Most of it is completely pointless.

Obviously, yes, some callouts in the podcasting community are important and necessary. Calling out a show’s racism or discussing transphobic trends in casting calls are both important because they affect people’s real, actual lives. But the vast majority of podcast discourse I’ve seen is just people taking something very minor and treating it like it is the literal end of the goddamn world. In the sphere of Twitter podcasting discourse, somebody tweeting that they dislike a fiction trope spurs more arguments and attacks than someone tweeting that they think all trans people should die.

There is no room for minor arguments; no space given for small differences in opinion. Two people cannot have a personal disagreement without one or both of them posting about it publicly and forcing the entire community to pick a side. Everything is a battle and everybody is determined to Win, because Losing means ostracization from the community—this community which drains you so much, which leaves you so stressed out and anxious all the time, but which you’re dependent on because you need to stay in people’s good graces for them to support your art.

If your mutual tweets something about disability rights that you disagree with, you can’t politely say “I disagree with you and here’s why.” You absolutely can’t just leave it be and chalk it up to a difference of opinion. In the black-and-white world of Twitter discourse, there is no middle ground: there is only Right and Wrong, and you cannot allow yourself to be Wrong because being Wrong means you are a terrible person. Good People are only ever Right; they never make mistakes, never have bad days, never say anything Wrong.

Your mind (and your body, for that matter; our bodies have terribly wonderful memories) remembers every time that you have watched the people on your timeline viciously destroy anybody who did something Wrong. Maybe you even participated. It was justified, of course—they were Wrong and you were Right, and you were simply expelling Bad People from the community so that Good People could remain safe. But now, all of those incidents have hardwired your brain to be terrified of being Wrong: if you’re Wrong, the timeline will turn on you in an instant. You cannot allow yourself to be Wrong. To be Wrong is to be Bad and to be Bad is to be Worthless. 

So when someone says something you disagree with, you cannot leave it be, nor can you approach them as if they are a kind person who simply made a mistake. No, that’s not enough. They were Wrong, remember? And Wrong people are dangerous. They can’t be a Good Person if they were Wrong. There is no such thing as a mistake. There is no such thing as two people having equally valid opinions. Only one person—the Good Person—can be Right. And this person said something Wrong, so they are Bad. And since they are Bad, you can’t approach them in good faith and have a polite discussion with them to see their side of things. They must be intentionally malicious, they must be Bad, so you are under a moral obligation to attack them as hard as you can.

Read more: 20 of the Weirdest and Worst Things I’ve Seen on Casting Calls

Halo and Horns run rampant in the community.

Two people have a disagreement. This is how it starts. This is how it could end. But it won’t end like that—it can’t. Disagreements in podcast Twitter cannot be resolved privately; they must be resolved in public, so that everybody can join in. What is a more efficient way to separate the Good from the Bad? How better to exile the Worthless than to force them to state their opinion on every single possible issue until you finally find one they’re Wrong about?

If you think that you can avoid this by just never stating your opinion, you are so very, very wrong. Not stating an opinion is, in and of itself, Bad. See, it’s not just enough to not have a Bad Opinion—to be a Good Person, you have to have a Good Opinion that you state publicly, as often as possible, at every single opportunity. If you do not publicly state the Good Opinion, it will be assumed that your opinion is Bad. You are guilty until proven innocent. What, you want to stay out of discourse? You don’t think you know enough about the situation to have an opinion? That just means that you’re a selfish coward who’s refusing to use their platform for good. You monster.

Complicating this even further is how many people will subtweet about drama rather than just stating their opinion plainly. “Subtweeting” is the act of making a tweet where you do not explicitly say what (or who) the subject of the tweet is, but the context makes it clear for anybody who’s tuned into current discourse. 

So, instead of tweeting:

“I disagree with Amy’s stance on podcast conventions—I think that cons should pay their speakers whenever possible.”

You tweet:

“Wow, I cannot believe that there are still popular podcasters who genuinely think it’s okay for conventions to not pay their speakers. I guess you all just hate poor people and think that only rich people deserve to speak at conventions lol”

It’s not enough to share your Good Opinion—you have to make sure it’s worded to cast the other side in the worst light possible, so that nobody can say so much as “I think they actually make some good points” without seeming evil. Now this isn’t just an issue of whether or not conventions are obligated to pay their speakers, it’s an issue of morality and social justice: if someone doesn’t agree with you, that doesn’t just mean they have a different opinion, it means that they hate poor people.  

And Twitter isn’t helping.

This serves the purpose of drawing people deeper into podcast discourse. If you log onto Twitter and see half of your timeline subtweeting about what appears to be the same topic, natural human curiosity will compel you to dig deeper. But it’s not just that, is it? It’s not just curiosity—it’s fear. If you don’t know who they’re talking about, they could be talking about someone you like; and if they’re talking about someone you like, you have to stop liking that person ASAP so that nobody will think you’re associated with them. They’re Wrong now. They’re Bad. And only Bad People can tolerate the presence of other Bad People. If you don’t figure out who everyone is tweeting about and you later make an innocuous tweet mentioning that you like that person, the subtweets will turn to you instead:

“lmao I cannot believe there are people who actually still support Amy after everything she said. unfollowed.”

People who subtweet insist that they do it for their own safety—that if they outright said who their tweets were about, they would be attacked by that person’s supporters; so, you see, subtweeting is the only way to voice their stance on the issue without getting attacked. 

But it doesn’t actually work like that. 

Here’s the thing: your Twitter account is not a diary. It is not private. Even locked Twitters, often referred to as “private accounts”, are not actually completely private if they have any followers. Twitter is, inherently, a public medium. When you tweet something, it’s because you want other people to read it. You cannot argue with that; that is the very nature of social media. If you wanted it to stay private, you would have written it down in a journal. But you posted it on Twitter, which means that you wanted people to see it; and if you wanted it to be seen, then you wanted it to be understood; and if you wanted it to be understood, then you had to include enough information that people familiar with the drama can tell what it’s about. And if they can figure it out… so can the people you fear would attack you. 

Subtweeting does not keep you safe. It just doesn’t. That’s an argument that falls apart the second you examine it further. But it does a great job of further dividing the community into an “in” group and an “out” group: if you know, you know. And if you don’t know, that’s your fault for not being online 24/7. How dare you not have in-depth knowledge of every single argument and wrongdoing in the podcast community? How dare you have a personal life (or a job or a family or health issues or a breakup or—) that prevented you from sharing your opinion on Twitter discourse within 15 minutes of the first tweet going up?

And the podcast community pulls you back in.

And this is how the podcast community becomes a self-sustaining mess, an endlessly renewable resource of drama and tears: it is not enough for us to be trapped in the suffocating grip of podcast discourse. We have to make sure everybody else is stuck here with us. 

The full scope of how bad this is didn’t hit me until a few weeks ago. I was taking a shower and thinking about something I was contemplating posting on Twitter. As is my habit now, that quickly turned into me thinking about every possible bad faith interpretation someone could have of it, every angle that someone could use to attack me. I started playing with the wording of the tweet to make it more clear. Finally, I got it as clear as it could possibly be, but I knew that people could still find a way to attack me for it. I started planning out my potential responses to those, what I would say to defend myself. This is a habit I developed ages ago that I haven’t really thought much about. But as I was standing under the hot water and thinking this all over, it began to feel familiar somehow. I thought about that, tried to figure out why. And then the pieces clicked into place.

This is what I’ve done in every toxic and abusive relationships I’ve had. This is it exactly. In those relationships, I knew that anything I could say could be used as ammunition to gun me down. To protect myself, I would plan out the exact wording for every single thing I wanted to say—no matter how innocuous—and prepare myself for the ways it could be turned against me. That is a survival skill I picked up to survive toxicity and abuse. And now it’s a survival skill that I learned again to survive Twitter.

Twitter is not a healthy environment. Most people know that, but many podcasters seem to hold the opinion that the podcast community is different. But I assure you, it’s not. It is just as bad as everywhere else. Good Liberal Podcasters who have the Right Opinions and say the Right Things will tear you down as viciously as any incel Redditor, but while they do it, they’ll smile at you ever so sweetly and tell you it’s all your fault for being Bad, for not being as Liberal as them, for not having the Right Opinions. If you think that homophobic fundamentalists can be vicious, just wait until you tell a queer podcaster on Twitter that you think bisexuals can call themselves femme. Podcasters will tear you apart, make you feel Worthless, convince everyone around you to abandon you, and then they’ll go and cry about how traumatic it was for them, how you triggered them, how they just don’t feel safe around you anymore.

This is not healthy. This is not good. No matter what podcasters think, this is not Right.

So how will the community respond to this?

What’s really infuriating to me about writing this piece is that I already know all of the possible ways the response to it could shake out.

Option 1:

People ignore it. This isn’t terribly unlikely—something I’ve noticed as a Discover Pods writer is that our pieces rarely get large amounts of attention unless people want to yell at us for doing something Wrong. (Editor’s note: This is writer Cassie Josephs’s feelings and not an official Discover Pods standpoint, and we have not done research into this phenomenon. This is a vibe only. As someone who was dragged back onto Twitter to defend a writer, though, it certainly feels accurate.)

