S3:E15 transcript // Choose your own (audio) adventure
JANUARY 6, 2022
Episode description: Laura takes us behind the scenes and into the audio expedition that happens every week at Shelter in Place, from initial idea to published episode. There are highs and lows, twists and turns, and finally, the discovery of what makes a story worth telling in the first place.
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Episode transcript:
Laura: When I was a kid, I went through a years-long obsession with Choose Your Own Adventure books. I would read them over and over again until I’d found my way to every ending. I loved the sense of endless possibility, the way I could always start over and try again if I didn’t like where I ended up.
What I didn’t realize then was that those books were actually a pretty good training ground for the adventure I’d end up choosing in life, which has led me to you, today, in this episode right here and now. Those books taught me to approach stories with a wide open imagination, to consider many possible plot points, to look out for trick endings and looped stories and to remember that no matter how hopeless things might sometimes seem, there is always another way to end
It’s been decades since I read those books. My kids are still a little too young to appreciate them, and until recently, I forgot about them. MFA workshops and sending my writing to agents and editors or submitting it for grants or publications taught me to be careful with my creativity, to strive for perfection before I even let it out the door. I learned to expect rejection as the likely possible outcome, tried to toughen myself against life’s harsh realities.
When the occasional good news would break through, I’d celebrate—but the very next day I’d have my guard up once again. I spent most of my adult life in this particular pattern. I never quite developed thick skin, but when it came to creativity, I learned to hold onto hope loosely. Then on March 17, 2020, I started Shelter in Place and stepped into an adventure I hadn’t even known I was looking for.
From the start, podcasting was different—maybe because in the beginning at least, I wasn’t all that concerned with the outcome. I approached each episode a lot like I did those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I knew I’d hit some dead ends and make mistakes that I’d have to figure out how to fix. But especially in that first season, when I was creating episodes daily, I didn’t have time to overthink it. I had to get the work out as fast as I was creating it. Every episode was like jumping off a cliff, learning to trust that I’d land. Some days I got a little beat up from the fall, but that was okay, because the next day there was another cliff, another creative experiment, another adventure to choose. After a while I learned how to loosen up even as I fell. I became a little kinder to myself, a little less precious about my work, a little more forgiving when I screwed up.
After a lifetime of creative paralysis, it felt like a revelation to realize that the process itself could be so much fun, that even when it’s hard, it’s still an adventure.
It was still thrilling nearly a year later, when my husband Nate and I began our Kasama Collective training intensive as a way to share that epiphany with others.
We wanted to invite our trainees into the creative process and teach them how to create a podcast episode from start to finish—but without having to wade through the tome of the creative life that we’d both already been in for thousands of pages. We wanted to fast track them to the good stuff I’d learned from my MFA program, a Fulbright scholarship, a hundred daily episodes, a dozen years of coaching, and many, many hopes dashed on the rocks of rejection. Nate wanted to pass along the best parts of what he’d learned from twenty years in advertising—everything from the Mercury Radio Award he won before he’d even finished portfolio school to the inevitable layoffs when the economy was bad. We knew that we couldn’t prevent the dead ends and false endings entirely, but we could offer a distilled version of what it had taken us decades to learn, and even add in the resume and job interview coaching Nate was trained to do with the skills I’d developed as a collegiate coach in helping people to realize their potential. We rolled all of that up into a Choose Your Own Audio Adventure we called the Kasama Collective.
It’s been a wild ride, and one of the very best parts of this adventure has been getting to know our Kasama Collective graduates. Just this week our alums met for their monthly video chat, and it was like gathering with old friends, because in creative time, we are old friends. We’ve lived a lot of the creative life together.
But it also occurred to me recently that most of the adventure we’ve been having has happened behind closed doors. Even our most dedicated listeners only have a hint of an idea of what goes into each of these episodes.
So today, I want to invite you to step into an adventure we’ve created just for you. You don’t have to be a podcaster to enjoy it, or even a storyteller. The only requirement is that you’re human. If you’re listening and you are not human, I’m sorry. This episode is not for you.
