and we’ve included the video of him talking about it in this module’s further reflections, though he calls it “man in hole” because, you know, this was back in the ‘60s. 

Anyway, just picture a stick figure. That’s your character. It may appear that they’re just floating in space, but they’re in a place and time. That’s your setting. (Unless, of course, it’s an astronaut story, in which case they can still be floating in space.) They’re walking through life, so draw a line going forward. Then oh no! They fall in a hole! That’s your conflict. So draw the line going down. But hooray! Somehow they figure out how to get out of the hole, so draw the line going back up. That’s your resolution! Simple as that. 

So for this week’s module, one of the exercises is to start sketching out one of your episodes, according to the “person in hole” diagram: character, setting, conflict, and resolution. As usual, we’ll put a Google form on the website in case it’s helpful for you to work that way, but again, this is such a simple structure that you can do it with a pencil and paper, or walking around the block recording a voice memo on your phone. 

The beauty of the “person in hole” story structure is that it's simple enough to imagine and sketch out in about one minute, but you can map it to everything from a Disney movie like Encanto, to Harry Potter, Empire Strikes Back, even to Breaking Bad. 

Laura: Once you have your conflict—your hole to get out of—you have the beginnings of the story you’re going to tell. That may be enough to get you going to write that first draft, and I would encourage you to try even if your ideas are still fuzzy. 

The next element you can think about is character. Are you a character in this story? If so, how involved are you?

Who are the other characters? Why are you including them? What defines them? Are there things they say that make them unique? What is fascinating about them that your listeners will find fascinating too? What can you find to love about them even if you disagree with them? How can you celebrate them through the moments you’re revealing of them or their work?

We’ll talk more about setting in our sound design module, but for now simply think about where this story takes place. Is it important that it’s tied to one geographical location? Where are you or your characters as you’re telling it? Is this a story where the setting changes not just through location, but time?

And finally, what’s your resolution? This is where you return to the original conflict or tension and give us some sort of satisfying ending. It could be a call to action. It could be an epiphany. But it could also be very small, just a subtle shift that changes your perspective or challenges you to think about your problem a little differently. 

And by the way, these elements of story don’t just apply to narrative episodes or even just to scriptwriting. They can shape the way you conduct and edit interviews, the way you do sound design, and the way you structure your podcast episodes or even entire seasons.

Nate: Whether or not we call ourselves storytellers or writers, we are all the central characters in our own stories, the people who are facing conflict and living with tension, trying to grapple our way toward some sort of resolution we can live with.

You’ve probably noticed by now that each module includes suggestions for further growth. Sometimes these are podcast episodes to listen to or videos you can find online. Other times they’re books that have influenced us, that we value enough to recommend them to you. One of those recommendations this week is the book Story by screenwriting guru Robert McKee. He’s thinking about stories cinematically, but most of what he’s teaching applies to audio stories, too. 

McKee says that stories are one of the fundamental ways that human beings have always sought to find meaning in their lives. Whether you’re talking about ancient cultures explaining the origins of the world as deities fighting, or your friend recounting what they learned from a Tinder hookup that turned awkward, stories are the way that we make sense of all the random, unpredictable, and unsatisfying aspects of life. 

McKee also notes that “stories are the currency of human relationships.” To know someone well is to know the stories that define the key events of their life: how they crashed their first car, how they met their future spouse when a trip got delayed by a plane’s engine trouble, how their son was born by emergency c-section (to use three examples from my own life)! 

The epiphany I had recently is that even though I didn’t consider myself a “real” writer for a very long time, all of the major landmarks of my writing career have been about stories. 

When I was a nerdy eleven-year-old home schooler in Massachusetts, for a town essay contest on colonial history, instead of doing the typical five-paragraph exposition, I wrote mine in the form of journal entries from a member of the 1787 expedition. In college, for an essay contest about Margaret Thatcher, instead of a thesis-driven discussion of politics, I riffed on George Orwell’s 1984, imagining a dystopian alternate reality in which Lady Thatcher had never been prime minister. And then in portfolio school, to promote recycling, I wrote that radio ad you heard from the perspective of an aluminum soda can. 

I somewhat dismissed my abilities as a “real writer.” So if you’re coming to this course with some hesitation or uncertainty about storytelling, I can relate! And I can also say that the elements of an effective story can be learned.

To quote Robert McKee again, “The mark of a master is to select only a few moments but give us a lifetime.” So in this module, you’ll practice honing your skill in selecting those moments, based on these simple structures, and be able to build your own memorable audio stories.

Laura: Once you start thinking in terms of story, you realize that there are stories all around you. That life is a story. We may think that statistics or facts are what we need—and often we do need them—but stories tether us to real human experience. At its best, a story can challenge and change us.