Option 2:

People are angry. This also seems fairly likely. In this option, the exact people this article is about will see this article and, on some level, recognize their own behavior. But instead of thinking “Hey, yeah, that isn’t great for me to do”, instead of reflecting and growing and maybe even changing, they’ll say that this article is problematic. That I hate marginalized podcasters, that I’m villainizing safety tools (“Subtweeting keeps us safe!”), that I’m saying nobody should speak up about mistreatment and that nobody should believe abuse victims. They’ll rip every single line apart to find things I said that they think are Wrong. It won’t matter that none of that is true. It won’t matter that reading the entire article would prove that’s not what I’m saying at all. People will be angry because the only other option is acknowledging they’re Wrong, and they’re still convinced that being Wrong makes you Worthless. They cannot accept a world in which they are not Right.

Option 3:

People are lacking all self-awareness. The exact type of person this article is about will read the article and think “Wow, that’s awful! I’m so glad I don’t do that!”, ignoring all of the subtweets they’ve made, all the drama they’ve retweeted, all of the people they’ve viciously attacked for being Wrong. They’ll retweet the article and say “This is so true!” and then right after it they’ll retweet a callout that amounts to nothing more than “this person should be completely and totally ostracized from the community because they said something that made me feel a little sad”. 

When I first became aware of these issues, I might have viewed this article differently. I might have thought “Well, maybe if people read this article, they’ll change!”. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe the issues in the podcast community ultimately run deeper than podcasting itself. The issue stems from years of social media wearing away at our ability to feel compassion for other people, our ability to see nuance, our ability to accept being Wrong. As surely as rocks being ground into sand, the echo chamber that is social media has created an environment that grinds away kindness and compassion until all that’s left is anger and cruelty. This issue did not originate in the podcast community. But, despite what some podcasters say, it is sure as hell present in it.

Read more: Black History Month: Integrated Diversity in Podcasting

So why did I write this article about the podcasting community? Why bother at all?

Honestly, part of it is probably catharsis. Not just for me, but for my friends. When I first started sharing fragments of this article with my podcasting friends, they told me how much they saw their own experiences in this article. I am writing about what we all go through. Maybe that will help us feel better. I don’t know. 

But I think there’s something else, too. I don’t hope that this article will change anything, but I do hope that some of the people who need to hear this message will see it. That maybe—just maybe—this article will make them realize how toxic their environment is, that they don’t need to put up with it, and that they can escape if they want to.

To those people, I want to say this:  

In July 2021, my stepdad had a stroke. It came out of nowhere—he didn’t drink, didn’t do hard drugs, ate well, exercised regularly. He did everything “right” and he still had a stroke. And then, in September, complications from that stroke took his life. He was only 44 years old. I thought that he was going to be in my life for 40+ years. Instead, he was in it for seven.

And now, with a new appreciation for how horrifically short life can be, I cannot find any way to convince myself that the discourse in the podcast community is worth it. I cannot see how there is any purpose to the way that people will be publicly torn apart over nothing—over discourse that does not actually matter. 

Actual queer people are not physically hurt by a straight actor playing a gay character. A cishet creator writing queer characters will not set the queer rights movement back three decades. Someone criticizing your event or awards show or network will not kill you. A creator running their show on volunteer labor is not going to topple the economy. Creators putting ads in their show does not ruin your experience of listening to podcasts forever. A critic writing a negative review of your show does not mean that you can never make podcasts again. None of this matters. All of this is just people tearing each other apart for stupid, petty, pointless reasons. It’s just a bunch of hurt people dedicating hours of their week—even hours of their day—to hurting each other more.

And what do you actually gain from it? Does it help you grow as a person? Does it make you happy? Does it make the world a better place? 

Or does it just make you upset? Does getting into Twitter arguments actually make your life—or anyone’s life—better in any way, or does it just make your mental health worse by triggering anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and anger over things that you can’t actually ever change?

One night, my stepdad was alive and well, with no idea of what was about to come. He went to work, said hi to his friends, kissed my mom and told her he loved her. He thought he’d get to tell her a million more times. By the next morning, he was comatose in a hospital. A few weeks later, he was dead. I could die tomorrow. You could, too. You could die tonight. In an hour. In a minute.

I want you to ask yourself this: if you knew that today was your last day alive, how much of it would you spend arguing about podcasts online? Keeping that answer in mind, please realize that today could very well be your last. And if it is, you could spend that day drawing, singing, hanging out with your friends, reading a good book, walking through your favorite park, spending time with your family… or you could spend it arguing with people online about things that don’t even matter.

I’ve made my choice. What’s yours?

The post Why the Podcasting Community Sucks appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

But I don’t think that mentally ill characters should never exist in horror at all. As a mentally ill person who loves horror, I would never say that absolutely nobody is ever allowed to represent me in one of my favorite genres. I just, y’know, wish that people would work with us instead of against us and portray their mentally ill characters kindly. If you’re interested in doing that, here are some tips on how to do it well.

Don’t…

… make your villain mentally ill.

I’m sorry, I’m just gonna put a big ol’ stop sign here. There’s a history here that cannot be ignored: mentally ill people—particularly those with “scary” disorders like schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder (commonly known as multiple personality disorder)—have long been stereotyped as evil and violent, and this stereotype has formed the basis of a huge swath of popular horror. But this is an incredibly harmful stereotype that contributes to mentally ill people being discriminated against by a society that views them as inherently dangerous. (Editor’s note: Mentally ill people are 16 times more likely to be the target of police violence, which is additionally compounded by factors like race, gender expression, class, etc.)

In addition to being harmful, it’s also just plain inaccurate. Being mentally ill is far more likely to make you a victim of abuse than a perpetrator of it, as abuse against mentally ill people—in forms like institutionalization, forced sterilization, and parents/spouses being given the legal right to control our lives—is socially acceptable because it’s considered a way to keep those Scary Evil Crazies from hurting Good Normal People. 

(“But this mass shooter was mentally ill—” no, he was racist/homophobic/sexist, thanks for your time.)

A caveat: if you yourself are mentally ill, I’m not going to tell you what you can and can’t do. But I am going to tell you that if you don’t have the specific mental illness that you want to give your villain (or something very similar), that’s probably not your story to tell. Dealing with anxiety doesn’t mean that it’s okay for you to give your serial killer dissociative identity disorder. 

… bait and switch “mentally ill” characters who are actually neurotypical. 

Alright, work through a thought experiment with me.

You’re queer. You hear about a movie released by a major studio that has a lesbian character in it. You think, “Oh boy! A queer character in a big movie? That never happens. I should go watch it.” So you go watch it, and you’re all excited at the start of the movie because hey, lesbian character! But then the twist comes: the character isn’t actually a lesbian, she was just being haunted by ghosts who made her think she was a lesbian, and she’s actually straight and ends the movie in a relationship with a man.

… Yeah, okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor. But you get what I’m going for, right? The bottom line is this: when you’re part of any marginalized group, it really sucks to see a character who you think is going to be like you until the big twist reveals that they were never like you at all.

… make your mentally ill characters helpless victims.

Okay, so, you have a character who’s actually mentally ill and who isn’t a villain. Great first steps! The next one: do they have agency? Do they get to do cool, interesting things—or, if that’s not really the kind of story you’re telling, do they have some say in the actions they take? Or do they just exist to be helplessly brutalized without ever getting a chance to fight back? If it’s the latter, please reconsider that. 

A writing tip I see frequently is that your character’s actions should have actual effects on the plot—both good and bad. A character who just deals with things happening to them is nowhere near as interesting as a character who’s given the room to make actual choices, take actions, and then deal with both the positive and negative repercussions of them. I think that’s good writing advice in general, but I think it particularly applies to mentally ill characters.

I would love to see a mentally ill horror protagonist who actually gets to do cool things. A character with dissociative identity disorder who saves the day. A schizophrenic Final Girl. Mentally ill characters who get to actually do things instead of just having things done to them. 

Maybe…

… refrain from using psychiatric hospitals as a setting.

I am ducking tomatoes right now from other mentally ill people who think that this should be under the “don’t” list because they don’t think that horror should ever, under any circumstances, be set in a psych hospital. But I disagree! 

There’s an episode of The Magnus Archives, “MAG 177: Wonderland”, that takes place in a mental hospital. I actually loved that episode, because it’s very clear in the way it’s portrayed that the horrifying thing is not the patients. Rather, the horror comes from the doctors who abuse the mentally ill patients under their care. I, personally, am fine with horror like that.

Read more: How The Magnus Archives Helped Me Love Horror Again

Because the truth is that there’s a lot of abuse that goes on in psych hospitals, both historically and presently. And it is genuinely horrifying. To me, the issue with how psych hospitals are portrayed in most horror isn’t that they’re portrayed at all. Rather, it’s that the horror usually comes from the “crazy”, violent, evil patients who were locked up for good reason, because if they weren’t locked up, they would hurt people. 

In the smaller number of portrayals where the doctors are portrayed as abusive, the main character of the story is usually a neurotypical person who is mistakenly locked in the hospital despite not being mentally ill at all. The implication is that the abuse happening to them is only bad because they’re not really mentally ill, which itself carries the inherent implication that if they were mentally ill, they’d deserve it.

But in real life, there is a lot of abuse that happens in psych hospitals to patients who are genuinely mentally ill and absolutely do not deserve abuse. It happens, it’s scary, and it’s worth talking about. Dare I say, it’s even worth making horror about. So, yeah, I am actually okay with psych settings where the horror comes from the abuse that the mentally ill patients face.

… avoid giving your villain trauma.

Yes, yes, we all love a good tragic backstory for a villain. Done right, it can serve to humanize them a little, to show that they’re hurting the world because the world hurt them first. Done wrong, it can come across like the creator is trying to justify the villain’s unjustifiable actions. Done really wrong, it can imply that the very act of experiencing trauma turns you evil.