For the rest of you, let’s get this adventure started. Every good story starts with a character, and in this story, that character is you. You have this whole year before you. Maybe you’ve already cooked up plans to take over the world. Or maybe you were feeling worn out before this year even started. Either way, it’s okay. There’s no packing list for this adventure, no advance prep needed. The one thing you must have for this adventure is something you already have: curiosity.
So let’s get curious together about what is going to happen next.
There are three doors before you with three different answers to this question: why create?
This is the first question we ask in each and every Shelter in Place episode, the first question we ask our Kasama Collective trainees. Find your “why” and the who, what, when, where, and how will come.
Or put another way, why work? Why make stuff? Why wake up this morning or any other? What keeps you going when life gets hard?
If this is all getting a bit too existential for you, then let me kindly suggest that how deep you go into this journey is entirely up to you. No one will force you to bear your soul. It is possible to float along on the surface of life, to live walled up and protected from creativity so you don’t feel a thing. But if you’re willing to take a chance, to trust this process, you will likely get some scrapes and bruises along the way—but you’ll also find yourself on an adventure. You might find community with both strangers and friends. You might see a dormant part of yourself come alive. You may even discover a whole version of yourself just waiting to be unlocked.
To continue your adventure, you must choose one of the following options for why you will create this story. You look at the three doors, and see that each of the doors has a sign.
On door A: you are creating to answer a very specific question that has been bothering you for a long time.
On door B: you are creating because you want to bring healing to a topic or situation that has been a source of pain, either personally or globally.
And then there’s this on door C: You create to have a rollicking good time.
You choose C. How can you pass that up?
At least for today, you’re creating because it’s fun. Because you like how you feel when you make stuff, and you feel curious enough in this particular moment to see where this will take you.
You step through the door and immediately find yourself in a dance party with every fun person you’ve ever known. There’s your kindergarten teacher who always made the class laugh, and your weird uncle who had the best jokes, and your college roommate who always had the best Halloween costumes, and even your dog (not technically a person, but man, that dog was fun). There are people you’ve forgotten you knew, people you’ve never met but admire. It’s like all the fun in the world came together in this one place, just waiting for you to enjoy it.
You dance for a few songs, and it’s great, but you can feel a slow resistance creeping in. You start to wonder if people are looking at you, to feel a little insecure about your moves. You thought you just came here to have a good time, but the thing about adventures is that they’re only adventures when we keep moving through them.
In a book, or a movie, or a podcast episode, or a life, there has to be something that pulls us through the story, that makes us curious about what happens next. In storytelling terms, that reason can be summed up in a single word: conflict. Conflict creates the tension that makes us want to keep going. It gives our brains a problem to solve.
As screenwriting guru Robert McKee says, “no conflict, no story.”
This is something we think about in each and every episode of Shelter in Place. As soon as we’ve asked the question of why we’re creating a particular episode, we’re immediately asking that next question of why people should keep listening. What’s the conflict? What’s the problem to solve? Why does this episode need to exist? Why is this the adventure we want to choose when there are so many others out there?
At this point, you’re feeling a little grumpy. After all, you came here to have fun. It’s a little annoying that you can’t just stay in the warm happy glow of the dance party. But deep down you also know that the real story isn’t in this room. You’re already feeling the pull of your next adventure, and truth be told, it doesn’t feel great. Conflict usually doesn't feel good. But it does make life interesting.
You make your way to the edge of the room, to a hallway so long that you can’t see the end of it. Along the walls of this hallway are doors so short that you have to bend down to open them. Each squat door has a name inscribed on it, one for each person in the room behind you: there’s your kindergarten teacher, your uncle, even your dog. Upon closer inspection you notice the fine print beneath each of those names and a unifying theme emerges: every name on those doors has one thing in common: they’re lives have not been easy—but somehow they’ve lived them joyfully anyway. In fact, it’s been that contrast between laughter and pain that has often made these people (and one very funny animal) seem so special. You had no idea that the kindergarten teacher who made you laugh was secretly a standup comedian, who somehow managed to make even the divorce she was going through hilarious. The uncle you loved so much, who could make you laugh harder than anyone you’ve ever known, eventually died of cancer. Even that awesome dog who looked like he was always smiling had only three legs when you got him from the pound.
Well that escalated quickly! Wasn’t this supposed to be an episode about fun?
