Out on the Wire

Why I read this book

Burned out from a recent certification exam, I started listening to podcasts after work, mostly story-driven ones like This American Life, Radiolab, and Serial. One night, the obvious dawned on me: Man, these guys really know how to tell a compelling story… how do they do it? An internet search later, I found Out on the Wire.

But why read a book on podcasting if I have no plans to start a podcast?

Well, I think stories are really important to how we understand the world. Fundamental even. Like it or not, we’re all storytellers and much of what we “know” is just a story we’ve heard from others—or one we tell ourselves. Narrative podcasters, good ones anyway, know how to tell a story, and I figured I could learn a thing or two.

Should you read this book?

Definitely, if you plan to start your own podcast or radio show. If not, maybe.

Out on the Wire is well presented and includes interviews with the best in podcasting and radio (Ira Glass writes the foreword and is featured heavily throughout, alongside other modern radio giants). But it is a comic book, a format I don’t usually reach for. Around 200 pages, Out on the Wire covers a lot of ground in little time, but, perhaps limited by its medium, doesn’t get very deep into its subject. Still, Out on the Wire is a well-illustrated, fun, and breezy read that contains a lot of wisdom whether or not you ever plan on picking up a microphone. 

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Commonplace

[It] feels so right to us today, when authority comes from directness and authenticity, not distance and formality.

Radio is a very visual medium.

There are variations of course, but: get tape, cut tape, write narration (if any), get feedback, rewrite, recut, layer in sound, score with music, air. That’s the technical underpinning of all radio stories.

In 1999, we would typically work on an episode of our show for three or four months before it made it onto the air…

…the characters change and they grow and they learn something new, and surprising… that’s what we’re going for, something surprising…

Whenever there’s a sequence of events—this happened, then that happened, then this happened—we inevitably want to find out what happened next.

I believe radio is a typically didactic medium. It’s not enough to tell a story. You also have to explain what it means.

This is the structure of every story on our program [This American Life]—there’s an anecdote, that is a sequence of actions where someone says ’this happened, then this happened, then this happened’—and then there’s a moment of reflection about what that sequence means, and then on to the next sequence of actions. This is an ancient storytelling structure, really. Its the structure, essentially, of a sermon; you hear a little story from the Bible, then the clergy person tells you what it means. Anecdote then reflection, over and over.

We’re making a narrative, so you want the interviewee to lay out the anecdote, step by step, in order.

You got to give the audience something to picture as the story is told, something three-dimensional and it comes alive. This is the first thing we teach new reporters, right after how to work the equipment.

If I am going to say anything critical about [someone I’m interviewing], I say those criticisms to their face during the interview… You have to give them a chance to respond to the criticism.

The key is to keep moving between different kins of moments: funny scenes, emotional scenes, raising questions.

You always take out the music when there’s a big idea that you really want people to pay attention to. You lose the music so it stands out… It’s like shining a light on it.

For a while we tried to not do This American Life life [but] doing it [live] so close to the edge—for better or worse—makes it feel like a real radio show…

You know when a deadline isn’t real, and when it is.

The key is to express your own personality. Radio is boring when the people on air just want to sound like everyone else. The people who are the most fun to listen to only sound like themselves.

When these producers and reporters go out looking for stories, they find them by paying careful attention to what’s interesting to them.

Story ideas are not sprinkled on us like fairy dust. Finding a story idea is a job within itself.

Focus sentence: Somebody does something because ______ but ______.

**Noticing when you’re bored is really important. It means something in the story isn’t happening in the right way. **

I’m doing a story about X. And what’s interesting about it is Y… [if you] can’t put the second half together, you’re heading into uncertain waters.

The topic is just part of the story idea, it’s the first half of the XY story formula. “I’m doing a story about X.” X can be a person, an event, even an idea. But if you haven’t got a Y, a pretty engaging, surprising Y, you never leave topic-land and arrive at a story.

Imagine a structure and keep reimagining it as you do interviews and research. You need to imagine a story in your head [before your interview]… What is your dream quote for the ending. What is your dream quote for the beginning.

At the end of the month, a car dealership has to make a quota. And for the last two days they basically will do anything to sell you a car.

[Story] ingredients, such as recordings of sounds that might help the listener understand you’ve moved from one place to another.

That’s the magic of being out in the field, and observing the world. You’re actually curious about all the things that you can’t predict that are going to happen.

**“This is interesting for this reason.” I need to say that in some way explicitly. **

The best stories are the ones that have stakes. We always say, What are the stakes, what are the stakes?

I particularly need to fall in love with a character or place, much more than an idea. The idea is not really enough for me.

If [a story doesn’t have a character] sometimes you just have to carry it based on sheer enthusiasm. [Radiolab]

You… don’t want to go with that sort of classic anecdote/object lesson format that a lot of storytelling gets to… I want to experience the world as ideas flowing through people.

[Model] big-picture behavior for [an interviewee]… If you don’t model something for them then they just want to sound like the rest of NPR.

[People] get used to talking in a certain way. If you can jar someone out of that, they are unsteady, at risk, more open… What you listen to is not a voice but to a mind.

