There’s a strong impulse right now to organize stories by space, rather than time. Check out This American Life’s Story Globe, or the various wings of Localore. It seems a natural extension of our communication technologies to map our environments with stories, and (attempt) to chronicle the fantastic volume of human experience that takes place all around us, all the time.

I think this trend in storytelling is also part of a broader cultural move towards organizing our lives according to space (eating local foods, supporting local economies). But the impulse to put a story on a map can be taken one step further; it can be applied to the structure of a story itself. You can organize a story by the space in which it took place, rather than by the order in which it unfolded in time. Careful, though: when space becomes the supporting structure of your story, you’re unlikely to end up with a traditional narrative arc. And if you don’t have that, then you might have to find something else to keep your listeners in their seats.

I was always averse to studying the elements of a story. I still remember a kind of icky feeling from 7th grade, when I first learned the basic plot diagram (you know, initial events, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement - don’t forget the second “e”) because let’s be honest, stories don’t really HAPPEN according to a pre-set formulas... right?

But once I actually started telling stories, I realized that formulas are extremely helpful. It’s a big part of why I write these blogposts. So today I am going to write about a formula that is used in many stories — and prove to you why, even though stories don't occur according to formulas, formulas can still be your friend.

Here’s the formula: “Someone does something because, but...”

I picked up this week’s nugget of storytelling gold from Rob Rosenthal, the producer/teacher behind the podcast How Sound. He pulled it from a CBC style book (That's "Canadian Broadcasting Company"), and in order to help unpack it, I'll give you an even more distilled version of the formula: “X because Y, but Z”

Sometimes when I’m reading an article or book, I take a moment in the middle of a paragraph to think about what I’m reading. Sometimes I’ll even read good a paragraph twice. It’s like my brain needs a moment to organize and process the information it’s acquiring. But when we listen to a spoken story, we can’t necessarily take that pause when we need it. As writers and producers of spoken stories, we have to anticipate those moments when our audience will need a moment to think about things, and give it to them. These are the pauses that give the audience space to make meaning, to move from witnessing the story to understanding the story.

Or, in the words of the wonderful Ira Glass, “An image will stay with you a little longer if we put in more of a pause.”

I feel like a lot of radio people harbor some deep-seated awkwardnesses. If you’re among them (among us), I’m here to tell you that not only is this ok, it can, in some circumstances, actually prove quite useful.

You’ve probably heard that an audience mimics the emotional state of the speaker. It’s true. If you’re watching someone speak confidently, you’ll feel more confident, and if you’re watching someone who’s uncomfortable, you’ll feel uncomfortable. What you probably have not heard, though, is that feeling uncomfortable can help you tell a more dramatic story.

This is one of the reasons I love this story by Noah St. John. You’ll probably want to go ahead and listen to it before reading the rest of this blogpost, because there are major spoilers coming up.

It’s time to get a little bit personal. This week I’m going to write about one of my own stories. I had more fun producing this story than any other story I’ve produced.

It’s called People Find the Drum who Need to Find the Drum, and it hails from waaaaay back in the Stanford Storytelling Project’s archives --- Hannah Krakauer and I made it in 2008. It’s about a visiting artist at Stanford, John-Carlos Perea, who leads a 10 week course on pow wow music. He teaches his students the history of pow wow music and dance, then how to play the drum and sing pow wow music. We followed the course for several weeks, and witnessed the transformation that the students underwent during this time.

In the process of scripting this story, Hannah and I scratched our heads and labored intensely over how to tell the story of Perea and the students we’d interviewed. We sorted and resorted our piles of transcripts, and went through several writes and rewrites of the story’s narration. And then, one evening at my house, over our tenth cup of tea, it dawned on us: this story was best without a narrator. The characters could tell their story themselves.

I just finished re-listening to my absolute favorite audiobook, A Wrinkle in Time, read by the author, Madeleine L'Engle.

I feel a little embarrassed for broadcasting my love of a children’s audiobook, but I challenge you to name a better one. Seriously. I have listened to lots of audiobooks, and I have yet to find anything that approaches it, especially in the realm of fiction.

This book sings to the depths of my heart, and I share it with anyone who is going on a roadtrip or having trouble getting out of bed or excited about space travel or struggling through teenage awkwardness... I recommend it to basically anyone, and this is why: L’Engle’s voice.

Poetry and jazz. Makes me think of a crowded basement, deep in the city, a man with a cigarette, tapping his foot, nodding toward a trio of musicians. We tend to think of the poetry and jazz combination as the epitome of the avant garde. But actually, it descends from the longest tradition in human communication, where the storyteller is a singer, a songster, a minstrel, a bard.

I have always been intimidated by the poem-song, because it has the potential to go so terribly awry. But my interest was recently revived when I came across this rare gem: San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, live at the Blackhawk. The year is 1958, Rexroth is a center of gravity in literary San Francisco, a reluctant mentor to the Beats, and is performing here at one of the era’s most serious jazz venues.

