Better Writing Through Radio, Part II

Writing to Tape

Ok, writing to tape. Notice that an impulse often comes over you as you start to write into a piece of tape. You begin to summarize what's in the tape. Rather than setting it up, you start giving away what we're about to hear, upstaging it. This impulse feels natural, and therefore good, but it's a storykiller. It drains all the excitement and momentum out of the story. So, the first rule of writing to tape:

Don't repeat the tape.

The writing that goes around a piece of tape—right before and after it—should work with the tape, as one unit, like a good comedy team: neither one stepping on the other's lines, and both trying to maximize the audience's pleasure (or horror, or whatever emotion you're trying to provoke). Here's an example of how the script-to-tape relationship sounds when it's working. This is Ira Glass' opening to a This American Life episode called "Kindness of Strangers."

Listen to Clip (MP3)

Ira: Brett was standing on a subway platform. Afternoon rush hour, it was crowded. And he noticed this guy... didn't seem homeless, decent clothes. Stopping in front of each person, looking into his or her eyes, saying something, and moving on to the next person. Turns out the guy was telling people:

TAPE—They could stay or they had to go. They were in or they were out. LITERALLY WHAT WOULD HE SAY. Literally it would be: You? You're out. You're gone. You're gone. You're OK. You can stay. AND THEN DO PEOPLE LEAVE? No! Not at all. And no one argued with him.

The very last line before the tape, combined with the first line of tape, is sort of a call-and-response package. Listeners get the feeling that Ira and Brett are telling the story together, which they are—but only because Ira is deliberately writing to the tape in a way that creates that feeling. He also wrote the whole opening in a way that emphasized, and drew out, the tension of the scene—what is this guy saying to people?—and then he allowed the tape to come in as the punch line. A quick word about how to choose tape, since it's easier to write to good tape than to bad. Use tape where a person is being expressive, or saying something surprising, or being funny, or maybe where you have some interaction with the person you're interviewing (like in the segment above). Whenever possible, avoid using "explaining tape,"where a person is droning on about statistics, or background information, or giving some long backstory. Unless the person you're interviewing is great at explaining, YOU should do any explaining in the script, and let the tape be dynamic and emotional. When you take on the drudgery of explaining, you can control it: cut out all the draggy parts and write it as interestingly as possible. Then go to tape. Here's an excerpt from a story Alix Spiegel did about EMS workers dealing with suicide attempts in one part of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. This excerpt starts in the middle of the story, with Alix laying out the statistical evidence suggesting an increase in suicide attempts.

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Alix: Jefferson Parrish EMS records show that the number of suicides in October this year was the same as in years past, even though the population was significantly diminished. But anecdotally, supervisor Mike Yoyad, second-in-command, estimated that the service was seeing as many suicides in a day as they usually get in a week. Another EMS worker reported that on his shift, the rate had doubled. And many, like Matthews, say they're struggling to keep afloat themselves.

TAPE—Honestly, I try not to think about it cause otherwise I'll end up in the same state as everyone else.

Alix: But some on the force find it more difficult to push emotions away, like crew chief Paul Corello. Corello is a 20-year EMS veteran, with no history of mental disorder, who says he finds himself in an unprecedented position.

TAPE—I cry every day. Every day. I'm at the lowest point in my life that I think I could ever be. Like I said before, my worst enemy is me. Cause when I have idle time, that's when I...I start to feel real bad. Sometimes I find myself out in the street, knowing I got some errands to go run. And sometimes I can't even figure out why am I here? Why did I end up in this area here? Why did I come here? What did I need to do here? And I can't remember.

So, Alix covered the nuts and bolts in her script, and then got to a great piece of tape. The second rule of writing to tape: Let the tape have the money shot. Something else to keep in mind, as you're writing to a piece of tape, is: what exactly do you want to tell listeners about the person they're going to be hearing from in the tape? Remember that you know a lot more about this person than any of your listeners, and you need to give them the information they need to find the tape you've chosen as compelling as you do. For instance, right before Alix plays the second piece of tape above, she tells us that the guy we're about to hear has been doing his job for 20 years, without ever getting dragged down by it. Then when she plays the tape, and the first thing we hear is this guy saying "I cry every day," and his voice starts to catch, we know that this is a big deal; this is not a man who has been crying every day for his whole life. Third rule: Tell listeners what they need to know to get the most out of the tape.Here's an odd truth about radio stories: a lot of tape is not that gripping, taken strictly on its own merits. If you heard it without any set-up, it wouldn't be that interesting. Of course you should always try like mad to get gripping tape, and you want to use that tape whenever you can. But not everyone you interview is going to sob or be hilarious or tell you the most fascinating story you've ever heard. With careful writing, though, you can tell a memorable story with tape that is only decent. Here's a scene from a show I did about American private contractors working in Iraq. The guy in this scene went to Iraq to help rebuild its electrical grid.

