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The Text

For convenience, I am here addressing the radio theater writer, but I don't mean to suggest that producers, directors, and talent should skip this information. The issues covered here bear upon all creative contributors to audio drama. While writing ability is not required of producers, directors and actors, playwrighting lore is. They must analyze or edit scripts as part of their jobs. Analyzing the script to uncover its values and requirements is their first step of preparation.

In passing, it is worth noting that the converse is true, too. To best understand their job, writers should act, produce, and direct. Greek tragedians directed, scored and choreographed their own plays. Two of Europe's greatest playwrights, Shakespeare and Molière, were actors. The two most famous radio dramatists of the Golden Age, Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler, produced, directed, and performed as well as wrote. Three of the most noteworthy American radio dramatists of recent years — Marjorie Van Haltern, Erik Bauersfeld, and Tom Lopez — produce and direct their own writings. Erik, our better known colleague David Ossman, and I are professional actors. You are writing for performance, which you can't fully understand unless you experience it.

Plays show characters talking and performing actions. The dialogue and actions are not random, but are connected and lead to something. Your task as script writer is to draw believable and interesting characters, give them suitable dialogue, and shape their words and deeds into a plot.

The way you accomplish these tasks depends on the audience you anticipate, the effects you wish to achieve, and the tools of the medium you're writing for. You can draw on any number of devices common to all literature, which are too numerous to discuss here. Other effects such as character, dialogue, structure, and the medium, I will take up more or less in order.

Before doing so, I want to mention two related commonplaces of creative writing bearing upon all facets of playwriting:

Show don't tell. Whatever you want to have emotional impact should be acted out rather than merely spoken about. The audience has difficulty experiencing anything it does not witness. The rule isn't inviolable. Break it if showing the action would:

Never say anything directly that you can say indirectly. This maxim has two applications:

1) Don't gloss your own work. Actions explain themselves. To point a moral in so many words is redundant. Implicit values carry more impact than explicit ones. The audience gains a more personal and intimate appreciation of your play when you let it make its own inferences.

2) At times, the best way to bring ideas home is to express them figuratively — that is, in terms of something else. Tropes (figures of speech) and verbal images are useful for rendering abstractions tangible, drabness colorful, obscurities familiar, and vagueness sharp. The radio dramatist's lexicon defines such common tropes as metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, periphrasis, personification, portmanteau words, simile, symbol, and synecdoche.

Dramatic Writing

Characterization

Characters are created by giving them personalities. It should go without saying that all fictional persons should have personalities. In practice, however, it's easy to neglect supporting and walk-on characters. Performing a play with one or more flat characters is like driving a car with one or more flat tires. Those who dominate the stage should be more fully developed than those who don't, but all deserve attention.

When principals are specimens of i) types, ii) conventional personalities found in nature, or iii) symbolize abstract values — e.g., good and evil — they must still exhibit individuality. Otherwise, they will devolve into hackneyed representations or stereotypes. When characters are insufficiently differentiated, they are said to be one-dimensional. When they seem living, breathing human beings, they are called three-dimensional.

Three-dimensional characters seem full and real. To define characters coherently, you must emphasize or exaggerate some of their traits, suppress or ignore others, and make them more consistent than real-life persons. You cannot hope to shape the complexities and contradictions of truly realistic characters in a few minutes' or a few hours' playing time.

As a practical matter of script writing, you may not want to develop them, even if you could. Good actors play the personalities you have written, to which they will contribute resonances of their own individuality. Star actors can't always portray anybody but themselves. Meanwhile, producers may have to snap up the biggest names they can get, regardless of the qualities required for the role. Therefore, you may choose to delineate principals only in the broadest outlines so that they can be filled in with the personalities of whomever the producer is able to cast in the roles.

When, on the other hand, you insist upon animating your own fictional creations, you are well-advised to give them dimension. What exactly does this mean? Three-dimensional characters are those fictional persons of whom the audience gains some intimate and fundamental acquaintance by the end of the play. You can facilitate this intimacy in four ways:

Rostand's fictional Cyrano de Bergerac (there was a nonfictional one) is a very full and complex character. He has a rich and complex inner life. He's a Basque and therefore, the author suggests, earthy, emotional, bellicose, courageous, chivalrous and poetic. He has been indoctrinated in the values of a shame culture. He also possesses depth of feeling, loyalty, cleverness, and a poetic soul. The salient outward sign of his individuality is a physical deformity, which exacerbates an ego disorder. This in turn makes him arrogant, hyper-sensitive, sexually anxious, quixotic, and obsessive about what he calls his "white plume" of freedom.

We see him contend with fundamental issues of fame and obscurity, wealth and poverty, love and denial, fulfillment and disappointment, life and death. In the last act, we see the consequences of these contentions in his appearance: the rags he wears, the cane he must now lean on, a fresh white plume incongruously cocked in his battered old hat. Although he dominates the play, we see more than he does — the cadets' egging Christian on to a confrontation with Cyrano in the bake shop, Christian's self-destructive resolution at Arras, Roxane's several tête-à-têtes with de Guiche. And while he is very aware of some of his own faults and strengths, he is incapable of appreciating what the audience realizes: that he is lovable.

There are three ways to reveal character:

Besides the foil, it is helpful to distinguish two other types of characters by the function they serve in the drama: the protagonist and the antagonist.

A script may contain more than one protagonist, but three or more tend to divide the audience's focus, unless you make a group or community the collective protagonist. We tend to think of protagonists as "good guys," or heroes, like Cyrano. But they can be anti-heroes as well — either good but weak like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, morally ambivalent like Peer Gynt, or totally evil like Shakespeare's Richard III.

For protagonists to keep the audience involved in their welfare, they must:

Cyrano's cleverness and kindness endear him to audiences, his courage and integrity render him admirable, and audiences identify with his vulnerabilities. His involvement in intrigues, duels, battles, and love affairs provide no dearth of vicarious thrills.

In drama, antagonists outnumber protagonists, probably because the audience can better sympathize with and admire a hero when he's ganged-up-on. We commonly think of antagonists as bad guys, but they don't have to be morally opposed to their adversaries, the way de Guiche is to Cyrano. However, when human or animal (antagonists can be forces of nature), they must act according to objectives that clash with the protagonist's. Christian is a good man, but his romantic objectives make him Cyrano's rival.