I’m not saying that you can never give your villain a tragic backstory. But if your villain has undergone some form of trauma (whether that’s sexual assault, abuse, the death of a loved one, or anything else traumatic) and your heroes have not, that carries some bad implications. When your villain is the only primary character who’s undergone trauma—especially when that trauma is a key part in what turned them villainous—the implication is that the very act of experiencing a traumatic event makes you evil. 

But in real life, trauma does not make you harm people. On the contrary, it can actually make you more likely to experience further harm: if you’ve been abused before, that can affect your baseline standards for how other people should treat you, which can make you more likely to stay in future abusive situations because you think you don’t deserve better. 

This is in the “maybe” section because, like above, I don’t want to say that you can never have a villain who underwent something traumatic. But I am saying that if you give your villain trauma, you should give at least one of your heroes trauma, too. And really, doesn’t giving both your hero and villain trauma and showing their different reactions to it just make them better foils?

Do…

… write mentally ill protagonists, not just side characters.

I can think of a very small number of protagonists in any genre who are canonically mentally ill, and an even smaller number who have “scary” mental illnesses like personality disorders, schizophrenia, and DID. Let us be the heroes instead of just the side kick or the one-off character intended to teach a Very Special Lesson.

… show how it affects their life.

I’m not saying that you have to write your character experiencing ableism—you don’t—but mental illnesses do, by definition, affect some part of your life. How does your character’s mental illness affect their hygiene, their eating habits, their sleep schedule? Are there certain things they avoid because they trigger depression/psychosis/anxiety/etc? How does this affect them? How does it affect the story? If a character avoids being in total darkness because it’s a psychosis trigger, that’s going to become an issue real quick if they’re facing a demon who thrives in light and can only be avoided by being in the dark.

… research.

Any time you write a character in a marginalized group that you’re not in, it’s imperative that you do a lot of research to make sure you’re writing them correctly. Research the specific mental illness you’re writing, focusing primarily on resources written by people who have that mental illness themselves—not medical professionals who have worked with people who have it, not neurotypical people whose family members/friends have it, but actual mentally ill people who really have that illness. 

Research the symptoms, but don’t just read dry bullet point lists on medical websites—read personal accounts of what it’s actually like to experience them. Read nonfiction by us, but read fiction, too. Read the stories that we write about ourselves. Research stereotypes, things to do avoid. Ideally, you’ll also hire a sensitivity consultant—someone who has the mental illness you’re writing who can look over your work and verify that it’s accurate and not harmful.

Yep, that’s a lot of work. You know what else is a lot of work? Writing. You didn’t burst from your father’s head like Athena, fully-formed and with a perfect knowledge of everything you’ll ever want to write about. You practiced writing. You got feedback on your work. You researched how to write well. When you started writing fiction about things you weren’t familiar with, you did more research—whether that was looking into how long it takes someone to bleed out from a bullet wound, what people wore in medieval Europe, or how long it takes to drive across a country. You researched what it’s like to be a doctor, a firefighter, a lawyer. 

You’ve done research for your writing before. Do it again. And if you really, truly have some reason why you cannot do extensive research on this topic, don’t write mentally ill characters. I’m serious. Just don’t do it. No representation is better than harmful representation.

The post How to Audio Drama 202: Writing Mentally Ill Characters in Horror (Without Ableism) appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

The year is 2009. It’s a weeknight, maybe one or two in the morning, and I’m sitting at the family computer in my pajamas. The computer is just off the kitchen, which is just off all of the bedrooms in the house, so I’m sitting in the dark out of a worry that lights would wake my mom up.

(I am, technically, supposed to be asleep right now. Oops.)

I have maybe six or seven tabs open. There are several Wikipedia pages for different creatures in folklore and urban legend, which are always fun to read. But the thing that’s really holding my interest are these strange little websites I’ve found that collect horror stories and urban legends. They’re hosted on Angelfire or something similar, lovingly designed by some horror aficionado somewhere in the world. The background is black or dark brown, sometimes with patterns of bats or skulls; the buttons are shaped like tombstones or look like they’re dripping with blood.

I read about a hook-handed man murdering a young man walking to get help for his broken car.

A strange creature that looks like a human but contorted in ways that humans cannot, rushing through a cornfield towards a horrified college student.

A teenage girl whose house is broken into when her parents go out for the night.

I’m autistic with a special interest in horror, and I’m having the time of my life.

The year is 2014. I’ve dealt with hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions for as long as I can remember. As a child, when I lacked the words to fully describe what I was experiencing, my experiences were dismissed as insomnia, as anxiety. Nothing serious. Nothing anyone needs to help me with. I just need to stop bothering my parents so they can get a good night’s sleep. So for as long as I’ve been dealing with these issues, I deal with them on my own. I have my systems and they work for me. It’s fine. I’m fine.

Except it’s getting worse.

I have trouble being at home alone at night. I convinced my dad to get a pit bull so that I’d have someone at home with me when he’s away on business trips and my siblings are at our mom’s house, and having her helps, but not completely. I’m jumping at the voices of people passing outside, nearly crying at the sights of shadows that I’m convinced are moving. I try to find refuge in my favorite genres of media. But after watching a horror movie on Netflix leads to another week of sleepless nights, I come to a horrible conclusion:

Whatever is going on in my brain, horror is making it worse.

So I set horror aside. I try very hard to forget my old love, to pretend that I don’t miss it at all. I still have fantasy, still have sci-fi. I can read those. It’s fine. It’s fine.

The year is 2018. I talk to professionals about everything I’ve been experiencing and get a diagnosis, get medication, get coping techniques that make it manageable. I tell my therapist that I’m going to start trying to watch horror movies again, and I do try, but I get too freaked out by the visuals. I don’t want to prompt more issues, so I stay away from horror.

I am furious with myself for this decision. Horror has been one of my greatest loves since I was a small child; I have a distinct memory of being maybe seven or eight and telling my mom everything I had just read about the history of vampires. I’m angry at my brain—angry at myself, by extension—for not being able to handle horror anymore. The meds and therapy are helping me heal, but I still feel fundamentally broken.  

The year is 2020. I’ve been slowly dipping my toes back into horror—reading an occasional short story here, a blog post there—but I haven’t fully dived back into it. Now, everyone I follow on Tumblr is talking about a horror podcast called The Magnus Archives. The Magnus Archives is a podcast made by creator Jonathan Sims about a man (also named Jonathan Sims, otherwise known as The Archivist) who discovers something sinister lurking beneath the polished academic facade of the paranormal research institute he works at. One night, as I’m relaxing in bed with my partner, I open Spotify and start playing the first episode.

Eerie string music plays, raising the hairs on my arms. A voice begins to speak.

“Rusty Quill presents: The Magnus Archives.”

The music is unsettling, setting me on edge in a familiar way that I’ve missed like a fish missing water.

“Episode One: Angler Fish.”

My heart is racing already—not from fear (yet) but from excitement.

“Test, test, test. One-two-three. Right. My name is Jonathan Sims. I work for the Magnus Institute, London: an organization dedicated to academic research into the esoteric and the paranormal.”

Read more: The Magnus Effect: how Tumblr contributed to the success of The Magnus Archives

The episode terrifies me. It unnerves and unsettles me in a way that I find, strangely, comforting and familiar. This first episode of The Magnus Archives features a monster (the eponymous Angler Fish) that dangles a humanoid lure in the shadow of a back alley and asks drunk passersby for a cigarette. When the hapless victim approaches and holds the cigarette out, the Angler Fish strikes. 

That night, when the lights are off and I’m waiting for my meds to knock me out, that familiar paranoia comes creeping back in: my mind says, the Angler Fish is in your doorway. If you look up, it will be there, and it will kill you.

I tell my mind Shut the fuck up, I’m going to bed, and I fall asleep.

In the morning, I turn over the events of the previous night. I was scared, yeah, but I got past it. I realize that Magnus is exactly what I’ve been needing: it’s more immersive than written horror, but doesn’t freak me out the way that visual horror does. I eagerly devour the rest of the season.

In season two, The Archivist is—to put it gently—having a really fucking bad time. He’s discovered that his predecessor was murdered and her body left in the tunnels beneath the Magnus Institute (the reason for the title of The Magnus Archives), implying that her murder had something to do with her work. As The Archivist spirals down paranoia and delusions, I’m blindsided by how much I relate to him. I mean, I’ve never stalked my coworkers to their house, but the paranoia? Being convinced that someone wants to harm you? Knowing with total certainty that if you make one wrong move, someone will kill you? I’ve been there.

I feel really, really bad for The Archivist! He makes bad decisions and harms the people around him, for sure, and I’m not excusing that. But I understand where he’s coming from. I don’t know if the creator intended for him to be read this way or not, but I start to see myself in The Archivist: someone dealing with a mental illness that makes you predisposed to thinking that everyone is out to get you. For The Archivist, that’s greatly exacerbated because he has actual proof that somebody really is.

I come up with a lengthy headcanon for The Archivist, giving him my own backstory: delusions and paranoia from a young age, finally getting a diagnosis and meds as a young adult. I try viewing his actions in season two through the lens of someone who stops taking his meds, and suddenly everything clicks into place. I don’t excuse the harm he does to his coworkers, but I sympathize with him.

And that makes me realize something: if I can sympathize with The Archivist, why can’t I sympathize with myself? If I can give him my exact history and treat him gently, why can’t I treat myself gently, too? 