Listen to Clip (MP3)

Nancy: Mike, from Texas, starts out on a small tear. He's 30 years old, with dark blue eyes and a blond moustache growing down the sides of his mouth. He instigates the brothel conversation, then orders a bottle of Captain Morgan rum. For himself. But the evening, surprisingly, gets less rowdy as it goes on. It turns out Mike is a geek, though a kind I've never encountered before: a power-plant geek. He's really, really into what he does: the job, the tools.

TAPE—Absolutely. I wanna see the kind of equipment they got. Not only plant equipment and power-producing equipment. I want to see what kind of cranes and logistical equipment we've got on site and that sort of thing.

Nancy: He wants to see the cranes. The conversation gets more and more inside: shimstock, couplings, pipe guys versus mechanical guys.

TAPE—And then you got civil guys that want you to set the pipe and set the machinery to the grade of the concrete. And it's like, no, it don't work like that. (laugh)

Nancy: There are guys who come to Iraq who know guns and do guns. And then there are guys who come to Iraq who are technicians or specialists in some area: geeks. Sewage geeks, water geeks, refinery geeks, electricity geeks.

Now, neither of these pieces of tape is that great. But if they're framed right, they give a strong sense of this person, Mike. So even though this scene is short, it was hard to put together, and I had to rewrite it several times, with help from Ira and from Sarah Koenig (who produced the Iraq show), because we wanted to pull off a kind of trick: turn the tape's weakness into its strength. Here's what we did. We realized that the first cut of tape is only interesting because it's surprising that he finds what he's talking about so interesting. So, instead of not using that piece of tape because all the equipment he talks about sounds kind of boring, I used the script beforehand to set up the idea that this man loves his job so much that he loves even what we would find unlovable about it. The second piece of tape is even less promising than the first, on the face of it: it's an inside joke, and we, as listeners, are not on the inside. But in the writing leading into the tape, I tried to set it up so that the tape's incomprehensibility itself becomes the joke. You know who's really good at writing to tape in a way that always makes it interesting? Alex Chadwick, the host of Day to Day. Here's a snippet from a recent show—a promo that's less than a minute long.

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Alex: Later this week, those space scientists who sent the rover robots to Mars two years ago finally get out of the lab and go to the movies... where they see an IMAX documentary with enormous images from the wide, red plains of a distant planet. And the scientists—the calm, quiet, serious scientists—go wild.

TAPE—It shows me Mars the way I've always known it looks. You know? I mean I saw those scenes and it's: Yeah, that's what it looks like! TAPE—The only thing that would be different if you were there you'd be wearing a space suit. But that's exactly what it'd be like to be there and experiencing what are rovers have been experiencing, and continue to experience, every single day, even now.

Alex: Exploring Mars by rover. The scientists and the filmmaker, later this week.

Alex's script seems so breezy and offhand, but it's actually quite pointed, and it makes this tape so much more compelling than it would be if he just led into it by saying something straightforward, like: "Later this week... scientists who sent those robots to Mars a couple of years ago...talk about the documentary made from the robots' footage." Wouldn't that make your mind start to wander? Instead, he really sells the story, in a simple, direct way he helps us, as listeners, understand how exciting this film must be for the guys who sent the robots up to Mars—and then we get caught up in their excitement. How does he do this? He tells us that these guys almost never leave their lab, and now they have a chance to finally SEE MARS, a place they think about all the time but have never before seen close up. And then he very slyly adds the part about the "calm, quiet, serious scientists" right before he says that they "go wild," because the thing is, the tape is not wild, it's pretty subdued. But Alex is saying, look, this is what "wild" from these guys sounds like. Fourth rule: You are in control of your story: you make the tape work, even if it's so-so.A caveat to that rule—in fact, an outright contradiction of it—is that sometimes a piece of tape isn't working because it really is the wrong piece of tape and you should use a different one. Or maybe it's cut wrong. I tried about 10 different ways to write into the following piece of tape, about a Palestinian man who grew up in London, then moved to Gaza a few years ago:

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TAPE — I've put on over 20 kilograms of weight since I've come into Gaza... you'd go to the biggest gym, called Rosy, and they've got two treadmills. The last gym I joined in London was about... you'd be standing on one treadmill in a line of 50... you'd have remote control on your neck connected to your speakers... you'd be watching MTV or CNN while you're jogging. Here you've got the local stereo put on the side and one guy wants Arabic music while the other guy wants dance music (laugh)...

I was making myself crazy, trying to find a way to explain the kilograms-to-pounds conversion (one kilo = 2.2 pounds, so the guy put on more than 40 pounds) without giving away what he was about to say. I had it in my mind that the line about putting on 20 kilos absolutely had to come at the start of the tape—I liked the idea of getting the dramatic weight gain in first, before you hear about the lameness of the gym. But look how much easier it was to write around, once I moved that line to the end of the cut.

Listen to Clip (MP3)

Nancy: Four years ago, Hadi Abushahla left London, and a successful career as an export manager... To move to Gaza City and start a computer store. When he arrived, he wore cufflinks every day. His Arabic was marginal, and had the wrong accent: he'd copied his mother's West Bank style, not his father's Gazan one. He was 27 years old and he'd been visiting Gaza since he was 18. Living here, he found out, is not like visiting.

TAPE—You'd go to the biggest gym, called Rosy, and they've got two treadmills. The last gym I joined in London was about... you'd be standing on one treadmill in a line of 50... you'd have remote control on your neck connected to your speakers... you'd be watching MTV or CNN while you're jogging. Here you've got the local stereo put on the side and one guy wants Arabic music while the other guy wants dance music (laugh)... I've put on over 20 kilograms of weight since I've come into Gaza.

Nancy: That's 44 pounds.

By moving the weight-gain tape to the end of the cut, I not only had easier tape to write into but also had a clear line out of the tape—I could make the kilo-to-pounds conversion there, and give the drama of the weight gain even more emphasis. So, another rule: Consider re-cutting a piece of tape if the writing isn't working.Now I'd like to contradict myself again and say that there are times when it's good to repeat what's in the tape—you can do it before or after. If you want to lean on a point in the tape, for instance. I did that in the Iraq scene above, repeating what Mike said about wanting to see the cranes. Another reason to do it would be if the person you're interviewing says something great but is off-mic. Jack Hitt did this in a This American Life story called "Dawn,"about going home to Charleston, South Carolina to find out what happened to a male-to-female transsexual who lived there in the 1960s, named Gordon. Here, Jack is interviewing his mother.

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Jack: She's lived in Charleston all her life. We poured some iced tea one afternoon, and sat at her dining room table.

TAPE—When Gordon was still a guy, um... can you say that?

Jack: That's my mom, whispering. You can't really hear her. What she's saying is...can you say that on the radio? Here, listen again:

TAPE—When Gordon was still a guy, um... can you say that? Yeah (laugh) I can say that. Ha ha Ok. Um, when Gordon was still a guy...

Jack: You see, good Charlestonians do not discuss private matters openly. If at all, we discuss them sotto voce. Sometimes literally in a whisper.

Jack's writing turns this piece of tape from a murky moment into a revealing one. It's important, during taping, to try to get everything on mic, and you wouldn't want to play off-mic tape too often in any given story, but the script can sometimes rescue tape that would otherwise be unusable. Another rule: Don't necessarily reject good tape that happens off-mic. A couple more basics. If the place where the tape was recorded is audible, you need to tell us, before we hear the tape, what that place is, and maybe describe it, and if necessary tell us why the place is important in the story. You might also want to identify any strange background noises we'd hear in the tape, so that we won't be distracted by wondering what they are, as we're listening. Finally, I'm sure you know this, but there are exceptions to every rule and suggestion I've laid out here. Radio can work in a lot of different ways. The main thing to remember, as you're writing, that it's your job to keep listeners interested in the story, all the time, and that the script can be one of your best tools for doing that.

Nancy Updike

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Better Writing Through Radio, Part I


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