Motivation and Meaning

Every character at every moment of every scene must have an objective. Every action, every pronouncement must be motivated. Without objectives, they'd have no reason to interact, or do anything else for that matter. A lowly herald with one measly line has to have some motivation for delivering it, if it's only to earn a living as a professional messenger. Some critics say that motivation defines character. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but I will say this:

In a play, you don't describe characters to the audience, you reveal them in action. If they don't act, the audience can't get to know them. Unless you motivate them, they cannot act, except as epileptics or schizophrenics; it's impossible to get to know somebody who's either throwing a fit or comatose. To be revealing, action has to mean something. Motivation gives action meaning. Insufficiently or improbably motivated action is absurd.

There comes a point in the performance of every play when the audience asks itself, "What the hell am I doing here?" It's your job as writer to head the question off at the pass and answer it before it's posed. It's more effective to weave the answer into the fabric of your script than to pin to the cloth a label proclaiming AUTHOR'S MESSAGE. Meaning is implicit in motivation. The factors that drive the characters (love, fear, sex, hunger, death, greed, honor, status, etc.) also drive your audience. The characters you portray comment by their very existence on the audience.

As you write, the reasons why your characters do things may be no more apparent to you than to them. To test motivation, ask yourself, "Are they doing this because they want to, or because I want them to?"

Subtext

Motivation and meaning are implicit in characters' pronouncements, though rarely explicit. The underlying significance, or subtext, may be apparent to one or more of the characters. More often than not, the characters do not grasp the subtext entirely or at all. They are acting/reacting spontaneously, trying to fool each other or themselves, assuming understanding, only groping for understanding, or incapable of understanding. Rarely do people completely and openly express what they're driving at. Like many of the values in a production, the audience need not gain a conscious understanding of the subtext to appreciate it. But the director and players do need to understand, because they can't play what they don't know is there.

Sometimes the entire purport of the action lies in the subtext. No dramatic movement occurs without it being played. For instance, at one point in Harold Pinter's early radio play, A Slight Ache, Flora invites a mute stranger to visit her garden. Outwardly innocent, her dialogue is, between the lines, a sexual invitation.

FLORA. I want to show you my garden. You must see my japonica, my convolvulus ... my honeysuckle, my clematis.

These lines are funny and menacing when the subtext is played; they're a big "So what?" when it isn't.

Dialogue

Physical actions have subtext (e.g., "body language"), but dialogue is the primary carrier. In audio drama, mostly what characters do is talk. The primacy of dialogue in audio drama doesn't necessarily make audio drama talky. Talkiness, an inertia of language, arises less from an access of words than from a deficiency in their employment.

Dialogue should:

Just as fictional persons only resemble real ones, their dialogue only resembles real speech. Dramatic discourse is heightened discourse - direct, precise, smooth, lean, logical, dynamic, and characteristic; whereas the spontaneous, natural article is periphrastic, redundant, digressive, vague, hesitant, disjointed, bland and generic. In the course of daily life you will pick up - and may, like Bernard Shaw and others, carry a notebook with you to jot down - interesting or typical modes of expression, perhaps entire conversations. To make dialogue out of your notes, however, you will have to compress or otherwise edit it to make it particularly characteristic and logical.

Plotting and Structure

The taller and more elaborate the building, the more support it needs from bolts and girders. The longer and more complex the play, the more support it needs from structure. This means stronger structure, not necessarily more structure. Overplotting is a hazard. When there is too much incident, the play can become "bogged down in story" — that is, made confusing and boring by complexities and explanations.

Under-plotting can also destroy momentum. When action doesn't move in any particular direction, for dramatic purposes it might as well not move at all.

Drama, whether serious or comic, tells a story. So do a novel and a news report. They may tell the same story, but in different ways. The news report will arrange the facts so that the most important float to the top and the least sink to the bottom. A novel may proceed discursively from beginning to end with many diversions along the way. A play, being far shorter and therefore more direct than a novel, will begin as close to the big moments as possible (in medias res), and will simplify, combine and telescope events and characters to achieve the most direct route to the ending. This structuring a story into a work is called plotting; the arrangement of chronological incidents is the plot.

Story: (Greek myth) The Delphic Oracle tells Laius, king of Thebes, that his son will grow up to kill him. To prevent this, Laius orders the infant exposed in the wilderness. The vassal entrusted with the deed cannot bring himself to do it. Instead he gives the baby to the childless king and queen of Corinth, who name him Oedipus. Oedipus grows up thinking himself their son; hearing a prophesy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he flees Corinth. He sets out for Thebes, where a monster called the Sphinx is menacing the city. On his way, he becomes embroiled in a fight with strangers and slays them, not knowing Laius was among them. He goes on to vanquish the Sphinx. The grateful Thebans vote him king and give him Laius's widow, Jocasta, as wife. Oedipus and Jocasta live happily until a plague strikes Athens. The Oracle informs Oedipus that if he finds and punishes Laius's murderer, the gods will lift the plague. In the course of his investigations, Oedipus discovers his own patricidal and incestuous responsibility for the plague. In horror, Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus blinds himself. He then sentences himself to exile, a terrible punishment in those days, and starts wandering the Grecian world with his sister-daughter Antigone. Eventually he finds sanctuary in Colonus, where he dies under portentous circumstances.

Plot: Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the King is set before Oedipus' palace doors on the fateful day he learns of his unwitting patricide and incest. At curtain rise, a delegation of Theban elders appears to beseech the protagonist to do something about the plague. Oedipus tells them that he has already sent his brother-in-law Creon to the Oracle. Just then Creon returns to report that Laius's murderer must be brought to justice. Oedipus vows to do so. After a few hours of relentless probing, the awful truth comes out, Jocasta kills herself, and Oedipus has poked out his own eyes. Creon enters and restores order. He wants to ask the Oracle what to do with Oedipus, but when Oedipus insists upon exile, Creon sends him on his way.