Once again, you have options: option A. You could go back to the party and dance away all the tension you’re feeling. That might actually be a really good idea. I recently started doing Zumba with Making Waves Studios, and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made all year (and yes, I will include a link to their online classes in our show notes for today).
But there’s also Option B: you could get down on your hands and knees and crawl into one of these hobbit hole doors. In this audio adventure, this means stepping into the story of whoever the door is for, sitting down with that person—or animal—and asking them about their life so you can really understand how they’re able to laugh even when life gets hard.
When we’re making episodes here at Shelter in Place, we often build our episodes get built around conversations we have with people who inspire us, or who help us explore our curiosity about some conflict or problem we want to resolve. It can be a wonderful way to create, to spotlight someone who is doing something worth sharing, a chance to celebrate the people and ideas that represent humanity at its best.
But there’s also a third option, one you didn’t notice right away. You let yourself drift down the hallway of doors until you see a name you know well: yours. When you creak it open and look inside, all you see is darkness.
Each time I write a script for a Shelter in Place episode—or guide one of our trainees through that process—there comes a point where we have to decide if things are going to get personal. When I was creating daily episodes in season one, I was only a few days in before I was confronted with the question of how much I was going to share. I’d resisted memoir all my life because I didn’t think my story was interesting enough to tell. Looking back now, I think my real reasons for resistance had more to do with not wanting to be vulnerable. It was scary to put myself out there, to admit that I had opinions and insecurities and that I often made mistakes. I knew I could present a polished, curated version of myself, but at that point in the pandemic—at that point in my life—I was too tired to pretend I had it all together. With each day that passed, it seemed like another piece of the foundation I’d built my life on was crumbling away. What was left was me: a flawed, fragile, human being who was working hard to find hope even on the days when it was hard to come by. As scared as I was to put my real self out there, it also felt like a relief to stop pretending. And so I took a big breath, opened that door, and stepped inside.
In our work with our Kasama Collective trainees, this is a crucial plot point that determines the rest of the journey. We’ve had a couple of people who have gotten to this point and slammed that door shut. But those who step inside and leap into the abyss discover that the world is bigger and kinder than they thought it was.
A few of them discover that even what they thought were weaknesses are actually their superpowers, because the greatest gift we can offer to the world is, in fact, ourselves.
Before you can second-guess yourself, you scoot yourself through your hobbit hold door and leap out into the darkness. You feel yourself falling, wind rushing past you, the party far behind you as you drop.
And then at last you hit something soft, like falling in a great giant pillow, and the darkness falls away and in its place mountains and trees and a wide blue sky surge up all around you.
The scene around you triggers an instant memory. It’s been years since you were here, but you know where you are: Montana, on a trail that leads up to the summit of Mount Baldy, with your family and your middle school best friend beside you.
You’ve packed sandwiches and snacks and plenty of water, and your dad has a topo map that shows the mountain’s summit at 8,000 feet, but it’s a hike none of you has done before, and the collective fitness level of the group is moderate at best, and you will hike 20 miles round trip by the time this day is over.
One of the exercises we use often at Shelter in Place is to think about our episodes in scenes. Once we identify the central conflict of the story we’re telling, we try to find our way to the scene that embodies that conflict. Sometimes we hike our way in, noticing the stream and the mountains and the big sky. Other times we drop our listener right into the middle of the action. The places our brain takes us when we’re open and curious can often give us great insights into the conflicts that give us the most trouble. If we’re willing to sit with them, we may even learn something new.
At the point when you step into this scene, you’ve lost the trail hours ago and have already spent over an hour bushwhacking through the weeds. Your legs are covered in scratches and your hiking boots are wet from when your foot slipped off the log you were crossing and into the stream below.
As you walk along the dusty Montana trail, you remember that you came here in pursuit of fun—and you feel tricked that you thought was going to be fun. Because the worst part of this memory isn’t the scratches or scrapes or wet feet. It isn’t the twenty mile hike or trekking home in the dark. It’s the moment when your friend turns to you and says, “you’re so serious. You don’t even know how to have fun.”