Maybe The Archivist and I aren’t that dissimilar. Maybe we’re both just people trying to get through life even though our brains are against us. Maybe it’s not his fault that his brain makes things hard for him. Maybe it’s not my fault, either.

In 2009, I open a page on a horror story website and start reading a story about vampires.

In 2020, I start playing The Magnus Archives episode “MAG 56 Children of the Night” and listen to a vampire hunter talk about his life.

I love horror.

I am happy.

I am at peace. 

The post How The Magnus Archives Helped Me Love Horror Again appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

While that’s a great reason to make art, it also comes with its potential downsides. Depending on what kind of podcast you’re making and what role you have in it, podcasting can easily take as much time as a part-time job—but one that you’re not getting paid for, which is a quick road to burnout.

I’m currently producing a fiction podcast, Twilight Over Midgard. By my rough estimation, I probably spend an average of 10-20 hours per week working on the show. That’s a big commitment, especially considering that I also work 40 hours a week at a regular full-time job. That large commitment is made worse by my greatest flaw as a podcaster, which is shared by many of my colleagues:

Folks, I suck at taking breaks.

Here’s the thing: I genuinely love podcasting. It’s fun. It doesn’t feel like work when I’m doing it—it can actually feel relaxing in the same way that playing video games does. But it’s really, really not. Even when it’s fun, it’s work, and that can always lead to burnout. Creating this show isn’t something that I’m doing just for me. I have an obligation to a lot of different people to finish tasks on time. And anytime an art project stops being just for you and becomes something with deadlines and obligations, it’s not just a hobby anymore: it’s work.

I feel like I’m having to dodge tomatoes for saying that, but it’s true! It seems almost sacrilegious to say that podcasts, which most people make purely for a love of the medium, are work. But it doesn’t diminish podcasting as an art form to say that. Quite the contrary, actually: I think that it shows how seriously a lot of podcasters take their craft. But it doesn’t change the fact that when something is work, you need to take breaks from it. I’ve often heard it said that if you don’t pick a time to take a break, your body will pick it for you. In my experience, that very much applies to podcasting and burnout.

A cautionary tale about burnout

Let me set the scene for you: it was early August 2020. My husband/creative partner Nick just got the idea for Twilight Over Midgard. I was incredibly excited by the idea, so I began working on it pretty much nonstop. If I wasn’t at my full-time job or spending time with my family, I was probably working. I even downloaded the Google Docs app on my phone and started writing scripts in the bath and while I was winding down for bed at night. Looking at that now, I think, Oh my god, why did I do that, how did I ever think that was okay? It seemed fine at the time—writing is fun! I love writing! Writing has always been a hobby for me and has been something I’ve done to relax from about the age of seven, and this is writing, so it’s relaxing, right?

Wrong. 

Because then came mid-October 2020. After about ten weeks of nonstop work, I just… crashed. Hard. I could not work on anything. I would open a document and just stare at it blankly, unable to add anything or even to focus enough to edit what I had already written. I would carve out time to work on the podcast and instead just scroll social media for five hours. I realized that I was beginning to hate writing. That was genuinely upsetting to me. Writing had been my best friend for as long as I could remember. It had always been my greatest solace, my most wonderful escape. How could I hate my oldest friend? 

I couldn’t bring myself to work, but I knew that social media wasn’t the answer: this was right before the U.S. Presidential Election, so social media was basically a constant non-stop reminder of everything going wrong in my country. I couldn’t write. Scrolling social media wasn’t working. I needed something to help me rest, relax, and recharge. I had heard a lot of people recommend Tamsyn Muir’s novel Gideon the Ninth, which had been billed to me as a science fantasy book about a lesbian necromancer and her butch bodyguard. Which, oh my god, yes. Absolutely. Please. Yes. I began reading it and it was amazing. A few days later, I had spent none of my free time working on podcasts and most of my free time reading.

I felt a lot better already. I still wasn’t up to working on the podcast again, but I was already feeling less stressed, less anxious, and more rested than I had been a few days ago. I ended up sending a nervous message to some of my friends: was I allowed to not work on podcasting at all for a few weeks while I read Gideon the Ninth and its sequel? I was honestly embarrassed to be asking that. It felt shameful. I had always been taught growing up that you should always be doing something “productive”, that taking the time to rest is lazy and bad. So when I asked my friends if it was fine for me to take a break, part of me did honestly expect for them to say “no, keep working”. Thankfully, my friends were quick to tell me in no uncertain terms that rest is not shameful, that I don’t always have to be “productive”, and that I needed to take a break. So I did. 

By early November, I had finished both Gideon the Ninth and its sequel Harrow the Ninth. But I was still feeling the burnout. I needed something else to get me through a few more weeks of rest. After some thought, I turned to fanfiction. I couldn’t work on the podcast again just yet, but I wanted to write.

Over the next several days of working on a Gideon the Ninth fanfiction, something amazing happened: I began to fall in love with writing again. It slowly shifted away from being something that brought me stress and anxiety back into something that brought me joy. By pulling away from my own work and diving into somebody else’s, I was able to step away from the burnout that had been frustrating me in my own writing and rediscover what I love about fiction. I ended up extending my podcast break for a few more weeks. When I eventually went back to Twilight Over Midgard, it was with a renewed sense of energy and passion. 

Now, obviously, reading a book about a lesbian necromancer and then writing fanfiction about it won’t work for everyone. But I truly think that the lessons I’ve learned while working on this podcast are lessons that all podcasters—all creators—should take to heart. Namely:

Set realistic deadlines

Remember that one of the joys of independent podcasting is that we’re not constrained to somebody else imposing a strict release schedule. Your audience won’t abandon you if they have to wait a while for new episodes. Don’t build your production and release schedule based on what you think the audience wants: build it based on when you can have the work done without pushing yourself. Structure your show into seasons—even if it’s a nonfiction show—and plan to take breaks between each season.

Take breaks

Set limits on how much work you can do in a day or what hours you can work during and then stick to those. Give yourself regular time to take lengthier breaks (minimum a few days, ideally at least a week or two) where you don’t work on your podcast at all. It may be hard, especially at first, but it’s really, really important if you want a real solution for your burnout, even when you love what you do.

Stagger your roles

This is something that I’ve found incredibly helpful for burnout, but that I offer up with the caveat that it might not be possible for all productions: if you’re taking on multiple roles in your production, try—if at all possible—to build your schedule so that you only have to focus on one thing at once. 

For example, I’m an actor in Twilight Over Midgard in addition to being the writer and dialogue editor. We’ve scheduled our production so that I can finish all of my recording for season one, then do all of the dialogue editing, then write the scripts for season two. That may seem like it means that the production will take longer—and yeah, sure, maybe it will! But it also ensures that I won’t suddenly hit a breaking point mid-production and find myself unable to do any work at all. Not only am I taking care of myself, but I’m taking care of the production, too.

Consume art, don’t just create it

Take the time to consume other people’s art instead of just producing your own. In my opinion, this is one of the most important pieces of creating art. In addition to being relaxing, consuming art can help you remember what you love about it, revitalize your passion for storytelling (whether fiction or nonfiction), and give you inspiration for your own stories. 

I think that it’s important to familiarize yourself with other works in the genre and format of your own story, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to that—sometimes inspiration can come from media that’s completely different! Twilight Over Midgard is a modern fantasy podcast intended for adults, but pieces of media I consider influences include Avatar: the Last Airbender (a children’s TV show) and The Murderbot Diaries (a series of sci-fi novels).

Read more: How to Audio Drama: Your (First) Story Bible

The bottom line on burnout

Art is important. I really do think it is—art connects us to people, it relaxes and recharges us; art can be a protest against the world and a prayer for it to change and a plea for people to rise up. Art is vital. But taking care of yourself is vital, too. No matter how important art is, your health comes first. So please, my fellow creators: take care of yourself. Take a break. I promise, no matter how long you walk away from it, your art will always be there for you when you get back. 

The post Avoiding Podcasting Burnout When You Love Your Work appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

When it comes to queer representation in media, it’s perfectly fair to want to make sure that queer creators have plenty of room and resources to tell their own stories. But insisting that only queer people can create queer stories does not accomplish that goal.

The thing is, when “only queer people can create queer stories” becomes the established norm, you are not actually empowering queer creators, nor are you limiting queer stories to queer voices. Rather, you’re limiting queer stories only to queer people who have the privilege (and the desire) to be out of the closet.

If everybody agrees that only queer creators can tell queer stories, then it seems fair to interrogate anybody who creates a queer story while not being openly queer. It seems reasonable to go up to them and demand to know if they’re queer or not. But if they are queer—which they very well might be—they’re being put in an absolutely horrible position.

If they insist that they’re not queer, then people will continue attacking them. People will accuse them of appropriating queer stories, of trying to profit off of queer people. 

But if they admit that they are queer, they’ve just come out of the closet in an incredibly public way. And for many people, coming out publicly isn’t an option at all. Many queer people can’t be publicly out of the closet because doing so would put them in emotional, mental, or even physical danger. If someone lives in a bigoted area and/or if their family isn’t supportive of queer people, being out in a public place could mean facing abuse from their family, losing their job (yes, that’s illegal; yes, that still happens), ending up homeless, or even risking death—either through outright murder (a particularly high risk for trans women of color) or through slower methods, like losing the health insurance they received through their job and not being able to pay for healthcare. That is the position that people are putting artists into when they insist that only queer people are allowed to create and be involved in queer stories. 

