1. Preparing to Draft and Storyboard Concept Podcasts
STRUCTURE
STORY & PLOT
Preparing to Draft and Storyboard Concept Podcasts
15 minutes: 12:25 / 1: 55
Today we’re going to talk about Structure Story & Plot to prepare you to start putting your segments together –
Don’t forget that stories, like any other genre make a claim.
So your segments need to make a claim – even if the claim is less assertive and formal than it is in your blog posts and proposals or a written essay.

2. STRUCTURE
“Structure offers a path, a way to figure out where to go … what to do with all the tape.”
—Rob Rosenthal,
paraphrasing Bradley Campbell, in “My Kingdom for Some Structure”
15 minutes >> 12: 30, 2:00
We’re going a little bit backwards here,
because often you have all your tape in front of you before you start structuring.
But we’re going to do a little bit of structure in order to decide how to get the episode set up.

3. STORY & PLOT
“The concept of plot is too often confused with a description of the events in the novel, with what I’d tentatively call the story line.”
—Viktor Shlovsky, translated by Benjamin Sher, in “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy”
Skip for section F
Shklovsky continues: “As a matter of fact, though, the story line is nothing more than material for plot formation.”
Russian formalist
Create a kind of scientific language for how literature works.
Tristram Shandy is a crazy novel by Laurence Sterne – it’s supposed to be an autobiography, but he can’t ever get his story started.

4. PICTURE YOUR PLOT
Action
Background
Development
Climax
Ending

5. STORYBOARD
“A storyboard is a sketch of how to organize a story and a list of its contents.
A storyboard helps you:
Define the parameters of story within available resources and times.
Organize and focus a story.
Figure out what medium to use for each part of the story.”
15 minutes >> 1:10 / 2:40
We’re going to modify the storyboard
—“Storyboarding,” Advanced Media Institute,
University of California, Berkeley

6. WRITE IT > < SPEAK IT

7. BE KIND TO YOUR LISTENER
Short sentences
Make your description count
Mic interviewees, voices, sounds closely
Assertive, active verbs (present tenses!)
Make mistakes and let yourself learn

8. INTONATION Quoting linguist Roman Jakobson:
A former actor of Stanislavskij’s Moscow Theatre told me how at his audition he was asked by the famous director to make forty different messages from the phrase ... ‘This evening,’ by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a list of some forty emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase in accordance with each of these situations, which his audience had to recognize only from the changes in the sound shape of the same two words. (Dolar SSR 545)

9. CONVERSATION Calvin Trillin on Ira Glass’s Radio Voice:
Conversational tone
Not a particularly commanding tone
Not like Walter Cronkite (:23)
Crackly
No dread of silence
An ordinary human being telling a story to 1.8 million other human beings