Even though this was decades ago and you can’t even remember the last time you spoke to that best friend—who clearly was not destined to remain your best friend forever—you still remember how much it hurt to hear her say that, how it colored the way you saw yourself many years later, how it made you doubt yourself even in that dance party. You look over your shoulder and see the darkness you emerged from. Then you look ahead at the trail ahead of you that is climbing steeply uphill. Once again, you have a choice:
You can scrap the whole thing and give up on this adventure. You didn’t sign up for this!
You can keep hiking and see where the trail takes you.
You can return to the dance party. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun?
For reasons you can’t fully articulate, you choose option B. You keep hiking. Maybe it’s because you can’t help but appreciate the beauty around you, or because a part of you is genuinely curious about what comes next. As you walk, you begin to understand why your subconscious has led you to this point. There’s another part of this memory you’d forgotten. After the scrapes and wet boots and bushwacking and whining you and your siblings and even your grumpy friend start to get punchy. You start speaking in British accents. You pretend that you’re hobbits journeying through Mordor in Lord of the Rings. The whole thing gets very silly, and by the time you’re climbing up the final switchbacks of shale your legs are tired and your ego is bruised and you’re still mad at your friend and you are very, very thirsty—but you’re also having a really great time.
And then you reach Big Baldy’s summit, and it’s like walking on the sky to see all that blue. No one is complaining anymore. Your friend has tears in her eyes. She says she’s sorry for what she said. And perhaps most miraculous of all, you forgive her.
In every episode of Shelter in Place, we get to this point eventually, this connection to the deeper humanity that ties us all together. It isn’t neat and tidy—because life rarely is—but it’s the resolution we need to our conflict, the moment that reminds us that however hard things have gotten or how divided our world seems, there’s always another way to end this story.
Sometimes we draw from research to see what the experts say about this tender part of life we’re digging into. Sometimes we bring in the voices of those experts themselves. But always there is a movement to bring people together, to find a way to hold the paradox that is living: We long to be united, and yet we find it impossible not to disagree. We hurt each other and we love each other, sometimes in the very same moment.
You could take the same trail back down, but instead you explore the summit’s wide flat top until you see a trail snaking along the edge of a cliff with a series of caves. Each cave has a stone stairway leading deep underground, and as with the doors, you can’t see what’s below. You could stay up here on the summit—you’re enjoying yourself now more than before—but your curiosity leads you down the first staircase, into a cavernous hall below, where you hear your friend’s voice—not the teenage version of herself, but the adult she’s grown up to be.
At last you reach a small candlelit room, but where you expect to see your friend there is just a rough blue stone that glows with each word she speaks. The sound echoes off the walls and hisses with static, but when you reach for the stone and polish it with your shirt, the sound gets clearer. You pick up the glowing blue orb and pull a handkerchief out of your pocket and begin polishing. What was echoey, choppy audio becomes gradually clearer. You’ve broken a sweat by the time you get the stone polished to a shine, but at last you can hear this adult version of your friend clearly.
She says that she remembers that day well, that it was a terrible hike. She had horrible blisters and she was out of shape and she got sunburnt and a week before that trip her grandpa had just died. She says, “I remember that we had an argument, and I told you that you were no fun. I think I said that because it was how I was feeling about myself at the time. But it was you who ultimately got me out of that. For years afterward I would do British accents whenever I was feeling sad. It got me really curious about why being silly made me feel so much better. I was still thinking about it years later, when I was studying the neuroscience of playfulness and laughter in one of my college classes. I ended up getting a job at a non-profit dedicated to the science of laughter. I’m still working there today.”
The light from the blue stone fades, and you notice for the first time that there are other stairways in the corners of the room. From each of them you hear the echoes of sound. It takes you a moment to realize that the voices you’re hearing down those stairwells are all yours, but they’re not all the same. In one stairwell your voice is as echoey as your friend’s. In another there are the sounds of traffic competing with your voice. At last you reach a stairwell where your voice is clear and so quiet that it feels like it’s coming through headphones. You creep down the stairwell into a tiny carpeted room with what looks like velvet curtains and pillows all around you. There’s a single microphone in the middle of what looks like a child’s blanket fort.
“Sometimes we have to get rid of all of the echo before we can hear things clearly,” you hear yourself say. “Sometimes we have to be still long enough to know what to say.”