This doesn’t just hurt people who are only closeted in public, either: it also hurts people who don’t even know that they’re queer yet. For many queer people, our very first interaction with queerness was not entering the community as a queer person—it was being an (overly) enthusiastic ally to the queer community. And then, after being surrounded by queer people, having access to queer resources, and receiving education about queer identities, we eventually realized that we were queer, too. 

And through of all of this, the most infuriatingly frustrating part is that this horrible, dangerous pressure is almost always coming from other queer people. Facing bigotry, exclusionism, and violence from cis straight people is always awful, of course, but at least it’s expected. But facing it from other queer people? From people who are allegedly part of our community, people who should be able to understand why forcing people to out themselves is dangerous? It’s depressing, but it’s also baffling. Why on earth are queer people so intent on hurting other queer people?

Read more: “Asking for It” Wants Honesty about Queer Domestic Violence

To give one theory for why this is so common, I’d like to reference Kai Cheng Thom’s fantastic article “Why are queer people so mean to each other?”. In the article, Thom—a former therapist for queer and trans people—puts forth a theory for why there’s so much in-fighting, drama, and conflict within the queer community: that it’s a trauma response. 

Sociological research tells us that queer and trans people are disproportionately likely to experience abuse, sexual violence, homelessness and bullying in childhood and adolescence (and it continues into adulthood for many, Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project notwithstanding). Even those of us who somehow manage to escape outright abuse and neglect still grew up in a world where we needed to keep secrets — where, at any moment, we might come across someone who hated us or wished us harm because of who we are. Where our basic rights and dignity might be taken away at the whim of the next politician to take office. The result of all this exposure to trauma — to the very real threat of violence and ostracization from our family, friends and entire society — is that queers as a collective sustain serious trauma to our internal sense of ourselves and others.

Kai Cheng Thom, “Why Are Queer People So Mean to Each Other?”

One nearly-universal experience for queer people across the globe is that we’ve grown up in a world where it’s impossible to entirely escape homophobia and transphobia. After years—even decades—of facing abuse, disgust, hatred, and mistreatment (either from specific people in our lives or just society at large), our brains are hardwired to spot danger at the slightest provocation, to categorize anyone who does anything wrong as a dangerous enemy. We’ve had to get very good at spotting danger to keep ourselves safe. Now, after so long having to do that, we don’t know how to stop seeing everyone around us a potential threat.

Thom says (emphasis mine), “This, I believe, is why traumatized communities struggle so profoundly with loving one another. We have been hard-wired for suspicion and terror of betrayal, which in turn feeds into the logics of disposability and incarceration: we come to believe that making a mistake — any mistake, whether big or small — makes someone bad and dangerous. We believe that we need to punish people who are bad and dangerous, that some people are simply too bad and too dangerous to keep among us.”

I think that could provide a very, very good explanation for why this kind of gatekeeping is so common. It is undeniably true that for centuries now, many of the stories written about queer people by cis straight people have been very deeply harmful. When you look at it from that point of view, it becomes very easy to see why queer people are so distrustful of queer stories by cis straight creators: we’ve become so accustomed to those stories being dangerous to us that we assume all of them will be. 

In that light, this is an understandable phenomenon. At its root, it isn’t about hatred—it’s about fear. Cis straight people have told so many awful stories about us that we’re terrified that every new story that they create will be just as bad. And yes, you could give them a chance, but that so often ends poorly. Taking a chance on a queer story by a cis straight author only to encounter bigotry feels like being punched in the face.

Isn’t it easier to just never take that chance? To only read stories that you know will be safe? Isn’t it easier to deem any cis straight person who writes queer stories an enemy, too bad and too dangerous to keep among us, and to try to push them as far away from the community as possible?

It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. At the end of the day, there is simply no way to forbid cis straight creators from creating queer stories that doesn’t also exclude closeted queer people. And even if there was? I don’t think that would be the answer. I’ve been out for just over a decade. In the time I’ve been out, I and all of the queer people I know have been pushing cis straight authors to learn how to write queer characters and include them in their stories.

Now that more cis straight creators are starting to actually do that, it’s deeply frustrating to me to see other queer people shout, “No! Not allowed! Cis straight creators can’t make stories about queer characters!” I sometimes feel like ripping my hair out and yelling “But that’s what I’ve been trying to get them to do for ten years!”

While I’ve been discussing the queer community here, this is—unfortunately—not entirely unique to queer people. Disabled people, mentally ill people, and trauma survivors face the same thing. Though something I’ve noted there is that, unlike the queer community, this doesn’t always come from people who are actually in those groups themselves. Very often, it comes from people who only have an outside perception of what those experiences are like, but who are convinced that their perception is so correct that any portrayal that defies it is bad, harmful, and inaccurate. 

But outing yourself as any of those things can be just as dangerous (and just as traumatizing) as outing yourself as queer. We live in a deeply ableist society, and many people are convinced that disabled, mentally ill, and traumatized people are lesser: less capable, less intelligent, less human. In the case of a large selection of highly stigmatized mental illnesses (like schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder), many people even view the people who have them as actively dangerous, despite the fact that nothing about those disorders makes somebody inherently violent. 

To learn more about how all of these issues have affected people in the podcasting field, I put out a survey asking for peoples’ experiences.

One anonymous creator wrote in to talk about her experiences creating a show that features queer characters. She said that while she didn’t face pressure from any particular person to out herself, she felt a general pressure to be public about her identity—her co-creators weren’t out at all at the time; as the only out queer person, she felt like she had to be public about her identity so that people would know that a queer creator worked on the show. After describing this as an awkward position to be in, she says that the experience has made her hesitant about working on another project that would put her in a similar position. She ended her submission by saying that it makes her uncomfortable that media like podcasting forces creators to market themselves as part of marketing the projects they create.

Another anonymous creator wrote in with a different side of it: while they haven’t personally felt the pressure to out themself, the fear of that happening has prevented them from making and participating in stories that they relate to. They’re nonbinary, but can’t identify as such publicly because they’re currently financially dependent on transphobic family members. Being out wouldn’t just be uncomfortable for them—it would put them in serious danger. They were originally planning on playing a nonbinary character who uses he/they pronouns in the podcast they create, but ended up changing the character to a cis woman out of fear of facing backlash from the community. 

The same anonymous creator also discussed facing similar issues with their neurodivergency. They have a personality disorder—a type of mental illnesses that creates rigid, unhealthy frameworks for viewing the world. There are ten personality disorders in total, including narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. In the podcasting field (and in the world as a whole), these disorders are frequently mocked, attacked, exploited for cheap shock factor, and used as insults. While they try to call out this ableism when they see it, they can’t bring up their personal experience with the disorders, as it’s not safe for them to discuss them publicly. Unfortunately, people use this apparent lack of personal experience to dismiss their criticisms entirely. 

When asked if there was anything else they’d like to say on the topic, they said, “I just wish people would remember that we all can’t be as open as they are, and to be a little more considerate. Just because you don’t see us doesn’t mean we aren’t there, and it just makes it harder for us.”

Ultimately, all of these issues come down to one core belief: that creators are required to disclose personal information to be “allowed” to write stories about sensitive topics. And that seems to tie very strongly into the feeling that’s growing more and more prevalent in online communities that creators owe something to the people who consume their work; that anybody who’s listened to somebody’s podcast or read their book is allowed to ask that creator whatever they want, no matter how personal or invasive, and the creator is obligated to answer.

Read more: The 71 Best Podcasts of 2020

But at its core, this is a form of gatekeeping—and gatekeeping doesn’t help anyone. Quite the opposite, in fact. When this is the norm, it ensures that the only people who can create work about marginalized identities are the people who are able to be open about having them. In sort, it limits stories to creators who have a certain level of privilege above creators who need to remain closeted for their own safety.

I don’t just want those stories. I want the queer love story written by a lesbian trapped in a marriage with a homophobic straight man. I want the trans coming out story written by a closeted nonbinary person in a small town who can’t come out without risking physical violence. I want the story about a sexual assault survivor written by somebody who can’t speak openly about the assault they faced without facing further violence from their abuser. I want the story about characters with Cluster B personality disorders written by someone who can’t speak openly about their disorder without people calling them abusive. I want the story about a character who hallucinates and has delusions and is terrified that people are watching them written by a schizophrenic person who can’t be open about their mental illness because their ex-spouse could use it as leverage to gain sole custody of their children.

When we try to limit marginalized stories to only authors who have lived their experiences, we are inherently shutting out people who have lived those experiences but can’t talk about them publicly. I’m not okay with that.

Art has a wonderful capacity to be a healing force. Creating art about your experiences can be cathartic, it can help you work through complicated feelings you’re struggling to navigate, and it can bring you closer to your community. When we tell closeted people that they can’t tell their stories, we’re shutting them out from how healing art can be. That’s not okay. They deserve the chance to heal through art, too. And they deserve to create stories that will, somewhere in the world, make another closeted person look at them and say “I see you. I see you because we are the same. I see you, and now I know that I am not alone.” That’s a beautiful thing. Let’s stop stifling it.

Editor’s Note: This piece was updated on 2/19/2021 to change a linked source from a PinkNews article explaining author Becky Albertalli’s coming out to her own Medium post about her coming out.

The post Stop Making People Out Themselves for Art appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

By nature of being a social media website, Twitter makes us feel like we’re friends with everyone we follow. Even if someone we follow doesn’t follow us back, we still feel on some level as if we’re friends. But… we’re not. We can’t be. Personally, I follow over 800 Twitter accounts. There is no possible way for me to be close friends with every single person I follow. But if we know logically that it’s impossible for us to be friends with everyone we follow, why do we feel like we are?