A play may contain subordinate, parallel, or sub-plots that follow the same general flow as and that support the main plot. Shakespeare used multiple plots in several ways. In A Midsummer's Night's Dream the tribulations of four young lovers, the attempt of some simple workmen to rehearse a play, and a marital tiff between the fairy queen and king become enmeshed in the Athenian woods one night. In the two Henry IV plays, the grim doings at court are relieved and contrasted by the droll carousing of Prince Hal and Falstaff. Gloucester's suffering at the hands of his bastard son parallels and illuminates King Lear's suffering at the hands of his daughters.

Structural Elements

More than any other form of literature, drama depends for effect on the orchestration of tension and conflict. Tension keeps mounting to a peak or major crisis, at which point a reversal, or peripity, occurs, accompanied by an emotional outpouring, or climax, which releases the tension. Pressure dissipates to a level of equilibrium, and the play ends. The action preceding and building to the climax is often referred to as the rising action, and that which follows, the falling action.

Any occurrence in the play is considered an action. Some action necessarily occurs off-stage, because it is too ghastly or complicated or time consuming to show on stage, or because you can achieve a particular effect that way. The only way to manifest off-stage doings is through narrative — that is, by describing what happened. Sometimes neither acting out events nor merely describing them suffices. In that event, you can employ a unified sequence of partial scenes, documentary style.

Deciding what to show fully, what to show partially, what to narrate, what to suppress, where to begin, and where to end constitutes your most difficult problem as a playwright. You may find that you have so arranged things as to require an obligatory scene, without which your audience will feel disappointed or cheated. You can also find the opposite, that you have some beautifully written scene or speech or bit of business that just gets in the way and has to go. These decisions depend upon technical factors, taste, and most of all, the pace or dramatic flow required to propel, retard, deflect, or deter the action toward the climax.

The more a play sprawls, the more diversions and digressions it contains, the more diffuse the tension and the harder it is to build momentum. For this reason, you may want to begin your plays in medias res, "in the middle of things." Begin as close to the climax as possible, introducing past events in retrospect, through exposition, narration, or flashbacks.

On the other hand, you may also wish to build tension by purposely withholding the climax to the last possible minute. Doing so creates suspense, a kind of anxious anticipation that mounts when a playwright makes an audience expect a crucial happening momentarily and then delays the occurrence: a waiting for the other shoe to drop. Such a hold or delay is called a stage wait.

Like too much excitement during intercourse, too much emotional excitement in a play may cause a premature explosion. To retard its occurrence, you may have to release some of the pressure at key points. This is one purpose of anticlimaxes. You can also regulate tension with comic relief, so that the audience can laugh off a little steam.

In addition to halting the momentum and letting some of it dissipate, you can control its speed. The simplest way to accomplish this is to start slow and gradually keep picking up steam until the climax hits, then turn off the juice, so to speak, and let the play glide to the end. With practice, you can get very sophisticated with this, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again, altering rhythms, etc., as long as you don't lose the sense of movement entirely for very long.

Action that advances the plot is called dramatic action. Often, the curtain goes up before the dramatic action begins. Before you can get the ball rolling or let it roll too far, you must somehow "set the scene," deliver the background information, or exposition, that the audience needs before it can follow the plot. Some exposition may be delayed for the sake of getting a move on, while some may belong only at the end, as when, after the climactic revelation of the guilty party, the detective explains how he discovered the culprit.

Shortly after you dispose of the exposition, a conflict is introduced. Tension mounts through a series of complications, each arising out of the basic conflict, that force matters to a head. Some catalyst is often necessary to drive the tension to climax, after which consequences manifest themselves and loose ends are quickly tied up. Because audience interest falls as the action falls, the climax usually occurs close to the end of the play. Minor crises and high points or anticlimaxes may hit before the main climax, like landings on a staircase. Anticlimaxes appearing after the main climax tend to weaken the entire play and are therefore discouraged. For this reason, people speak of any occurrence that seems trivial when following a particularly sensational one as anticlimactic.

The play does not usually end at the moment the dramatic action hits the finish line. Corpses may litter the stage and everything may have been said, but you need something strong with which to send the audience home. You will have to come up with a curtain line that has the right note of finality. In fact, if you want the audience to return after intermission, you may want a good, suspenseful curtain line at the end of the first act.

A Very Good Example

To exemplify these principles, let's return to Sophocles, who had to write within the boundaries of the highly stereotyped structure of the ancient Greek theater. Tragedies weren't divided into acts, but into episodes, each separated by an ode chanted and danced by a chorus. They often began with an introductory speech or scene of exposition, followed by a formal entrance of the chorus. Once on, the chorus stayed until the dramatic action spun out. Its formal exit ended the play. Subject matter was restricted to historical or mythological stories already familiar to the audience, though in treating the story, playwrights were allowed considerable license.

In Oedipus the King, the chorus of elders quickly and anxiously delivers the exposition and sets up the conflict: there's a plague, Oedipus was a stranger when he saved the town years ago from the Sphinx, can he not save it again now that he is the king and the fate of the city is in his hands?

Immediately thereafter, the first complication is introduced when Creon narrates the intelligence he received from the Oracle. His investigation is further complicated when the blind seer Teiresias refuses to divulge what he knows, which is apparently everything, and warns Oedipus against probing too far. These opening episodes contain their own anticlimaxes, each episode leads logically to the next, and — as befits a good detective story — the exposition comes little by little as the episodes progress.

Sophocles ends each episode at a high point that whets the spectators' expectations for the following action. The first closes when he vows to get to the bottom of the mystery, the second with Teiresias' warning, the third as Oedipus accuses Creon of sedition, etc. In this way, he keeps tension hanging in mid-air during the choral odes, which function as stage waits.

The play proceeds in this way until the climax when Oedipus learns the truth. On the way, tension mounts inexorably and suspensefully as the hero gets closer and closer to unraveling the mystery, never suspecting what the audience already knows, that he is the murderer he seeks. The revelation brings on Oedipus's ultimate crisis: How will he deal with his own guilt? Overcome, he rushes madly into the palace.