At this point, you think your adventure is over. You’ve made it to the summit, your friend has said she’s sorry, all is forgiven. You’ve even started digging into neuroscience of this moment, understanding how having fun and giving ourselves permission to be silly can make us happier and healthier.
But just when you’re about to look for an exit to the deep cave you’ve descended into, you see at the edge of the tiny room what looks like a wine cellar, with racks of dark green bottles stacked from ceiling to floor. Each of them is loosely corked, and the dark glass glitters with light that seems to come from the inside.
You uncork the first bottle, and a rush of sound pours out so strong that it makes you jump. You realize it’s the soundtrack to the scene you’re in, the story that can be told through music and sound effects. You put the cork back in the first bottle and try the next. Same scene, different story. You try a third, which makes you laugh. A fourth, which you dislike immediately because it makes your story seem cheesy. And then there’s the fifth one, which you realize has been there all along in the background, just waiting for you to notice it.
Obviously I’ve taken some liberties in dramatizing the process we go through in each episode in an effort to bring you inside the brainstorming, scriptwriting, interviewing, audio editing, VoiceOver, and sound design that goes into each episode of Shelter in Place. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey, that maybe you even had some of that fun you were after.
I’ve often found comfort in stories, both in writing and in life, because when I choose to look at my life as a series of adventures, the same conflicts that feel overwhelming and depressing suddenly become interesting plot points, just another creative problem to solve. It helps me to remember to talk less and listen more, to observe what even the quiet moments of life can teach me. It reminds me that no matter how difficult or discouraging life gets, I’m never truly without a choice.
Getting to invite our Kasama Collective trainees on this adventure has been one of the best experiences of my life. It’s reminded me of how much we have to offer each other, no matter where we’ve been before.
But for a long time now, I’ve wanted a way to invite others into this adventure, to make it available to people who don’t have the time to dedicate to a semester-long live intensive, but who still want to learn how to put a podcast together from start to finish, to ask all of those creative questions that can tell us so much about ourselves.
So today, I want to invite you into a brand new adventure called the Kasama Labs, where we help you master the art and science of narrative podcasting, one creative experiment at a time.
Over the course of sixteen weeks, we give you a complete tool set to launch your own podcast that includes all of the adventures you’ve heard in this episode, including scriptwriting, audio editing, interviewing, VoiceOver, and sound design, and also the creative habits to help you find your answer to why you create.
The course is self-paced, designed flexible for busy people, less like a traditional classroom and more like a choose-your-own adventure. We’ve deconstructed the podcast production process for you and are giving it back to you in manageable chunks, so that you can emerge not just with a finished pilot episode for a podcast, but a vision for where you’re headed next.
We’ve intentionally designed the course to be something you can come back to again and again with new projects, a lab where all creative experiments are welcome, but with enough structure to get you unstuck when you can’t figure out which adventure to choose next.
The course begins the first week of February and spots are limited, so head to our website shelterinplacepodcast.org, to get our early bird price, which we’re extending through January 21. You can preview all sixteen modules on our website, and see testimonials from our Kasama Collective graduates, who have been through many of these modules themselves.
Whether we see you in our Kasama Labs or in our next episode, we hope you’ll stay with us on this journey. Your next adventure is right there waiting for you to choose it.
Kasama Labs ad:
If you’re a writer who’d like to start podcasting or a podcaster who wants to master the art and science of narrative podcasting, I want to let you know about our Kasama Labs. The Kasama Labs is a self-paced course where we pull back the curtain on how we became an award-winning podcast in the top 1% globally, and then give you a complete toolset to create your own narrative podcast, including in-depth instruction on audio editing, scriptwriting, interviewing, sound design, voiceover—and most importantly, finding your why. You can sign up and find previews for all sixteen modules at shelterinplacepodcast.org.
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Support Credits:
Shelter in Place is listener-supported. If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including Kasama Collective, our training program closing the gender and equity gap in podcasting, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.org. If you’d like to help us but can’t donate, asking your friends and loved ones to subscribe to Shelter in Place helps find us sponsors and expands our community.
End Credits:
The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and Melissa Lent is our project manager. Until next week, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis. And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.