Last week, I was on a conference call with a client. I’ve been working with them for several years on a fairly straightforward interview program, and lately they’ve been wanting to experiment with new formats and new types of storytelling.
When I’ve given presentations about this in the past, I have broken story formats into a number of basic styles. In audio production, whatever you are looking at doing is going to be either a monologue, a dialogue, a magazine, or a montage.
Let me break that down a bit.
Monologue is pretty easy. It’s one voice talking. It’s the easiest to record and the easiest to edit. Once you have figured out controlling the room noise, and the levels, and what you want to say, you’ve got the show.
Dialogue is two voices. Every interview you’ve ever heard, basically. It roughly doubles the work of a monologue. If you record in two rooms, you have to figure out noise control and leveling for both rooms. If you only record in one room, you have to figure out mic bleed and phasing issues. Plus, dialogues are tricky. If they are unscripted, they are a bit uncontrolled. If they are scripted, they risk sounding canned. So, roughly double the work.
If you like NPR, you know magazine shows. All Things Considered and Morning Edition are magazines: they take a bunch of monologues and dialogues and mash them together. Exponentially harder to pull off than a single dialogue, because you have to manage both interior and thematic rhythm and timing.
However, the hardest format of all, in my opinion, is montage.
This is the realm of “narrative newsreporting.” If you have listened to a single segment of a show like This American Life, you have likely heard an example of montage. It’s not a conversation, but rather curated snippets of conversations and interviews, mixed together with musical beds and location audio. Also, these various elements are usually supplemented with narration. All of this blends to create a single experience for the listener, but it is an experience that arises out of the clash and blend of these various elements.
So a show like This American Life is actually a magazine of montages, which is the hardest type of show of all of them to do.
I say all this to give context to me telling you that what the client was seeking to do was to make the jump from a dialogue format to a single-theme montage format.
The jump is very do-able, of course. I’ve been telling stories with this client for three years, and we have a strong working relationship. I trust the staff, and they trust me. We can do this.
But it also means a serious ramp-up of planning and work. To move into montage, you don’t just record moe voices, but now you have to find the rhythms and blendings of those elements. It’s like moving from a solo performance piece into a wind ensemble or a small symphony.
(The great master of this in radio was, ironically, the late pianist Glenn Gould, whose “Solitude Trilogy”—The Idea of North, The Quiet in the Land, and The Latecomers, which he produced for the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Company—is the gold standard of multi-voice montage)
Working with the client on this initial planning call, I made the suggestion that—since we were ramping up the complexity of our undertaking with this episode—we might want to lean into a structure as a way of giving us some scaffolding as we learn how to use this new storytelling format.
This is an old trick, of course. If the outcome is becoming more complex, one way to keep that from overwhelming you is to chunk the whole of it down into smaller parts. Need to write a 60,000-word manuscript? That seems daunting. But if you can chunk it into 12 sets of 5,000-word segments, that might be more manageable.
(I do this all the time in radio. I never think of myself as having to talk with someone for an hour. Instead, I walk into each conversation aware that my show clock can be broken into two seven-minute segments and four ten-minute segments. You can have a good conversation with anyone for ten minutes. So I just keep having really good short conversations with the guest until we’re done.)
Word-counts and duration are certainly reasonable ways to chunk a project done, but they are not the only tools in your kit. You can also lean into story structure itself.
In western culture, of course, stories have certain very dependable aspects to how they unfold and flow. At the most basic level, for it to be a story, the piece in question has to have a beginning, middle, and an end.
If we make that a bit more highfalutin’ and fancy, that becomes a three-act structure—build a world, cause trouble in the world, resolve the trouble.
Another way to chunk down a narrative is to lean into the conflict. Regardless of whether your project is fiction or nonfiction, you aren’t just building a world; you are populating that world. You have characters, and those characters want things, and those desires are going to create conflicts.
So I talked to the client about the fact that, in this montage project we are planning, we are going to have characters. Many will be neutral, and a handful will be our protagonists. The protagonists are the characters who are pushing for a particular change in the world we build. They are the characters the audience is meant to root for. In other words, they are our heroes.
But a story where you have heroes who immediately get what they want is not actually a story. For the narrative to work, the heroes must meet obstacles. There has to be some kind of resistance, and that resistance must be believable.
That means, in addition to your heroes, your story is probably going to have villains.
Now it’s easy to see how this plays out in a Hollywood blockbuster, but if you know how to look for it, you can find this structure operating in most of the media we encounter in our society.
Turn on Fox News in the evening, and look with an eye to structure, and you will see that each evening is a series of programs with clearly-defined heroes and villains. Certain guests and news items play the role of the “obstacles,” and others are the heroes the audience is meant to root for. Just like in professional wrestling.
If you ever get fundraising letters in the mail, you can learn to spot the same dynamics at work. If a nonprofit or a candidate can find some obstacle to success, and put that in the letter to you, they are banking (literally) on pushing that narrative button in you. People love to cheer for heroes, and we especially seem to love a David-and-Goliath type of story, where the little guy gets the best of the giant in the end.
So this is a helpful crutch for storytelling, but lately, I’ve also been thinking more and more about the long-term effects this structure might have on our collective psyche. What is it like for us to be hard-wired to always expect that a story has a villain? What does it do to our relationships, our politics, our morality?
As I guide these clients into telling more complex stories, I find myself thinking more and more about the obligations incumbent on storytellers, not just to do their jobs well, but to think through the implications of the very structures that they use to tall these kinds of complex stories.
As always, I welcome your thoughts, and I as that—if you find these writings valuable—that you please tell other folks about them. Thank you!