Another ode keeps the audience on pins and needles until an eye- witness staggers out of the palace and reveals the off-stage violence. Although the climax has hit off-stage, the eloquent narrator communicates the full horror of it. In so doing, he sets- up Oedipus's final entrance, in which he appears at the door of the palace, standing over Jocasta's body blood streaming down his face. The situation demands some expression of his feelings at that moment, an obligatory scene. Sophocles delivers it in the form of a contrapuntal lament between Oedipus and the compassionate elders. Thus the action begins to fall.

Creon arrives, restores order, and gently sends Oedipus into exile. All the loose ends are now tied up, the dramatic action is over, but not the play. Sophocles has to get everybody off-stage. Creon ushers Oedipus back into the palace. With the royal family gone and the palace door shut, there's no reason for the petitioners to stick around, so they leave too, delivering this gloomy curtain line:

People of Thebes, behold ye Oedipus, solver of riddles, man of power! Which one of us did not envy his good fortune? See what storms beset him now! Learn by this to call no one fortunate until he has gone from womb to grave untainted by pain.

Sophocles employed a tragic structure, that is, everything seemed to go well for the hero until the climax, when his fortunes took a startling turn for the worse. Conversely, everything can go badly for the hero until the climax, which brings about a turn for the better. This is called comic structure. Comic and tragic structures bolster melodrama, the most common dramatic form in broadcasting, about which more below.

There are many variations and mixtures of comic and tragic plotting, and many ways to structure plays that are neither comic nor tragic. The design of your play will often emerge from the themes and characters. All structures involve the coherent orchestration of tension and conflict — progression and unity, of events leading somewhere, arriving, and resolving — of beginning, middle and end, of wholeness. If nothing much changes for the characters, something must change for the audience; it must leave with a better understanding of your characters and situations than it came in with.

Variety and Contrast

Contrasting and complimentary touches are just as important as plot points. You can indeed hold a play together with variety and invention alone. Didi and Gogo, the protagonists of Samuel Beckett's best-known tragicomedy, are waiting for something significant to happen; they are waiting for Godot, who will somehow bring relief from their miserable existence. But he never shows. When the audience is sufficiently impressed with the doleful futility of the vigil, the play ends.

Until then, Beckett can't let much of anything happen to Didi and Gogo, but he has to keep the audience involved without the help of a plot, of "incidence." He resorts to a brilliant mixture of broad physical humor and verbal pyrotechnics. What little formal structure comes from the suspense of Didi and Gogo's vigil. Will he come? won't he? why will he? why may he not? if he comes, when will he arrive? what is at stake?

It may help you, as it does me, to think of the orchestration of contrasting and complementary elements in terms of a variety bill. Variety shows have no plots, but the elements and numbers are arranged to hold an audience. The strongest is last, partly so that the audience leaves the theater on an up-note and partly to prevent the law of diminishing returns from setting in. The next strongest ends the first act, so that the audience will stick around after the intermission. The third strongest begins the first act to put the audience in a receptive mood, and the fourth begins the second act for much the same reason. The weakest element is second on the bill.

In the middle of both acts appear some spectacular "turn," fast-paced, dazzling, or just plain loud. Two very similar acts are never placed back-to-back. Something slow is placed next to something fast, something loud next to something quiet, a ballad to a march, a solo to an ensemble number, something comic to something serious, etc. Great care is taken about placing something serious next to something funny. If the contrast is not perfect, the funny turn will trivialize the serious one, or the heavy skit spoil the humor in the light one.

A sophisticated amplification of these principles occurs in symphonic music. I have neither the vocabulary nor space to go into the subject here. The omission does not imply inconsequence. As an audio dramatist, I have benefited more from the little I know of music theory than from my greater familiarity with drama and theater.

Before leaving this subject, let me note that individual scenes and parts of scenes possess their own tone and atmosphere, but so does the play as a whole. The contrasting, varied elements must complement one another and feel of-a-piece with the play as a whole. In this regard, it's instructive to study the way Shakespeare employs humor in otherwise serious plays such asboth parts of Henry IV and Macbeth. You'd think Falstaff's low comedy in prose would clash with the high-toned verse opined by the movers and shakers of Prince Hal's world. But it doesn't. Why not? How has the playwright made pratfalls, puns and practical jokes part and parcel of a story of ambition and power politics? Discover the answers for yourself and use them in your writing.

Structural Integrity

Normally, the twists and turns of the plot ought to arise from the natural interactions of the characters as influenced by their circumstances and environment. When they do, they are said to be organic. If a play is an organic whole, you can extrapolate a premise from it, an impression of the moral and natural laws governing the play's fictional world: virtue is always rewarded, Martians eat Earthlings, fate is inescapable, gods interest themselves in human affairs, love conquers all, etc. These laws give the fictional world definition, significance, unity, and integrity.

The audience doesn't have to bother investigating these laws to appreciate the play, as long as it can infer their presence. In fact, you may not be aware of them while you're writing, because they're implicit in your imagination. When your audience says "What the hell just happened?" or "What is that writer driving at?" or "Give me a break!" your premise is either too esoteric or corrupted. You may have to state your premise in so many words at the beginning of the play, and edit so that, even with the statement, it is implicit throughout. The work's organic integrity may have been infected with an arbitrary virus.

Characters, circumstances, and environment may invite the arbitrary, and the hack writer looking for a crutch will snap at the bait. Witness the surfeit of lunatics on television. Maniacs are capable of anything, especially anything handy for the playwright's purposes. The environment or situations can be insane, as when characters go on quests, land on distant planets, or otherwise stumble into various wonderlands. The atomic bomb has been a godsend for monster mongers, for who knows what anomalies can result from radiation poisoning.

The usual reason — an unsatisfactory one — for capriciousness is convenience. The plot isn't going anywhere. The crisis has gone as far as it can go but can't be resolved. A happy ending is desired but the situation won't yield one. Somebody who has no reason to move must leave or enter for the plot to advance. So the playwright introduces a new element out of left field, which has nothing to do with what preceded. The cavalry arrives just in time, the ruthless villain repents, an idea strikes the hero, the maid chances to wander in and overhear the conspirators, the wizard finds just the right potion, the contending parties discover that they're long-lost relatives.

