![]() Less characters works better, and distinctive voices help. This makes it particularly hard for them to keep track of who is who during a radio play. Second, there’s a decent chance the listener will be doing something else at the same time as listening. Action/fight scenes are difficult to pull off (doesn’t stop me from trying every damned time), whereas monologues and narrative speech traditionally work better here than anywhere else (bleurk.) (Yeah, ok, make sure to ignore my prejudices). So, you need to be quick to invoke a sense of space. Well, first the audience can’t see anything. You need to bring the story if you want to keep them engaged past the first sixty seconds. Good jokes come thick and fast, good stories are immersive. There just isn’t enough to hold the audience’s attention–that’s why sketch shows move so fast. ![]() Why do we need stories not sketches? Well, a ten to fifteen minute sketch is boring. With experience you’ll get better at packing story into the right time, but a good short play is dense, packed with meaning, and only contains lines essential to the story. So, you’ll know you’re doing it right if at the end of your first draft you’re really struggling to get everything in the page limit, it feels like there’s so much going on and nothing you can cut, and you’re composing desperate emails to the producer in your head for why you need just a few minutes more. A story with rich characters and proper development will have you ripping your hair out to reduce it to fifteen minutes or less. How can you tell you have a sketch and not a story? The easiest way is if you’ve got to about seven pages (or less!) and you find you’ve finished, you’ve probably written a sketch, and your editor will ask you to cut it to two pages. Be funny as you like (please do be funny) but force a character to confront a difficult change. The audience has little time to adapt from play to play, so the sooner they can go “oh this is the one about the cow who’s trying to get to the moon but the farmer keeps sabotaging their rocket” the more chance they’ll remember your play amongst the others, and the more free you will be to go break the rules of drama and be all radical or whatever (or just tell a damned good tale).īut write a story not a sketch. You do story however you like, but key to a radio short is to get your want and your obstacle right up there in the first paragraph. How do I tell a full story in time it usually takes me to write one half decent sentence? If you give them a punchline in the place of a play they’ll get bored, and they’ll let you know. You guys know this stuff already, of course, but there’s a temptation with a short to take one cute idea (or joke), present that as your 10-minute play, and think your work is done. ![]() They attempt to overcome this flaw, and in a final confrontation with B either succeed in changing (comedy!) or fail to change (tragedy!) There were go. A attempts to get past B to what they want but fails because of some flaw in their personality. A short play is a full story, beginning, middle and end, conflict, character development, the whole deal. A sketch is a joke – a setup for a punch-line. If you’re looking for more information about writing radio shorts, I recommend A More Perfect Ten by Gary Garrison for your Kindle as a great guide on ten-minute plays in theatre (plus excellent examples of ten-minute plays), and if you’re interested in paper books I rather like Writing for Radio by Shaun MacLoughlin.Ī short play is a whole story–told fast. Later in the year we will have a whole run of brand new plays, and I wrote this guide to help my writers. You can listen to our first effort here, and we will publish more plays soon. A major part of my work this year has been the setting up of “Little Wonder Productions”, a production company to produce and publish short radio plays on the internet. ![]() This is a guide to writing short radio plays.
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