Podcaster Resources

How to Audio Drama: Writing Exposition

August 31, 2020 10:30 am

Last updated on September 22nd, 2020

When you learn how to write exposition for the page, you’re taught a lot of “rules.” If you’ve read much of How to Audio Drama, you already know my feelings about rules. In this edition, though, my philosophy that not every rule applies to every creator or creation applies even more.

Writing exposition for audio and writing exposition for the page–or the screen–are completely different beasts. Audio processing works differently from processing as you read something or see something. Let’s dive into the practices you should follow for audio, and how they differ from the advice you may have been told in other practices.

Show, don’t tell?

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most common credos I’ve heard in my various creative writing classes, groups, communities, etc.–but it’s also a rule I’ve seen get some much-needed criticism in recent years. “Show, don’t tell” means that instead of explaining something to your audience, you should let explanation happen organically within the story.

Take, for instance, a scene in which a character examines a strange piece of technology. If you were to tell, you would explain exactly what the technology was and how it worked, even if the character examining the technology already knew that information. If you were to show, you would just have the character use the technology without explaining it; the action of using it would be explanation enough.

But this isn’t the case for audio. With no visuals and usually no narrator, your audience will need some things explained. If any character does anything unusual, though, like enter an apartment through a window instead of a front door, you will have to tell. If you have two characters and only one sits down, you will have to tell. The inclination might be to only explain things in dialogue if they’re complicated, but I’ve found that often, the opposite is true. Small but meaningful gestures often need to be commented on, whereas complicated relationships or situations can usually be explained naturally as they unfold.

If your show has genre elements, you should expect to tell a little more. Don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong if you have someone give a short explanation of how a spell works or what an alien planet’s climate is like, as long as the character being told wouldn’t already know the information. This is why many pieces of media rely on a protagonist that knows as much about the setting as the audience does; it allows the protagonist, ad by proxy the audience, to ask questions and receive answers.

But like everything else in writing, you will have to gauge how much showing and telling you do with your podcast. It is always easier to delete than to add too late into the process, so given this is ostensibly your first audio drama, I would recommend relying heavier on telling than showing all the way until post-production. It is always easier to have lines where characters explain things too much and delete them because the sound design carries a scene. It is much more difficult, and much more inconvenient, to ask an actor after the fact to give you a spare line explaining something. Just because you write something and record something doesn’t mean you absolutely need to use it.

Yeah, okay, let’s talk about framing devices

When people discuss “good” and “bad” exposition in audio drama, they often bring up framing devices. In audio, a framing device usually gives a reason for the story to be told in audio, and it usually allows them to explain things out loud more easily. A classic example is making your podcast be your protagonist’s audio diary, or having your protagonist be an investigative reporter.

There is nothing wrong with having a framing device for your podcast, especially if it’s a first podcast. Framing devices get a lot of criticism for being overdone and for giving easy ways to tell instead of show. I do understand, and to some degree agree with, the criticism that framing devices are overdone. It was difficult to find a fiction podcast a few years ago that didn’t employ a framing device. But I don’t agree that making something “too easy” in storytelling is a bad thing. Why not let things be easy sometimes? Making a fiction podcast is really hard. You’re allowed to let some things be easy.

If you use a framing device, I recommend finding a new spin on it. Arden is a good example of this, making its protagonists true crime podcasters, but also working as a parody of the true crime genre. Unplaced also works well for me, following a protagonist’s audio diary because they are incapable of interacting with anyone but need to be heard and documented. But even if you can’t find a new spin on a framing device, I promise, you can tell a great story using one all the same.

Let the world rely on the audio

Let’s look at the show/tell concept from the opposite perspective. Yes, the small gestures need to be explained–but the opposite is also true. You often need to explain much less about your podcast’s world in dialogue. Instead, your world can rely heavily on sound design. Most places we’ve experienced in real life and in media have fairly identifiable audio landscapes, as well as audio elements that can be brought together to make something new but still recognizable.

Let’s take the first episode of We Fix Space Junk as an example:

We’re introduced to the world via several quick-succession sounds:

An alarm
A heavy door opening
Twangy, blues-inspired music (probably non-diegetic)
More doors and hatches
Then, the dialogue

The image is immediately clear. We’re in some sort of structure that relies on heavy metal hatches and doors: a space ship. The alarm signals that something happened that the people running the space ship didn’t want to happen. And the music suggests that this space ship is run down, old, and probably kept together with duct tape and a prayer. We can assume that the characters we’re about to meet probably aren’t prim and proper, either.

A ton is told about a world with just a few simple assets in sound design. When it comes to world building, you can write exposition with plans to edit it out as needed, but you’ll likely have to rely on explanation much less. We’ll discuss this in a much later edition that focuses on sound design, but for the purpose of writing exposition, a few quick sentences about the setting written as stage directions will go a long way.

What’s in a name?

One last quick tip for you. Have your characters say each others’ names as much as possible without sounding unhinged. Because your audience won’t get the visuals of a character or dialogue tags explaining who said what, it can be much more difficult to remember a character’s name. If you have actors who sound even a little similar, it might be difficult to tell those characters apart. The easiest way to get around that is to just have your characters use each others’ names. The names will get cemented in your audience’s head, and they’ll start connecting those names with the appropriate voices.

How to Audio Drama is our weekly column documenting every piece of information you’d need to start your own audio drama (aka fiction podcast). The series can be read in full, or read volume by volume. You can use our table of contents to find each How to Audio Drama installment, and you can submit questions to our monthly How to Audio Drama advice column.