I suggest starting with the poem-song, ‘I didn’t want it…’ It’s fun. You’ll find yourself both tapping your foot to the rhythm and nodding your head at certain lines in the poem. Both the spoken word and the music become catchier through their combination. How is this done?

Sometimes the best thing in a story is something that doesn’t actually happen in the story... it’s something that’s imagined-as-happening.

I noticed it recently in a David Sedaris story, Accidental Deception. Even though what occurs in the story is wonderful and hilarious, it’s the moment when Sedaris describes what kinds of things could occur, that the story becomes one of my favorites.

A while back, I wrote a post about the expert kindness of Ira Glass, where I said that Glass’ gentle touch was the secret to his success in a risky interview situation. But I’d like to revise my argument here, to take into account the tactics of another interviewer par excellence, NPR’s celebrated Terry Gross.

Terry Gross is kind, don’t get me wrong, but she’s not gentle in the same way as Ira Glass. She has a way of probing her interviewee about their apparent contradictions, or their less than noble deeds, and once identifying a difficult point, she does not stop after a single question, but tends to push the point, and then push it again. Somehow, her persistent jabs do not come across as attacks.

How is this possible? Is it the neutral tone of her voice? Is it her genuine curiosity? Is it that her critical questions are preceded by and interspersed with praiseful ones?

There’s some magical quality in radio, perhaps the softness of the voice or the raw emotion in every vibration that can evoke a visceral reaction. That magical quality comes out really strongly in “Unraveling Bolero”, by Jad Abumrad for Radiolab. It explores the intersection of creativity and neurology, and the eerie similarities between two artists. The music used to connect the two stories is what creates that magical quality.

Unraveling Bolero is the story of two lives, woven together in a haunting echo of one another across time and space. The first is Anne Adams, an incredible cell biologist, who after a series of events became a full-time artist. Soon afterwards, her obsession with Maurice Ravel’s Bolero began as she meticulously deconstructed the composition into a striking visual representation. The second is Maurice Ravel himself who, in the 1920’s in France, became consumed by the very same repetitive melody, during the process of writing the piece.

I think that the most challenging part of a writing a story for radio is formulating the introduction. The stakes are very high: your listener will decide within a few short seconds whether to stick around for your story or whether to turn the proverbial dial, and so you must do everything you can to persuade that listener to stay, and you must do it quickly. A good introduction has the magical power to seize a person’s attention and keep them curious about how your story will unfold.

I came across a great example of this in our own archives, in The Human Map, by Raj Bhandari. Within the first 30 seconds, Bhandari introduces himself, his topic, his character, and, perhaps most importantly, promises us that we will learn something new if we continue listening. So what else can we do but stay?!

Here is the transcript of the first 30 seconds. I think it’s worth reading closely, because it is so packed with top-quality craft elements.

From the SSP blogging staff: In preparation for our event this Friday with Coleman Barks and Martin Shaw, SSP blogger Bonnie Swift held an informal interview with Martin Shaw, asking him about repetition in the oral tradition, in the light of Shaw’s telling of the Handless Maiden myth.

What follows is the full text of Shaw's response.

The raw ground of many of these stories I tell are to be found in oral culture. A time when human speech was clearly a note in a far wider music - the roots of these tales carrying the croaking-burrs and twigged silver musings of the magpie tucked tight in their thinking. The teller was placed within, rather on top, of the web of sound the living world creates. This base-line consciousness creates a very vivid negotiation with the wider psyche of sea foam and black bear. Everything is intelligent, animate, communicating.

I was tired, and honestly, I thought I would just fall asleep while listening to this story. I was okay with that.

I was mostly listening so that I report back to my Canadian friend who told me about The Vinyl Cafe - I’d never heard of it and my expectations were low. Ready to check one more thing off my list, I put on my headphones and got in bed.

But by the time I finished listening to "Roger Woodward and Niagara Falls", I realized that I had been drawn out of my sleepiness and into the story - I was wide awake.

I spent the last minutes before the beginning of winter break in my usual chaotic frenzy to download enough free online podcasts to stave off boredom on my flight. With headphones in my ears, eyes closed, I find it easier to survive the stale airports and the rickety, small planes that for some reason airlines also choose to fly to my tourist hot-spot hometown of Indianapolis.

Scrolling through the random Moth podcasts I had downloaded, I jumped into the story of Aimee Mullins performed live on the Moth Radio Hour, without any clue as to who she was. I was just looking for a distraction, something to drown out the emergency evacuation instructions, but I found myself suppressing giggles in my seat, disguised eloquently with coughing. But I also found myself twisted up inside, twisted by the emotional pendulum-style of her storytelling, from light to dark and back to light. Comedy and Tragedy intertwined.

When I first started listening to The Fourth Tower of Inverness, I felt sure that it had been produced within the last few years. It’s a radio drama that seems to campify the New Age movement, and all of the meditation/inspirational tapes that were produced in the 90’s.

But the story is from 1972 - long before self-help tapes became a Thing. It’s as if the writers have a prescient understanding of the hypnotic power of sound, and they use some classic guided meditation techniques to weave that power throughout their playful narrative.