Thinking in Sound

Donald McWhinnie, in his excellent book The Art of Radio, said that "...the writer's business is to make excessive demands of his interpreters," a challenge that is probably easier to rise to in radio than in any other medium, because the scope of it is so vast.

A radio play can travel between centuries and continents.  It can take place in any number of exotic locations, or within the confines of one person's mind.  The possibilities are pretty much limitless, yet precisely because of this, as a writer you need to be quite disciplined in how you structure a play. You have to attract your audience and hold their attention by the means of sound alone - there's none of the light, colour and movement which help to enhance plays in the theatre, or in films or television. The radio writer has nothing but sound to stimulate the imagination of the listener, so it needs to be rich and varied.

Many  writers who are new to the medium can get easily carried away with the wonderful box of tricks available as sound effects, but these are only meant to support the key ingredient, which is dialogue.  Gripping, nuanced dialogue that interests and excites the listener should be at the centre of your work.  This is how you convey important information, which means that speech on radio needs to be a little more explicit than anything written for a visual medium.  It is a subtle trick to pull off, because too much overt signposting sounds stilted and artificial and your listeners will probably start turning over to Radio 2, (or worse!)

It's not simply a matter of stringing together conversations - if a play was all talk it would quickly become dull.  The writer needs to think of the other aural elements of sounds, music and -- important but sometimes neglected -- silence.  Pauses help the listener to assimilate what they have heard and prepare for what happens next.

You need to keep the mix of sounds you use as luscious as possible.  Try altering the lengths of sequences, or the number of people speaking, or the pace of the dialogue, or the location of the action,  or the background acoustics.  For example, in the world of sound, one room can sound like any other if they are roughly the same size, but the difference between an interior and an exterior acoustic can be huge and therefore dramatic. Try contrasting  a noisy sequence that has a number of voices and effects with a quieter passage of interior monologue, and see where that takes you....