I think the real art of narration is learning to feel it just enough, even if you say it over and over again. [The recording] got better because I actually memorized the script by doing it so many times. Whereas when I was reading it, it’s very hard to get away from a readerly voice.

Essentially, for you to preform a version of yourself on the air, you’re having to learn the craft of actually being an actor… to sound like an actual person saying those words, and not somebody reading a page, that’s a craft.

The main trick [to sound like an authentic version of yourself]—and this trick really works and I read it in a book—is to lower the pitch of your voice. When you get tense and are not performing well, if you listen to yourself, you will hear that you are talking a little too loud and your voice will be higher because of the tension that you’re carrying.

One of the keys to coming across as a real person on the radio is feeling your own enthusiasm, and not shutting it off.

[In editing] I take a 45-minute interview and make it sound like it was really a 6-minute interview. Someone actually said this in the interview, but we’re totally rearranging what they say. It’s really important to recognize that what we’re doing is taking on the character of the person that’s speaking.

When you get really good at modification, taking out interviewees’ necessary pauses and their “likes” and distracting misuses of certain vocabulary, you can actually hear them more clearly.

***

It’s Almost Always Chronological Order

Ira Glass: If you start lining things up—this thing happened, then this thing, and then this next thing—it raises the question of what’s going to happen next.

Jessica Abel: And unanswered questions equal suspense.

…

IG: So chronological [order] is the default [story order].

JA: But you don’t always start stories at the beginning.

IG: Well, sometimes there’s chronological, but you pull one sexy anecdote out as the bait to put at the beginning. Or you choose the very last scene as the opening because the last scene is going to be the sexy thing that will pull you in.

***

To be successful, you have to have interesting taste.

If there’s any action, information and exposition should always be embedded in the action.

A scene is a setting, an action, and an idea.

For a scene to work, you need to create a visual image in the listener’s imagination. … You should always switch things from a descriptive voice to an active voice [its much more visual and] creates a scene.

Power of suggestion. The mind of each listener is a vast storehouse of scenery. The radio writer, through speech, music, and other sounds, enables the listener to visualize each scene.

Really good writing comes out of interaction; it does not come out when you go back to sit down at your computer.

The writing happens in the space between two people.

Signposting [is when] you’re being told, “This is the important part. Notice this. Remember this.” Why signpost? The hard, hard, hard thing about radio is that if you take a step that the listener doesn’t follow… if the listener is saying “Wait, what?” It’s a disaster, It’s a train wreck. Because the time that it takes to say “Wait, what?” Means that you can’t concentrate on the next thing that the person in the story is saying… one moment like that in the story can totally derail the story.

At first I thought [signposting] was kind of annoying. I was like, You don’t need to flag everything. But then, I would listen to my old pieces and be like, Oh no! I don’t know what’s going on! I don’t know who’s talking! Sometimes you just really need to state the obvious.

In oral storytelling, it’s important to really land the key moments of the story.

People don’t want to be told how to feel but they do want to be told what to pay attention to.

With radio you have a peculiar problem. If somebody stops talking, you can’t just go to silence for very long. And so if you just want to pause, you need something there. Often the main thing that music is doing is just holding the space, and letting the moment live for another three or four seconds.

Music and sound are powerful emotional tools. They put you inside the point of view of a character as strongly as any narrative one could write. … [Music] can make characters so big and so epic. It can give the story such sweep. And it can make things tender, and fragile, and heartbreaking. Powerful, visceral.

[Music can be ahead of the action and operate] on behalf of the all-knowing omnipotent author.

In most [edit] meetings, [Snap Judgement] had their entire staff of nine, including their webmaster and intern, in the room actively participating.

The critiquing process here is pretty much “take the knives out and hit this.”

[Editing] is so much more time-consuming than even being in the field. We’ll do edit after edit after edit.. spend all afternoon on one 20-minute story, and rewrite every little part of it. That’s why the show is OK. That’s why its good.

To me the story might be perfectly clear, but one of my co-directors of one of the other storytellers, might be confused… if somebody there is confused [people in the audience would get confused].

You have to get the story out in front of other people. And then take it back to work on alone… if you haven’t done that six times, it’s not going to be a good story. God knows, iterations should be some kind of religion. 

I’ll endlessly tell my producers: Put it on your phone, walk around the block with it. Move your physical position and listen to it in a different space. It’s particularly true when you’re working on something alone. You have to find ways to access different parts of your brain as a story teller.

Our biggest hope is that our pieces will actually, and I mean this literally, move people. I want bodily reactions, I want the face to change, I want the sitting position of the listener to change.

Sometimes people will give you notes on your piece, and you really disagree with the notes. There’s something in your piece that they really didn’t like, and the way they say it to you is really wrongheaded. But I think you still want to notice they didn’t get this part… especially if its something that you love, if they didn’t get it, it means you really need to think, wait, what did I do wrong that they are not loving this the way that I love it. And even if you hate them and disagree with everything they’re saying, what they’re saying to you is you failed. 

You may hate it, but they are 100% right. Why? Because they can tell you what they actually hear, as opposed to what you think you said.

Editing is essential no matter what you’re creating. And it something that many many people miss in their process.

[Learn to…]

• Pay attention to what interests you
• Find your voice
• Build solid structure
• Collaborate editorially