Story Building Tools: Narrative Rules for Podcasting
Every podcast tells a story. What story are you telling and why listeners will care? Here are some common narrative rules and how they can apply to podcasting.
What is a Narrative Podcast?
In Podcasting, there is a specific style called narrative. Podcasts like Serial, Revisionist History, and Radiolab are some of the most successful narrative podcasts. Narrative podcasts focus on telling a story and are often much more scripted than an interview or solocast. When scripting your narrative podcast, consider these rules:
What are the Rules?
There must be conflict. Why should the audience care? What are the stakes?
If there is no resolution, then there must be a call-to-action for the audience to finish the story.
Coincidences are great for creating problems, bad for solving them.
Show don’t tell.
Follow The Rule of Three.
Avoid the obvious. The audience will get bored.
Some details don’t need to be explicitly stated, they can be implied.
The Hero is flawed. The audience admires them more for trying than their successes.
Once upon a time ___. Each day ___. But one day ___. And because of that ___. Because of that ___. Until finally ___.
You can rely on parody or similar story structure, but create your own twists so the audience can’t predict what will happen next.
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