In some Greek tragedies, when affairs got hopelessly muddled, an actor representing a god was lowered from a machine to straighten things out. An arbitrary plot device is still called a deus ex machina, or 'god out of the machine.' A deus ex machina is not always a crutch. It can produce powerful affects when introduced for irony. In Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Queen Victoria's messenger gallops up with a pardon just as Macheath is about to be hanged. The playwright introduced the messenger to make a sardonic point. "How nice everything would be if these saviors on horseback always appeared when they were needed," someone says.

I remember reading Carl Barks's "Uncle Scrooge" comic books from the early '50s. At moments of crisis, Hewey, Dewey, and Lewey would pull out their copy of the Junior Woodchuck's Guidebook, in which they'd always find a solution. The very silliness of this deus ex machina became a running gag amplifying one of the more comforting natural laws of the Disney universe: kids have more sense and more imagination than adults.

Whether a plot element appears organic or not often depends on preparation. You need to set up every important plot, character, and thematic element properly, even a surprise ending. When you want listeners to remember anything important — a name, a plot point — find some way to introduce it and reinforce it at least two additional times before the crucial point. Establish the premise at the outset and keep it operative.

Genre Writing

Genre writing is the bread-and-butter of commercial drama, including TV, radio, cinema, and the popular theater. It means writing to an established formula. Greek tragedy is just as formulaic, or more so, than a TV cop show. But, whereas the Attic drama arose from and retained aspects of religious ritual, shoot-em-ups arose to respond to two commercial needs: success and volume.

(Scene: A meeting of the creative team in the Big Mogul's office.)

MOGUL: Kids, we got a lot at stake here. To even the odds against failure, me and the bankers took a good look at things that have proved boffo in the past. We boiled 'em down to the bottom line. Here are the equations. It's up to you to do the math.

WRITERS AND DIRECTORS: Brilliant, B.M.! We gotta knock out twenty-six to thiry-nine hours and we were worried just how we were gonna do that. By reducing the job to tenth grade algebra, you've made our job a piece of cake.

TROUBLEMAKER: But what about creativity, innovation, and stuff?

MOGUL: The public don't want creativity and innovation. They want to know what to expect. If they liked last week's show, they want to get more of the same on next week's show, not somethin' totally different.

SEASONED OLD PRO: (aside to Troublemaker) Don't worry, kid. Even in algebra there's room for maneuvering. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere — they all wrote to formula. Stay within the bounds and you can be as creative as you want. Just don't make a point of it with B.M. or he'll squash it. Say nothing and he won't notice.

Most genre writing proceeds from this sort of rationale. The most common forms you're likely to encounter in radio:

The Serial. A drama in which continuity and plot are stretched over a number of discrete episodes. To entice the audience to return for the next program, episodes typically end on some suspenseful note, a "cliff-hanger." I distinguish between three overlapping types:

Soap operas, or "soaps," are far looser than full-length plays. Several melodramatic plots of equal importance may unfold simultaneously, though starting and ending in different places in never-ending cycles. Audiences seem to care far more about the Who and the How than the What. Moments are far more important than any consequence. Multiple issues of great importance are always looming over the characters. Suspense is unremitting. Yet the plots creep forward as if burdened with a great weight. Most fans can't tune in every single day, though most try, and the viscosity of development prevents them from missing too much. (One radio serial kept a character riding in an elevator for several months.) No climax may ever appear. A stream of story line may just peter out, but it makes little difference when other estuaries continue flowing imperviously along.

Adventure serials or cliff-hangers may build little tension from one episode to the next. Each installment has to be relatively short, because without real development the law of diminishing returns soon sets in. Cliff-hangers depend on non-stop action to keep the audience interested. Forces of good and evil thwart each other in single-file encounters. Episodes could continue indefinitely and, when they do end, end arbitrarily. All but the last episode ends with a life and death situation suspended in doubt. The BBC's popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a distinguished modern example.

Dramatic novels (my name for them), or miniseries, such as Upstairs Downstairs or my own Craven Street, strive for depth of characterization and a concomitant structural sophistication. Each episode has its own dramatic design and reaches its own climax while contributing to the overall dramatic design. The climax to the whole series comes in the last or next to last episode.

In addition to suspenseful episode endings, serials share another trait. All but the first episode begin with a summary, or recap, of the previous episode's action. The recap may be narrated or worked somehow into the action. When the plots are particularly convoluted and the serial particularly long, the entire story thus far may be recapped periodically.

Anthologies. Broadcast series of dramatic programs, in which plots and characters change from episode to episode. There is usually one or more unifying element - a recurring program host who introduces each program, a common theme (e.g., horror, mystery, love, saving souls), a common author, a common formula, or even a common origin. All programs may share formulaic length, breaks, and billboards; otherwise, no common structure may be present.

Episodics. Any regularly scheduled dramatic broadcast series of self-contained episodes. Either there are continuing lead characters, or some stylistic or thematic continuity (e.g., Twilight Zone). In commercial television, every dramatic series that isn't a sitcom or serial is an episodic. Like serials, they are melodrama. Like sitcoms, they don't waste much time on exposition or variety, as fans can be counted on to remember and demand the same premise, principals, milieu, and situations from show to show.

Melodrama. The overwhelming majority of broadcast dramas are melodramas. In melodrama, characters personifying good combat characters of forces personifying evil. Conflicts within a character are rare. If characters do grow and change, they only gain an appreciation of some commonplace value. Melodramatic situations are black and white, violent, sensational, and far-fetched struggles against death, exploitation, physical pain, bondage and physical or moral corruption. Novelty is achieved through exoticism; otherwise plots and characters are highly stereotyped. Kessey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a powerful example. Bad examples proliferate on prime-time television.

Sitcoms. Dramatic broadcast series of humorous programs, in which recurring leads cavort in self-contained episodes. The action occurs primarily in recurring locales and revolves around domestic or other mundane situations. Matters of life and death rarely enter in. The overwhelming majority of sitcoms are farce, a comedy of discomfiture and humiliation, or slapstick, a comedy of physical assault. Humans are shown as comically flawed, but endearing, and fate is kind. Sentimentality is frequently present.