The answer: parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are any relationship wherein one person feels affection for, interest in, and even devotion to somebody who has no idea that they exist; or, if they do, views them as a passing acquaintance rather than a true friend. For an in-depth examination on how podcasting breeds this, I highly recommend Wil Williams’ article “Podcasters Are People: The Intimacy of Medium vs. Parasocial Relationships”.  (Disclosure: Wil Williams is the managing editor for Discover Pods.)

Most people you follow probably do not consider you their close, personal friend. Unless you’ve had multiple lengthy, private conversations with them, they probably only consider you a stranger; at best, maybe a professional colleague. Even if you have talked with them at length, some people only consider a select few people true friends, which is perfectly within their right. There’s nothing wrong with just being somebody’s colleague. It doesn’t mean they dislike you, it just means they’re not close to you. 

But Twitter is a social media website with a distinctly casual feeling to it; a website where people are just as likely to post about what they’re having for dinner or what their dog did today as they are about their professional endeavors. Unfortunately, this makes it a great venue to create and encourage unhealthy parasocial relationships. Because of the casual nature of Twitter, many people feel like everybody they follow is their friend, particularly when that person follows them back. And when you’re in a field where it’s easy to directly interact with the people whose work you admire—and even to receive a response from them—that feeling gets even stronger. After all, you follow that person. You like their work, and maybe they’ve tweeted something nice about something you worked on. You’ve interacted in tweet replies on Twitter. Maybe you’ve even chatted in a Discord server. They must be your friend!

Meanwhile, the person you view as a close friend doesn’t view you as being a friend at all. I—and many others I know—have seen this lead many, many times to two kinds of issues:

The mistake

Someone you have a parasocial relationship with does something you don’t like. Maybe they tweeted something a little thoughtless, or they said something that they intended as a joke but that came off as mean-spirited, or they made a writing choice in their audio drama (fiction show) that you disagree with. The healthy response to this is to let yourself feel whatever you feel about that, but to not take it personally. But in your mind, this person is your friend. So now, instead of just being miffed that a stranger you respect (or formerly respected) did something that you think wasn’t okay, you feel personally betrayed. They’re your friend! How could they do that to you, personally?!

And what if you’re upset enough to directly address it with this person, letting them know exactly how upset you are? They’ll likely react with confusion, maybe coldness or frustration—they don’t understand why you’re acting as if you have a personal stake in what they do. Now you’re even more upset. Not only were you “betrayed” by your “friend”, but when you tried to talk to them about it, they didn’t give you the apology that you feel you deserve. Meanwhile, they’re upset, stressed out, and frustrated because someone they consider a colleague (or even a total stranger) came up to them and demanded a response from them that’s completely inappropriate to demand from somebody you don’t know. What happens after that? We’ll explore that soon.

Violating boundaries

The other dangerous manifestation of parasocial relationships involves personal boundaries. It’s very reasonable and healthy for all people to have boundaries, and that extends to having different boundaries for different people—like maybe you’re okay with being hugged by your family and partner, but nobody else. But what happens when you think that somebody is your friend while they view you as a colleague?

Imagine this scenario: You work for a large company; there’s hundreds of employees in your building alone. You have a coworker, Steve, who works in a different department. You don’t really work together, but you might chat with each other if you’re sitting near each other in the cafeteria or if you pass by each other in the halls. Now imagine that Steve gets your cell phone number, and one evening—completely out of nowhere—he starts texting you intense, heavy, detailed information about his history of abuse and his current struggles with trauma and mental illness. You’ve barely spoken to this guy, but he’s putting you in a position where he’s suddenly expecting you to comfort him and act like his (unpaid!) therapist. 

Read more: EarBuds Podcast Collective: *Let’s Talk Mental Health*

You might be thinking, “That sounds horrible, but it also sounds unrealistic; nobody would actually do that.” Unfortunately, variations of that happen with a horrifying frequency in online spaces—including podcasting Twitter.

When you go up to a stranger and start venting about your personal life, you’re creating an incredibly awkward and uncomfortable situation. The person you’re venting to is now in a situation where they either need to provide emotional support to someone they don’t know or tell someone in distress, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” The second option is absolutely the healthiest thing for them to do, but it can create another unfortunate situation:

From the other person’s point of view, a stranger demanded something unreasonable from them and they politely but firmly reinforced their boundaries. But from your point of view, you went to a friend for support and they callously rebuffed you. You think to yourself, “This is unfair because if they wanted to vent to me, I would listen”. And maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t take into account whether you’re someone they would want to vent to at all.

The result

Both of the situations I outlined above—being personally upset when someone does something you dislike and trying to act overly familiar with a stranger—often end in the same emotion: somebody feels (perhaps justifiably, perhaps not) that they were wronged.

In any of those situations, if either of the people involved view their Twitter as their personal space rather than their professional one, they might use it the same way they’d use a group chat with their close friends: they open up their Twitter and begin to vent about the experience they just had. Sometimes this will be in the form of vague tweets, like “ugh some people around here really need to learn how to respect boundaries” or “wow sure is fun when someone you thought was your friend abandons you when you need help, lol”. Sometimes, if they’re particularly mad, they’ll go as far as to outright name the person who upset them.

That’s where things get even messier. If you open up Twitter one day to find that somebody has started talking about what a horrible person you are in full view of your colleagues—colleagues you want to maintain a good reputation with—there’s suddenly pressure on you to respond publicly instead of privately. Instead of being able to work this issue out in private (or just walk away from it entirely), you feel like you have to publicly defend yourself. 

Just like that, we have Twitter Drama: an issue that should have been resolved privately (or simply resolved by both people deciding not to interact with each other anymore) is suddenly in the public eye. And it doesn’t end there.

You follow two podcasters, X and Y. One day, you log on to find that Y has made a lengthy tweet thread complaining about X, and X responded with their own tweet thread that shows their side of the story. They deny the claims that Y made, and maybe make some complaints about Y in turn. Suddenly, everybody you follow is talking about this new public drama, and it’s all over your timeline. Not only are people talking about it, but people are taking sides—so you feel like you need to take a side, too. If you consider one of the people in this conflict your friend (even if you’ve barely interacted), you’ll feel naturally compelled to take their side. Your friend (are they really your friend?) is being publicly harassed, being unfairly targeted by somebody attacking them for no reason! They’re your friend (right?), so they couldn’t be in the wrong, because you wouldn’t be friends with a bad person (and you’ve interacted with them twice, so they must be your friend). They must be right. Therefore, the other person must be wrong.

Suddenly, an issue between two people that stemmed from a simple misunderstanding has become major Twitter drama that everybody following them feels morally obligated to be part of. And even if you don’t feel morally obligated, even if you don’t consider either of the people your friend, you might feel publicly pressured to join the fray. Because here’s another way this gets even worse: the people at the core of the issue and/or the people following either of them are suddenly making tweets about how everybody needs to pick a side (their side) right now. 

“Unfollow me if you still support X after everything that Y revealed about them,” says one tweet on your timeline from someone you respect.

“I can’t believe that there are people who are still supporting Y after they viciously attacked X”, says the tweet below it, also from someone you respect.

Everybody you follow is telling you that you have to pick a side, and that if you don’t, you’re a terrible person. In the eyes of Twitter, your stance on the latest drama decides your morality. And god forbid you aim for neutrality! Even temporary neutrality will be attacked—I’ve seen people absolutely ripped to shreds by accounts with several times more followers than them for the crime of simply saying, “I don’t have all of the facts on this situation yet, so I’m going to wait to speak publicly on it until I learn more.”

Now, this scale of drama—huge, public, namedropping drama where practically the entire field gets dragged into it—doesn’t necessarily happen constantly. But the smaller issues, where people feel like their boundaries are violated and start resenting people over it? I’ve seen that happen a lot. Way, way more than I should. And I really, genuinely believe that so much of this (and probably other issues in the field, too) stems from people trying to simultaneously use Twitter as a personal and professional space. But in many ways, you just… can’t. Especially if you have a large following. If you use Twitter as your professional account, you can’t vent on it like you’d vent to your private group chat with five close friends.

And that doesn’t end at refraining from publicly shaming other people: it also means that you need to be careful about the kind of things you tweet out about your own life. I’m not saying that if you make a podcast, you can never post anything about your personal life on Twitter. But if you have a Twitter account where most of your followers are only there you because they like your podcast, even if you’re not a professional podcaster and you’re just doing this for fun, your Twitter account is no longer a purely personal account. If you go onto that account and start tweeting detailed information about your experience with abuse, mental illness, and/or trauma while implying (or stating) that you need support, your followers—who, remember, don’t actually personally know you—will feel pressured to comfort you. And it makes them feel closer to you, too. They know personal, intimate details about you, so they must be your friend, right? 

Read more: Ask How to Audio Drama: Critique the Critics

And just like that, you’ve encouraged a parasocial relationship between yourself and your followers. Just like that, the pathway to hurt feelings, misplaced feelings of betrayal, and public drama has been laid down.

That isn’t to say that people are never allowed to talk about trauma, mental illness, or abuse. Those are all incredibly stigmatized experiences, and I do believe that it is good for people to discuss them publicly—if they do it right. Done right, it can help to lower stigma and make other people feel more comfortable discussing and getting help for their own struggles. It can even be educational, like talking about your experience with a misunderstood mental illness to clear up misconceptions about it. But there’s a huge difference in intent there. Are you tweeting because you want to help people? Or are you tweeting because you want a bunch of total strangers to help you? 

