How to Audio Drama: Your Setting

Last updated on March 30th, 2020

So, your audio drama has a concept. There’s a good chance your concept came with some degree of a setting in mind: a sci-fi concept might necessitate being on a space ship, a high fantasy concept might necessitate being in a kingdom, etc. But in this edition of How to Audio Drama, we’re going to dive deep into what makes a good setting for an audio drama, both in terms of your creative decisions and your practicals (anything about your audio drama that isn’t a creative decision).

Before you get too deep into your worldbuilding, let’s take a step back and think about how your setting could potentially impact your practicals, including your sound design and budget.

Be practical

When making your first audio drama, the last thing you want to do is get over your head. Your setting is one of the easiest traps for biting off more than you can chew. It might seem easy to set your audio drama in a modern day bustling city, but bustling cities mean lots of walla (crowd murmur noises) . It might seem too difficult to set your audio drama on a space ship, but the only noises we think of when we think “space ship” are a few sporadic beeps and bloops, some engine hum, and maybe an airlock hiss every now and then.

You don’t have to change your whole concept to accommodate a setting that’s easy on sound design. You can write fewer scenes with complex ambiance, you can go look for sound libraries catered to what you need, or you can talk to your sound designer very early in the process to get an idea of what they feel comfortable creating.

If you’re not sure where to start, here are some general types of settings that are usually simple or complex to design. These will, of course, vary depending on what the scene entails.

There are audio dramas that do all of these things well, no matter the level of complexity. Unwell takes the simple setting of a historical house and makes it more immersive and complex by giving each room its own ambiance and reverb. This is, hands down, an above and beyond step–but does it ever make a difference. It’s a great way to elevate a seemingly simple setting and make it something lush, complex, and captivating.

Meanwhile, the whimsical and delightful Hit the Bricks, which takes place in the land of Oz, has several scenes with strange and unfamiliar settings. Like Unwell, the sound design is meticulous. This isn’t just because it’s dealing with the complex settings the show requires, but because it roots all of those settings in familiar experiential sounds. Creating completely new settings will require a sound designer who isn’t just creative, but who can connect the abstract with the familiar so listeners have a sense of where the scene takes place.

And there’s no harm at all in making a podcast that requires very, very minimal sound design on behalf of the setting. Take, for instance, Palipsest‘s first season. This ghost story is told almost like an audiobook, though it does include some eerie sound design elements–not for the setting, but to emphasize the slow-build horror. Palimpsest doesn’t require the setting itself to contain much sound design, instead focusing on the narration itself.

When making an audio drama, you always need to keep your practicals (like what to expect from a sound designer and your sound design budget) in mind. Try to balance your creative goals with the resources you have now. You don’t want to go in with too much ambition only to be disappointed because your setting requires more sound design than you can manage right now.

Think about your message

Now that you’ve gotten your setting to something manageable with your practicals, you can dive into how that setting affects your story. The first thing you should consider is what message your audio drama is trying to convey. Is your story about war, oppression, community, hope, disaster? How will your setting help convey that message to the listener?

Say, for instance, you’re telling a high fantasy story about an underdog saving the world. What kind of people are in power in your setting? How did they come to that power? If you’re not writing an allegory (a metaphor with a 1:1 comparison, in which each facet represents a facet of its inspiration), but your setting is following the same patterns as real-life history, ask yourself why. Does your setting need to follow those patterns and structures? What do those say about the world you’re creating?

Or say, for instance, that you’re telling a story about feeling isolated or alienated. How does your setting convey that feeling of being alone? If it takes place in a natural setting, what else exists in that setting–and what can you remove from that setting to hammer in the isolation without it sounding unrealistic and breaking immersion?

Your setting always has an impact on the story that you’re telling. In every step of making your audio drama, you should return to the message you’re trying to tell and carry that through every choice of your writing. Your setting is the first place you should implement that practice.