Less stringently formulaic patterns can also be classified by genre. Defined in the lexicon are comedy, docudrama, drama (see sense 2), farce, problem play, romance, satire, situation comedy (not the same as sitcom), and tragedy (reputedly, the most profound form of Western drama, and maybe Western literature).

Audio Drama

Time Formats

As with script writing in other media, you often must conform to conventional time formats. In America, features for commercial broadcasters may be as short as one minute. Non-commercial programs tend to hug the hour and half-hour. When writing for non- broadcast, you should work within the lengths of the transmission medium: 15, 30, and 45 minutes per side of an analogue cassette, a continuous hour on a CD, possibly longer on a DAT, etc.

Broadcast half-hours and hours are 29 and 59 minutes long, respectively, including wrap-arounds, commercial and I.D. breaks, and other announcements. Many stations currently run news on the hour, which may diminish the program air time by an additional five minutes. Your play gets whatever is left over after all these subtractions.

Nonetheless, write long. You cannot time a script precisely as you write. If the script runs long, it can be cut, but if it runs short, what will the producer fill with? It is, therefore, common to write a little over the time allotted, to include dialogue that the producer can cut without doing damage.

Duration

Concentrating fatigues audiences. Dramatists often write to prescribed lengths that take audience fatigue into consideration. Playwrights program at least one act-break in a full-length play to give the audience a stretch. They know that the audience will probably have less tolerance after the break than before, so they ring down the first act curtain a little more than half-way through. When the length requires more than one intermission, each act and each intermission will be shorter than the one before.

The same principles apply in audio drama. Audio plays take more concentration than stage plays, television, and movies. Unless the material is very special, American listeners can withstand no more than an hour of playing time. Even when no commercial or station breaks are required, interrupt the action just past the half-hour. The longest act leads, the shortest concludes.

Production Conditions

Time formats change. Transmission media change. Conditions affecting the length and frequency of breaks change. Script requirements change with them. The writer hase the responsibility for keeping up with these things, accommodating current formats, programming in break points as needed, and otherwise writing for real production conditions.

You should call for special effects only when you have some idea that they can be done. You cannot cop out with a cue such as

SOUND: SNOW FALLING.

. . . or. . .

THE SHIP BLOWS UP. PANDEMONIUM. EVERYONE RUSHES TO THE LIFEBOATS AND FIGHTS OVER THE SPACES. THE SHIP SINKS BEFORE ANY CAN BE LAUNCHED AND ALL ARE KILLED.

. . . and leave to the producer the task of figuring out how to do it.

Writing for broadcast requires a sensitive handling of controversial language and subject matter. Audiences take offense more readily when listening to the radio than when listening to recordings. You should also assume that an economy of means is required, unless you are informed definitely to the contrary.

Conventions

American radio dramatists in the '30s and '40s developed a number of handy conventions that are still useful, if not indispensable, to the writer today. They provide simple rules of thumb for minimizing radio's limitations and maximizing its assets.

The Narrative Hook

Listeners can easily turn off a program, so you can't afford the theater writer's luxury of beginning your radio play with exposition. The conventional wisdom has it that you must catch the audience within the first 10 to 15 seconds. Any device you use for this purpose is called the narrative hook. Once you have excited the audience, you can assume they will listen with patience for a few minutes while you deliver the background information. It is my opinion that audio drama is so powerful that if you successfully hook the audience in that first brief window of time (and do not subsequently alienate listeners by confusing or irritating them), the audience will be unable to turn off your program.

Sometimes the narrative hook is built into the billboard, or stereotyped opening, of the series for which you are writing. The billboard may contain a teaser, an exciting excerpt from your play, or may create excitement without one. Indeed, so important is the billboard as narrative hook that traditional American radio is full of memorable openings:

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!

Even when the billboard assists, you're well advised to begin your play strongly. Narrative hooks do not necessarily have to be sensational, though they often are.

COP: (FILTER) Twenty-third Precinct. Sergeant Duffy spea . . .

FLODELLE: Help! Help!

My most successful opening scene begins quietly like this:

VOICE: Something on your mind?

PAUL: I - uh - yeah. . . . Nothing new.

VOICE: I wonder if talking about it might not relieve some of the tension.

PAUL: I don't know.

VOICE: Want to try?

PAUL: Yeah. . . . I - uh - I don't know where to start.

VOICE: One place to start is with the thing that's most troubling you.

(pause)

PAUL: Well . . .there was a girl. I guess there's always a girl. And there was a friend - I guess there's always a friend. . . . But they're not any more. (sinking into reverie) They were killed.

I don't get to mayhem until about forty seconds in. Immediately, however, the audience is made aware that it is eavesdropping on a troubled patient and his therapist. Something important is obviously hovering in the air. The success of the scene as a narrative hook depends upon how it's played: the soothing compassion of the Voice and Paul's intense, twitchy introversion.

Establishing the Scene

Unless you purposely withhold the information for effect, establish who's in the scene, where they are, and what they're doing within the scene's opening half-dozen lines. All principal characters present when the scene opens should speak to establish themselves within these opening lines.

In the scene excerpted above, we don't hear lines, or even a sound bed, that tells us where we are or who's speaking, but the context of the first two lines make clear the therapeutic setting, which person is the patient, and which the doctor. In many cases, you have to give the audience more explicit clues.

SOUND: FADE UP PUB ATMOSPHERE.

ALICE: Ted, I'm very glad you could make it. I appreciate it. Really. But can't you just relax?

TED: Alright, Alice, what's this all about?

ALICE: Nostalgia, I suppose. Just an urge to see an old friend.

TED: But why here of all places?

ALICE: This was our favorite watering hole, as I recall. It's where you proposed to me. Don't you remember?

TED: All too well!

Alternately, you can simply tell the audience:

NARRATOR: Early the next morning, Grover and George appear in court to plead their case.

You can set up a scene in the previous one:

FRANK: Louise, where are you going?

LOUISE: To the factory, where else?

MUSIC: BRIDGE.

SOUND: FADE UP CAR FACTORY.

FOREMAN: Hey, you can't come in here. Dis is a hard hat area. Cantcha read de signs?

LOUISE: Where's Mr. Farcus? I've got to talk to him right away! It's a matter of life and death!