At the end of the day, parasocial relationships are a very easy trap to fall into—particularly on Twitter, and particularly in a field where people are creating art that makes all of their listeners feel like they’re best friends. I’ve definitely caught myself thinking about people I don’t actually know as if they were friends! Doing so is not a moral failing. And if you don’t catch yourself early enough, you might make a misstep like the ones above. When the person you thought was your friend responds in such a way that makes you realize you’re basically strangers, that can feel embarrassing and uncomfortable. That’s okay. Plenty of people have made that mistake before.

The key thing to do then is to not get mad at them for it. They are not a bad person for not being your friend. If that happens to you, apologize to them, make a mental adjustment about how you view them, and then walk away. 

The issue, at the end of the day, is not the mere existence of parasocial relationships—it’s how we react when we realize that we’ve stumbled into one. When we respond to that realization by publicly insulting the person we viewed as a friend, we’re contributing to the podcasting field being a toxic, dangerous place that pushes people out and makes people feel unsafe. But if more of us would take a moment to step back, realize that the other person isn’t at fault, and let the issue be settled privately rather than publicly? We’d be a long way towards making the podcasting field as welcoming of a space as podcasters already claim it is.  

The post Twitter & Podcasting: When Professional Lines Blur appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

Additionally, there are people who can hear, but who struggle with understanding spoken dialogue—for example, people who have an auditory processing disorder, or people who speak English as a second language and understand it written better than spoken. By offering transcripts, you not only benefit these groups of people by giving them access to your podcast, you benefit yourself in three ways:

1. You widen the potential audience of your show, meaning that there are more people who can do things like pledge to your Patreon, buy your merch, and even download your episodes—many deaf people have some residual hearing (myself included) and enjoy listening to episode audio as they read the transcripts
2. You have a record of everything you’ve ever said in your podcast that you can search with ease. Trying to remember exactly what you said about sandwiches in episode 23? Open the transcript, search “sandwich”, and there you go!
3. If you have transcripts embedded in your site, you do something amazing for your search engine optimization: people could now find your podcast in search results through searching any combination of words that get said at any point in your podcast

If you have an unscripted podcast, you’ll have to hire a transcriber (also called a transcriptionist) to transcribe your show for you. Rates vary, but usually fall around $1.50-2.50 per minute of audio. If you have a scripted show, though, you’re in luck: you’ve almost got a transcript! Almost. While you could just upload your recording script without changing it at all, I really don’t recommend doing that. Recording scripts are better than no transcripts at all, but they’re missing things like tone description and ad libbed dialogue—the things that really help transcripts give audiences who read them the same experience as audiences who can listen to the show. 

So! Let’s go step by step through how to turn your recording script into a transcript.

Step One: Hosting

The first thing you should consider is how you’re going to make transcripts available. Uploading transcripts is the last step, so you could technically wait to decide this until after your first transcript is ready; but I highly recommend deciding now, because this could affect how you format your scripts in the next steps. You have a few options here. The two I’ve seen most commonly:

• Have transcripts available as a PDF, either through a public Google Drive folder you link to or through giving people the option to download the transcript directly from your site
  • Pro: Giving people the option to download transcripts means that they’ll still be able to experience your podcast if they go to a place where they won’t have internet access (e.g. if they’re going on a camping trip or a long car ride) 
  • Cons: Because you generally can’t change the text size of a PDF, these may be difficult or impossible for people with vision impairments to read. Black text on a white background can also be a migraine trigger for some people, meaning that these are inaccessible for them, too
• Put transcripts directly onto your website. This is easiest on a website that allows you to create blog posts, like Tumblr, WordPress, and Squarespace
  • Pro: People can much more easily change the text size if they need larger text and use a browser extension to invert the colors if black text on a white background is a migraine trigger
  • Con: Because these are on a web page, you can only use these while you have internet access

As you can see, both methods have some benefits and some issues. So, my suggestion is to do both! Have transcripts directly on your website and available to download as a PDF. It doesn’t entirely solve the problem (people with poor eyesight who are going somewhere without internet access may still struggle), but it will make your transcripts far more accessible than just picking one. 

If you have transcripts embedded in your website, the transcript for an episode should be available in the same place as the audio. This doesn’t mean you need to have your full transcript pasted directly beneath each episode in a way that makes people have to scroll through the entirety of each transcript before reaching the episode below it (in fact, please don’t do that). It’s better to just give people an easy button or link to click that will take them to the transcript. For example, this is how transcripts are displayed for the podcast Scoring Magic by Hug House Productions, hosted on WordPress:

My one note about this format is that I would recommend having something explicitly telling people “click the link below to view the transcript”—you want to make this as easy and intuitive as possible.

If your website has the option for blog posts but you want your episodes to all be on one page without having separate posts for each episode, you can still take advantage of your site’s blog feature. For each episode, make a new blog post containing the transcript. From there, you can insert a button or link with each episode on your episodes page that links to the blog post containing the correct transcript.

Not all website hosts give you an easy way to have transcripts embedded directly on the site. However, there’s a pretty simple solution to that: 

1. Create a Tumblr blog for your show (bonus: it’s totally free, and it gives you another platform to promote your show on
2. Create an Audio Post and upload the episode audio (either by uploading the file directly or inserting the link your podcast host provides you)
3. Put the episode description and any other information you want (content warnings, cast list, etc) in the space below
4. Insert a Read more link
5. Paste the transcript below that

This is how that looked for my first audio drama, Mina’s Story:

From there, you can just link to that post from your website!

This is by no means an exhaustive list—there are plenty of different ways to show transcripts on your website, and you’ll probably have to experiment a little to find something that works for you. Whatever you do, just keep these things in mind:

• Your transcripts should be easy to find. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that many podcasts—maybe even most podcasts—don’t have transcripts. If somebody can’t tell that you have transcripts within a minute or two of clicking onto your website, it’s very possible that they’ll assume you just don’t have transcripts at all. At best, this means that they have to struggle through listening to your episode. At worst, it means they can’t or won’t try your podcast at all
• Your transcripts should be linked to in the same place as the episode audio. I do not recommend having one page where all of your transcripts are displayed without audio and another page where all of your audio is displayed without transcripts. As a general rule of thumb for transcripts embedded on your site: your audience should only have to have one tab open at a time to be able to view your transcripts. The more tabs they have to have open, the more frustrating it will be, and the more likely they are to just leave your show behind entirely

2) Format

One last step before we get into actually editing the transcript: what do you want your transcripts to look like, and what program are you going to edit them in? If you want to edit the transcript in your script writing software so that transcripts are formatted like your recording scripts, you probably want to open a new copy of the script so that your recording script will remain intact. The Penumbra Podcast has transcripts that are formatted similarly to a recording script, like so:

This works great for PDFs, but may make formatting a little strange if you try to paste it directly onto your website. For easy formatting on your website, I recommend formatting your recording script in a regular word processor, like Google Docs or MS Word. 

You’ll also want to think about how you want everything formatted. Do you want character names in bold? Do you want action in italics? If you’re using Word, try doing research into shortcuts you can use to automatically format parts of your transcript (for example, there’s a shortcut to automatically bold every word written in all caps). There’s plenty of different ways to do this, but I recommend making sure there’s an easy visual difference between character names, dialogue, and sound effects/action. For example, the Hug House Productions transcript has speaker names in all caps:

The transcripts for The Far Meridian visually differentiates between all different types of text: scene headings are in bold and buffered by double hyphens, SFX is contained within double brackets, and character names are bold and capitalized.

You can format however you want, just try to make things visually distinct. If you’re unsure what you want to do, I recommend having character names in bold and/or all caps and sound effects in italics. 

So! We know where we’re hosting our transcript, we know how we’re formatting, and we’ve got our transcript and the episode audio pulled up. Now for the fun part: editing the transcript itself.

As a quick note: There are several steps to editing listed below. You can either do one listen-through for each step, going through the entire script and making sure one step is completely done before you move onto the next one, or you can just try to do all of the steps at once. Whichever you do—but particularly if you try to do all of the steps at once—I highly recommend doing one final listen-through at the end to make sure that everything is exactly where you want it to be.

3) Editing Dialogue

Some directors are fine with their actors playing with the dialogue—some even encourage it! No matter where the director of this project fell on that spectrum, it’s likely that there are at least a few instances where the written dialogue doesn’t 100% match up with what the actor actually said. Sometimes actors change lines, sometimes they ad lib new ones, and sometimes lines get cut while the audio is being edited. So, one of the first things you’ll want to look for as you listen to the audio and read through the script are any instances where the dialogue in the script doesn’t match the audio. Edit the dialogue that was changed and add in any dialogue the actors came up with.

4) Adding Tone & Volume

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to use a very light hand when putting tone description (e.g. “happy”, “sad”, “excited”) into a recording script—giving your actors the chance to interpret the lines themselves makes dialogue sounds more natural and can even add new sides to the character that you hadn’t considered. However, this doesn’t hold true in transcripts! Somebody who’s only reading your transcript won’t be able to tell the tone of the people speaking. And, even if they’re listening along, some people with hearing loss struggle to pick up changes in tone. While all of the steps here are important, I personally feel that this step is the most important.

You can notate tone however you want, but make sure that it’s visually distinct from the dialogue itself. Personally, I like to note tone in [italicized brackets]. You can do whatever you want, but make sure that you keep it consistent throughout the entire script (and, ideally, through all of the transcripts for your show).

All this being said, you don’t need to notate every single line—just add in tone when it’s particularly noteworthy or when the tone isn’t immediately obvious from the dialogue. For example, you probably don’t need to do this:

“[Lovingly] I love you, too.”

