How to Audio Drama: Editing Your First Season

You’ve written and edited your first script. You’ve found your team, your story bible is at the ready for inspiration, and your outline is all set up to keep you on track. You have all the tools you need to write your first audio drama’s first season–but now, let’s talk what’s next. Editing individual episode scripts does not a season make. It’s time to take a step back and look at your season in full and edit it as one complete piece of writing.

Let’s edit your first full audio drama season. Grab a drink. Get comfy. It’s gonna be a process.

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Assemble your team

If you have avoided my advice about working with a team up to this point. Please reconsider. Please. Editing a full season is such an intense endeavor. I promise it will be easier on you with support. If you can’t afford a team, try to find people you trust whose work you’d be happy to edit in turn. Barter with your friends. Reach out to your communities to find people who want to help. Please don’t edit your season alone.

If you do have a team, it’s time to set some roles for the explicit purpose of editing the season. As the showrunner, you should define the editing checks and balances that make you the most comfortable. For VALENCE, my team has agreed that I have final say on each script as our showrunner. I have enough experience going through rigorous editing processes to know when to trust my team’s judgment over my own feelings on what should be cut. I also have enough experience in audio to know what moments will be integral to the plot or characterization by merit of how they will establish the sound once they’re off the page. Not everyone will have the same level of experience, or the same level of trust for their collaborators. And that’s okay. It just means you might want to consider implementing a voting method on big cuts instead of trusting your own judgment implicitly.

With your role as a showrunner defined in terms of editing, your next step is to define the strengths of your co-writers. This will help inform their roles in the editing process. Anne Baird, for instance, operates as the antagonist writer for VALENCE, but they’re also a master of continuity checks. Katie Youmans is in charge of a few characters, but she’s also the person we call on when we want our audience to be emotionally devastated. I’m the head writer, for sure, but I’m also here for the goofs. If we want something off the wall or subversive, I’m usually the person on the team to get funny and weird.

Identify the key strengths of the writers on your team and trust them to fulfill those roles when editing the season in full. Honor their ideas and intuition as much as you honor your own. Thank them for their work consistently. If they have a good idea, explicitly tell them it was a good idea. And if they make big changes in an episode, be sure to credit them for those big edits, too. Writing is exhausting. Editing is exhausting. Make sure that you’re taking care of your team as much as you’re taking care of your audio drama and of yourself.

Get out your charts

It’s time to gather every single organizational tool you’ve used leading up to this point. Grab your outline. Grab your story bible. Grab your character questionnaires. Grab your Pinterest boards and Sims houses. And, maybe most importantly, grab everything you used to plan out your plot beats. You might not need every asset you’ve used until this point, but you want to make sure you have them at the ready regardless.

Google Docs folders work well for organizing these assets, but so do documents with lists of links to the assets. Platforms like Evernote or OneNote are too finnicky and freeform for me, but I know other writers who swear by them. What matters most is that you and your team can easily access everything you might need to reference as you edit. You should have resources on everything from concrete details for continuity to current events articles reminding you why you’re making what you’re making to playlists that help cement you in your show’s vibe.

Set aside the time

Editing a season in full is time intensive. Editing one episode’s script will probably take about three times as long as the expected runtime of the episode, and that’s assuming there aren’t any big edits or difficult decisions to make. You should treat the editing for each episode like being in an actual writers’ room. That means, if you can, scheduling calls where everyone can talk and hash things out together. If that isn’t a possibility for your team, try to find some method of collaboration that’s more active than emails back and forth.

Because you want your season editing to feel synchronized and organic, you’re going to have to set aside some dedicated time. For VALENCE‘s second season, my collaborators and I set aside an entire weekend with 8-hour days to mark everything that needed edits, and then the subsequent week to asynchronously make those edits, checking in whenever we finished editing an episode. This is what our editing weekend’s first day schedule looked like:

VALENCE‘s episodes are about half an hour on average, and we we scheduled three hours for each read through and editing session. Even with how much flex time we factored in, we still routinely got behind schedule. Keep that in mind as you plan your editing time.

But also keep in mind that we scheduled breaks into our editing weekend. Some of these breaks were directly related to VALENCE to keep us in that headspace–things like finding a song that represented a character, planning an outfit for a character, etc. But we also factored in the need to give our brains a real break from the work we were doing. We used Discord’s screenshare function to watch silly YouTube videos together or sent each other silly pictures.

You need to take breaks, and that means you need to factor breaks into your scheduling.

Read. Everything. Out. Loud.

When editing your season in full, you need to go episode by episode, and you need to read it out loud with your team. Assign roles, regardless of whether or not any of you will actually be acting. Play off of each other, but also make sure all the lines you’ve written are easy to deliver. Reading every line out loud is the only way to know how they will sound out loud. Reading things in your head does not sound the same.

If there are accessibility concerns for some of your team when considering this step, be sure to be cognizant about those needs. If someone on your team needs to read lips or see captions, services like Google Meet provide both video and automatic captions as you speak. If someone on your team cannot deliver lines, ask them how they would like to be included in the process, and do not penalize them if they just want to listen or observe.

Edit, but on a bigger scale

Luckily, once you start editing, things should fall into place. This is because you already have all the tools to edit a whole season; they’re the same tools you use to edit an individual script, just on a larger level. The same concepts apply, and you should have had plenty of practice at this point. Editing a season is time-intensive, and it can be stressful, but you already have the muscle memory to know what you’re doing. You’ve got this.

Don’t strive for perfection

Perfection is not going to happen. It simply is not going to happen. Take it from the team over at Start With This: “Done is better than perfect.”

When your season makes you feel fulfilled, when the emotional beats earnestly register for your team, allow yourself to be done. Your season will not be perfect. There will be errors. It is okay. You can never do better than your best.

Celebrate proper

You have done a lot of work, and while you have miles to go before you sleep, you should give yourself some kind of real reward. It can be easy to become discouraged during editing. It can be easy to feel discouraged even when you’ve decided your season is as edited as it should be. Plan something nice for yourself, and plan something nice for your team. Whatever reward makes you feel incentivized to finish editing and properly rewarded for your work will be up to you, but I do highly recommend drafting an email to your team telling them how grateful you are for their help, too. Making art is emotional work, and it should be treated as such both for yourself and your team.

Prepare for some big feelings

In the next edition of How to Audio Drama, we’ll talk about the strange and often unexpected feelings that come with finishing a season. You might feel excited and fulfilled now, but if you don’t, I want to tell you now that it’s okay if you feel confused or let down. It’s normal. Prepare yourself to run through a gamut of emotions, and try to rely on optimism, your reward, or affirmations from your team as you get ready to call a wrap on writing your first season.

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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.