Scene Transitions

The simplest, fastest way to change scenes is to use a few seconds of transitional music. Musical bridges are so familiar from television, films, and theater that upon hearing them, most listeners immediately recognize their significance. In the script, you only need the simplest of indications.

MUSIC: BRIDGE. This indication tells script readers that the previous scene has ended, all sounds have faded out, and a new scene is to follow or to sneak up as the music ends. A bridge not only changes scenes but punctuates them. When such punctuation is inappropriate, you may simply fade one scene out and bring up the new one, jump cut to the new scene, or cross fade:

CHRIS: I know just what he'll say when I tell him. (fading) He'll say, "Christopher, my boy, when I was your age...

HORACE: (fading up under CHRIS) Christopher, my boy, when I was your age, money never concerned me.

Audio drama is so fluid that you can perform a transition of time and place in the middle of a scene. For example, in my Craven Street program, Benjamin Franklin, residing in London, visits Ireland where his enemy Lord Hillsborough treats him with surprising hospitality. As Franklin is leaving his lordship's country estate:

HILLSBOROUGH: Remember, Dr. Franklin, my door is always open to you. And I hope, sir, you will let me see you often in London.

MUSIC: BRIDGE

SOUND: FADE UP CARRIAGE INTERIOR

NARRATOR: Well, you certainly didn't expect such extravagant hospitality from the Secretary for America.

FRANKLIN: He was wondrous civil.

NARRATOR: What do you make of it?

FRANKLIN: I know not what to make of it. Unless he foresees a storm, and desires to lessen beforehand the number of enemies he has so imprudently created.

NARRATOR: Yet, things look better now. . . .

FRANKLIN: They do indeed.

NARRATOR: A beam of light from the chink in Lord Hillsborough's door. Is that where you're going now?

FRANKLIN: To wait on his lordship, yes.

NARRATOR: It's a frosty January day. You're back in London and your coach is just pulling up to Hillsborough's city lodgings.

COACHMAN: (back) 'Ere we are, sir!

SOUND: COACH COMES TO A HALT.

Commonly British and Canadian audio dramatists change locale by the equivalent of a film "dissolve" — fading one scene out, pausing, and then fading up the next. Doing so tends to undercut any rhythm you have established. You also run the risk of confusing the audience because, unless there are loud and very different atmospheres under one or both scenes, this method does not always make the change clear. Used more judiciously and sparingly than in England and Canada, the simple fade-out and fade-up can produce a stage wait, anticlimax, or other dramatic punctuation.

You may also wish to employ two screen techniques from time to time: the CROSSFADE and the  JUMP CUT. Both tend to enhance the impression that the scenes thus connected are related either by time or cause and effect.

Populations

The larger the cast, the more the audience works to differentiate the characters. Limit the number of principals to three in modules of ten minutes or less, and to six in plays of a half-hour or more. You may have as many walk-ons and cameos as you wish, as long as their presence doesn't muddy the overall clarity or overwhelm production resources.

Clarity and Grace

Beyond mechanics, be guided by the principles of clarity and suggestiveness. Clarity is the fundamental problem, suggestiveness the fundamental asset of audio drama. You must treat them with grace, subtlety and common sense, or risk anomalies and cliches such as:

DAWN: I hear a blue car pulling up.

SOUND: SNOW FALLING.

TOM: Now if I can only just (get to the phone/reach the door/untie these bonds/open this lid)...

TOM: (after saying the above) Ah! There!

GWEN: Look, Fred, a two-ton truck is bearing down on us!

It is better to suggest than describe, to plant seeds of images in the listeners' minds than to place fully grown potted plants on top of their radios. Invite your audiences to participate and give them plenty of opportunity. Just don't go so far that you create unintentional ambiguity.

Physical Action

You can simply describe action with narration or dialogue, and perhaps you should when other alternatives seem awkward or time-wasting. More often, movement should be implied as naturally and gracefully as possible. The more skill you employ suggesting the setting and action, the more your listeners will see them in their mind's eye. As a rule of thumb, whatever the listener can infer without confusion is best: show don't tell.

You can suggest action with dialogue . . .

JEDIDIAH: May I see that?

CHARLES: Of course. Here.

JEDIDIAH: Hm! It's lighter than it looks. . . .

. . . with sound . . .

SOUND: A BLOW. BODY FALLS. . . .

. . . or a combination of dialogue, narration, sound, and even music.

SOUND: OUTDOOR ATMOSPHERE. SEA BIRDS. SURF, BACK.

CHARLES: Careful, dear. These rocks are treacherous.

NORA: (back slightly) Goodbye, cruel world!

NICK: No! Stop!

MUSIC: CHROMATIC DOWNWARD GLISSANDO.

SOUND: SPLASH FAR BACK.

NICK: Nora!

MUSIC: STING.

Avoid redundancy. When sound alone does the trick, why duplicate it with dialogue?

SOUND: FADE UP WIND IN THE TREES; BIRDS TWITTERING.

LORNA: Ah, here we are outside again!

Production elements should amplify and complement one another, each saying what the other can't or shouldn't say alone.

SOUND: FADE UP WIND IN THE TREES; BIRDS TWITTERING.

LORNA: Ah, what a beautiful day!

Narration

Conventional wisdom says that you should avoid narration in audio drama. It is only a crutch that keeps you from discovering imaginative and organic means for communicating ideas. I think this is good advice for beginners. But skillful narration is too protean a tool to dismiss categorically. It allows you to combine the descriptive qualities of literature with the emotive power of drama. You can use it to telescope the time necessary for establishing important elements that would retard the dramatic flow or bore the audience if established using strictly dramatic tools. It makes interior monologue possible, facilitates flashbacks, aids clarity and, in adaptations of literary sources, helps convey the original author's style.

As in novels and stories, the narrator is often an omniscient third party, representing the author or totally impersonal, who may see not only the overt events, but the thoughts of the characters, and who may even comment on the purport of the action.

SOUND: OUTDOOR ATMOSPHERE, WINTER. SLEIGH BELLS. HORSES TROTTING RAPIDLY.