Since the tone directly matches the dialogue, it’s easy to tell what the tone is just by reading the dialogue itself. However, you would probably want to note this:

“[Sarcastically] I love you, too.”

The “sarcastically” note completely changes the tone of the line, and it’s not as easy to guess just from the dialogue. If you’re not sure whether or not a tone needs to be noted, I recommend erring on the side of noting it.

Noting tone can also be useful in scenes where the emotion of the character is evident in the dialogue, but the emotion slowly builds throughout the scene. For example, in a scene where a character gets progressively angrier and angrier, it may be useful to periodically note their dialogue with things like “[getting angrier]”, “[furious]”, and “[absolutely livid]”.

Finally, you’ll want to make note of any changes in volume that you feel are important. Things like “[Whispering]”, “[Muttered]”, and “[Shouting]”. If people are speaking at a particular volume for several lines of dialogue or more, you can refrain from notating each individual line and instead include a note at the beginning of the dialogue, e.g. “They both drop their voices to whispers.” If you do that, just make sure to note when the dialogue returns to a normal volume.

If there are multiple characters and they all go back to normal volumes at different times, you may want to notate each line. However, if everyone returns to normal volume at once, you can note the change in tone all at once again, e.g. “Everyone returns to a normal volume.”

5) Wordless Vocalizations, Noises, and Pauses

This is something that’s probably more common in the final audio than in the actual recording script: all of the sounds people make without actually saying words. Things like laughter, crying, sighing, “uh-huh”, “mm-hm”, and the iconic “‘I don’t know’ sound”. There are two big decisions you’ll want to make here:

The first is how you want to spell wordless vocalizations. Do you want it to spell “uh-huh” or “uhhuh”? Do you want it to spelled “mmhm”, “mhm”, or “mm-hm”? You can really pick whatever you want here; whatever you pick, though, try to keep it consistent through the entire transcript.

The second is how to actually format these. Things like “uh-huh” and “mmhm” are pretty easy to just write directly into the dialogue. But how do you want to format things like laughter, crying, sighing? What about tearing up and suppressing laughter? Again, this is really up to you. Personally, I format noises that somebody is making simultaneously with dialogue the way I format tone, and I format noises outside of dialogue the way I format action. So, for example, a character laughing while saying a sentence gets formatted like so:

JULIE

[Laughing] You really think that?

While a character laughing, finishing their laughter, and then speaking gets formatted like this:

Julie laughs.

JULIE

You really think that?

You’ll also want to note any particularly significant pauses in dialogue. You don’t need to make a note of every single time there’s more than a second between dialogue, but if you’ve very intentionally created a moment of silence because it adds something to the audio, you’ll want to note that. If it’s a short pause between two sentences spoken by the same character, ellipses might work fine. For longer pauses, I usually note them as an action. For example:

JULIE
I hate you!

A long beat.

JULIE

I—I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry. It just slipped out, I… I’m sorry.

Again: how you format this is up to you, but you want to keep it consistent.

6) Stuttering

In real life, plenty of people stutter during casual dialogue. It happens all the time. Generally, our brains are pretty good at ignoring the stuttering and focusing on what the person is actually saying. In writing, though, stuttering stands out and slows down our brains considerably more. It makes it a lot harder to read the dialogue. For example, this is hard to get through:

“I-I-I didn’t m-mean to, to, d-do it, I-I, uh, um, it, uh, i-it w-was an a-accident, I d-didn’t d-do it on pur-purpose, I-I’m r-really, re-really s-sorry.”

And not only is it hard to get through, it’s ultimately unnecessary. You can get the same effect while vastly enhancing readability if you instead do something like this:

“[Stuttering profusely] I didn’t mean to do it, I—it was an accident, I didn’t do it on purpose. I’m really, really sorry.”

That’s definitely more readable, while still conveying the important thing about the sentence (the character is so nervous that they’re having trouble speaking). 

7) Accents

Noting accents is usually unnecessary unless it’s 1) relevant to the plot, and 2) not mentioned in-dialogue for a while. For example, say that your show is set in America, but one of the characters is from Ireland and speaks with an accent. If this is never mentioned and isn’t relevant to the plot at all, you’re probably fine not mentioning it. If this is relevant to the plot but one of the character’s first lines is “I’m from Ireland”, again, you’re probably fine not mentioning it. But if this is relevant to the plot and nobody mentions the character being Irish for a few scenes, it might be worth noting.

Throughout this guide, I’ve stated most formatting suggestions as nothing but that—suggestions based on my own preferences that you can choose to ignore if it doesn’t work for you. However, I’m going to be more firm on this next statement: you probably should not try to transcribe your character’s accent by altering their dialogue in the transcript to match how you hear the actor say it. 

Between all of the countries where English is spoken frequently, there are dozens (if not more) of different dialects and variations, based on things like class, region, and culture. Somebody pronouncing a word differently than how you pronounce it isn’t saying the word wrong, they’re saying it correctly in their dialect—and their dialect is not a less correct form of English than yours. When you note an accent (e.g. by transcribing g-drops at the end of -ing words as -in’), you’re making a statement: you’re saying “the way I say this word is correct and doesn’t need to be noted; the way other people say it is wrong and changes how the word is spelled”. 

When it comes to the differences between, say, Pacific Northwest American English versus Midwest American English, this is definitely annoying to the people whose accent you’re claiming is incorrect. However, this gets even more dicey when you get into cultural and class dialects. This is something you need to handle with even more sensitivity if you’re white, and particularly if you’re both white and upper class, as you’re coming at this from a place of privilege. In this case, the implication becomes that your culture’s dialect of English is the correct one, and other cultural dialects are incorrect. 

Because of this, I really, really do not recommend transcribing accents. If they need to be noted at all—which, again, they usually don’t—just note it once, the first time the character speaks, using the same format that you use to notate tone.

8) Music & Sound Effect Description

Finally, the last step in editing your transcript: describing music and sound effects.

Depending on how the script is written, you might not have much to add to sound effects, as they might already be at a point where you’re perfectly happy with the information given. However, you may decide that you want to replace sound effects with action descriptions; e.g. replace “SFX: The sound of clinking keys in a dish” with “She places her keys in the dish”. We’re now back into the realm of “do whatever works for you”—either way works. Just make sure that all of the sounds that the listening audience can hear are transcribed for the reading audience to pick up. 

However, it’s very likely that you don’t have descriptions for music baked into the script, particularly if you already knew the titles of the songs you were going to use as the script was written. Generally, I highly recommend adding a short description of what each song sounds like the first time it plays. How necessary this is depends on what kind of music we’re discussing:

• For your theme song and (if you have it) music that plays under the credits, adding a description isn’t completely necessary, but I do recommend it in the interest of giving reading audiences the same experience as listening audiences. After all, you picked your theme music for a reason, right? You chose to start with theme music and not just launch straight into the dialogue because you felt that starting with music adds something to the experience. Don’t reading audiences deserve to get that experience, too?
• For backing music, I recommend descriptions even more strongly. Again, you picked this music for a reason: it adds something to the scene. By giving a description of the music, you’re ensuring that reading audiences get the full effect of the scene

Writing music descriptions seems intimidating, but they don’t have to be long—in fact, in the interest of not slowing down readers too much, they should probably be fairly short. Focus on the most important thing: what emotions is the music supposed to make the audience feel? You can write things like “Sad, mournful music plays quietly under the dialogue”, “Upbeat, happy music begins to play”, or “Fast, tense, angry music plays under combat”. Any description that tells reading audiences what the music is supposed to make them feel is good!

Final Tips

And, with that, you have officially turned your script into a transcript! Now you just need to upload it to your website, and you’re good to go. Just like that, you’ve made your podcast accessible to a much wider audience. Before you go, I have a few final tips for you:

• If more than one person will be editing transcripts, I strongly recommend creating a style guide. This can be short—for most productions, a page or two will likely be fine. Even if you’re the only one who ever edits transcripts, you might still consider creating a style guide for your own reference, as it gives you an easy way to check your styles as you edit without having to stop, pull up old transcripts, and search through those
• At some point, you may find that you have to make a choice between following your style guide exactly or breaking it to try to describe something more accurately. In those instances, I generally recommend letting yourself break the style guide. When creating transcripts, the most important thing is giving reading audiences the same experience as listeners (or as close as possible). If you have to switch things up a little to make that work, so be it
• Consider mentioning transcripts in the audio of your show—especially if you start having transcripts after you’ve already released some episodes of your show. This can be anywhere that works for your show in particular. You can mention it at the start of your show, during a mid-roll ad break, in the credits, or anywhere else that works for you!
• Despite your best efforts, it’s possible that you may one day get contacted by somebody who needs transcripts and wants to tell you that something you’re doing isn’t working—that your transcripts aren’t accessible the way they should be. When this happens, listen and be willing to adjust. If you’re not somebody who relies on transcripts, it can be hard to tell exactly what works and what doesn’t. Listen to the people who do rely on them. 

At the end of the day, I know that this is a lot of work to go through. But remember: every time you post a transcript for your show, you’re opening the world up for people who need transcripts. People who have trouble hearing or understanding speech are constantly shut out of experiences in every aspect of our lives, from not being able to watch that new video all of our friends are watching to being excluded at gatherings of friends and family because nobody is taking the time to speak in a way we can understand. The world can start to feel pretty closed off. But when you publish a transcript, you’re opening the world up for us, just a little. And that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.

The post How to make your podcast more accessible using transcripts appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.