Think about your characters

Without getting into a philosophical debate about nature vs. nurture, it seems an easy claim to say that someone’s world impacts at least a little bit of who they are, how they think, how they behave, and how they speak. Now that you know your setting, you don’t have to connect it to individual characters just yet; we’ll talk about characters in a future edition. Instead, you should think about what the setting could mean for different types of characters.

Does your setting require different languages or dialects? How do the politics of your setting affect different types of characters? Are there foods, pieces of media, climates, customs, etc. that characters in this setting would and wouldn’t be familiar with? Make a list of things characters would know and wouldn’t know, depending on where they are in your setting. This will come in handy when building all of your characters later.

Find inspiration

The next step in refining your setting is getting inspired and organized. I am a highly visual person, so when it comes to making an audio drama, I rely heavily on actual visual inspiration to keep my brain consistent when writing scenes. Whether it’s for a country, a city, or even a room and its decor, I like to have lots of images and references when I write.

My inspiration tools for settings have nothing to do with typical writing exercises. I don’t write out descriptions for what rooms look like. You could go this route, but in my experience, having visuals and sharing them with your team makes sure that everyone is on the same page. The tools I frequently use are:

• Pinterest boards
• Online furniture catalogs
• The Sims

Yes, The Sims.

Pinterest boards

Pinterest boards will make a recurrence when we talk about characters, but they’re a great way to organize lots and lots of images the help create one aesthetic for a location. Here’s an example of a board I have for a fictional setting with an alternate history:

I like compiling images that represent every aspect of a setting in one place: the architecture, the flora and fauna, the fashion, the food, the typical decor, everything right down to musical instruments and specific landmarks. This helps me immerse myself in the setting before I start writing, which then helps me convey that setting to the listener.

It may seem strange to focus on visuals when your medium is audio, but in my opinion, this makes it even more vital to have a clear mental image when writing. Your listener will not see the same mental images as you, but if you have a clear vision in mind, at least some of that spirit will be imparted in your listener.

Furniture catalogs

If you’re working in any kind of realistic setting, furniture catalogs are a rich source of inspiration. Like how a character dresses, how they decorate and furnish their home says a lot about who they are–and can inform your sound design. Does one location in your setting have lots of hard wood? Does another have big, plush sofas and lots of rugs? Both of those will affect how reverb works in that room.

I am not an interior designer by any means. This means that when it comes to planning what certain rooms look like, I love turning to the “inspiration” sections most online furniture catalogs have. Instead of just showing the furniture piece by piece, they’ll design an entire room, always with much more wisdom and elegance than I could manage:

More than once, I’ve thought up a character based solely on a room I loved versus attributing a room to a character. This can be a fun exercise for thinking up new characters, but it’s also a great tactic to stay organized–and so is The Sims.

The Sims

I grew up playing The Sims–not for making Sims themselves, but for making houses. I’m not especially good or talented at this, but what matters is that they’re a phenomenal tool for keeping track of a building’s layout. I use The Sims to make floorplans for every major recurring building I write about.

If you don’t want to buy and learn a game for this sole purpose, you can obviously always use graph paper or actual blueprinting software. The Sims is what I know from my millennial youth, so it’s what I use. What matters is having a single image with a single floorplan you can use and reference over and over. If several scenes happen in a character’s house, your audience should be able to have a sense for what that house feels like. Your sound designer should have a clear concept of how long somebody would be walking from one room to another, and you should avoid conflicting directions of where rooms are in specific buildings within your dialogue.

Do your research

The last, most important, and unfortunately most individual aspect of building your setting is doing your research. The level of research you do depends on how important your setting will ultimately be to your story, but a good rule of thumb is that more research will usually mean a more immersive experience for your audience that won’t break their suspension of disbelief. This is especially true for realistic fiction, but genre fiction can benefit from plenty of research as well.

Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself to help guide your research (which will likely just be many, many google searches):

And now, it’s time to start putting everything together! Write up a document explaining different plot-significant areas in your setting. Write them out in as much detail as you can without burning out. This will help guide the rest of your pre-writing, helping you define your characters, your plot, and how those two come together.

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.