SOFIA: (drunkenly) Let me! I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver! . . . (etc., ad lib under)

NARRATOR: She stood up in the sled, and her husband, Vladimir Nikitch, and her childhood friend Vladimir Michalovitch, held her arms to prevent her from falling.

NIKITCH: I told you not to give her any brandy.

NARRATOR: The Colonel knew from experience that in women like his wife, too much wine brought raucous gaiety, then hysterical laughter and then tears. (Anton Chekhov, "The Two Volodyas.")

Sometimes, as in first-person narration, one of the characters participating in the action also narrates. This works well for internal monologue, when the effect of the action on the narrator or when the narrator's thought processes or point of view is the central defining element of the drama. You must be careful to make clear when the character is narrating and when not.

SOUND: OUTDOOR ATMOSPHERE, WINTER. SLEIGH BELLS. HORSES TROTTING RAPIDLY.

NIKITCH: (narrating) She was standing up in the sled and Vladimir Michalovitch and I were holding her arms to keep her from falling out. . . .

SOFIA: (drunkenly) Let me! I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver! . . . (etc., ad lib under)

MICHALOVITCH: (simultaneously) Be careful! Don't fall!

NIKITCH: (in scene) I told you not to give her any brandy. (narrating, disgustedly) I knew from experience that in women like my wife, too much wine brought raucous gaiety, then hysterical laughter, and then tears.

Old-style American radio borrowed the second-person narrator from pulp fiction to give the listener the sense that s/he is the main character:

SOUND: OUTDOOR ATMOSPHERE, WINTER. SLEIGH BELLS. HORSES TROTTING RAPIDLY.

SOFIA: (drunkenly) Let me! I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver! . . . (etc., ad lib under)

NARRATOR: (over Sofia) She was standing up in the sled, you and her old friend Vladimir Michalovitch were holding her arms to keep her from falling.

NIKITCH: I told you not to give her any brandy.

NARRATOR: You knew from experience that in women like your wife, too much wine brought raucous gaiety, then hysterical laughter and then tears.

SOFIA: (overcome with emotion) Olga! Olga!

One may even borrow the technique of Story Theater, the marvelously compact narrative innovation developed by Paul Sills. In Story Theater, characters narrate their own action in asides to the audience. Their attitudes and reactions are apparent in the actor's delivery. The heart of the action, they act out. Audience attention remains with them, instead of being diverted to a separate narrator.

SOUND: OUTDOOR ATMOSPHERE, WINTER. SLEIGH BELLS. HORSES TROTTING RAPIDLY.

SOFIA: (drunkenly) Let me! I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver! . . . (narrating) Sofia Lvovna was standing up in the sled . . .

NIKITCH: (narrating, annoyed) Her husband, Vladimir Nikitch . . .

MICHALOVITCH (narrating, amused) . . . and her childhood friend Vladimir Michalovitch were holding her arms to prevent her from falling.

NIKITCH: (in scene) I told you not to give her any brandy. (narrating) The Colonel knew from experience that in women like his wife, too much wine brought raucous gaiety, then hysterical laughter, and then tears.

In any case, your narrator is a character. You must hear his/her voice in your head in a way that the writer of printed fiction does not. The narrator needs speakable lines as much as your other characters. Too many clauses spoil the broth. Compare . . .

For the last two months, ever since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that she had married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, par dèpit; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become convinced that she loved him passionately. (Chekhov, op. cit.) 

. . . to . . .

For the last two months — ever since her wedding, in fact — she'd been tortured by the thought that she'd married the Colonel from worldly motives. Par dèpit, as they say. "Out of spite." But that evening, at the restaurant, she suddenly became convinced that she loved him. Passionately.

One of the strengths of drama in any medium is the sense of immediacy, of events unfolding while the audience watches or listens. Narrating can strip your play of this asset. Anything you want the audience to experience, not merely take cognizance of, should be exposed through dialogue, sound, or music, not narration. Unless you wish to stress the present state of mind of the narrator as informed by past events, narrate in the present tense:

Sofia Lvovna stands up in the sled. Her husband, Vladimir Nikitch, and her childhood friend, Vladimir Michalovitch, hold her arms to prevent her from falling. 

At times, narration can significantly contribute to the sense of immediacy. In Archibald MacLeish's radio play Fall of the City (1937), the narrator is an on-the-spot newscaster, describing events as they unfold. He reports that a conqueror is advancing on the city. The citizens panic. Out of fear, they capitulate before a shot can be fired. The conqueror in full armor enters the city without having to strike a blow. The newscaster sees the whole thing: 

They cover their faces with fingers. They cower before him. They fall: they sprawl on the stone. He's alone where he's walking. He marches with rattle of metal. He tramples his shadow. He mounts by the pyramid stamps on the stairway turns His arm rises -- his visor is opening. . . . There's no one! . . . The metal is empty! The armor is empty! I tell you There's no one at all there: there's only the metal: The barrel of metal: the bundle of armor. It's empty!

Orson Welles, who played the newscaster in the original broadcast, borrowed the idea a year later for his notorious War of the Worlds, which had more immediacy than anybody desired.

In audio as in conventional drama, the characters and events should reveal themselves. Motivation and purport should be implicit in the action. To have a narrator make these things explicit is to beat your listeners over the head with your message, distance them from the drama, and insult them at the same time. Narration should therefore intrude very gingerly, if at all.

SOUND: OUTDOOR ATMOSPHERE, WINTER. SLEIGH BELLS. HORSES TROTTING RAPIDLY.

SOFIA: (drunkenly) Let me! I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver! . . .

NIKITCH: (topping her) Sofia, do sit down! Do you want to kill yourself?

MICHALOVITCH: Don't worry, I've got her arm!

SOFIA: Wait a minute, driver. I'll get up on the box beside you. (etc., ad lib)

NIKITCH: (over Sofia) I told you not to give her any brandy. When women like my wife drink, first comes raucous gaiety, then hysterical laughter, and then tears.

Speeches

Interrupt long speeches every six lines or so to prevent the audience from losing the presence of the other characters in the scene.

Avoid orations. Generally, long harangues and dialogue without action fall flat in audio. They tend to drone on the ear. Besides, American actors, especially the younger ones, typically do not learn the phrasing that makes soliloquies interesting.

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