The Trouble With Radio Drama

As an assignment for Creative Writing, my group and I had to come up with a radio drama idea. At first it seemed simple, a few log lines, and a couple characters. It was going to be a piece of cake!

Once we began throwing around ideas, the problems began. For some time, the best idea we had was Somalian pirates that steal a fancy modern yacht. An hour of debating later, and we had it: a maid and all her servant friends gossiping about what happened during the week.

The idea seemed simple enough, but as we began to throw around storyline ideas, and created different characters, it proved to be more complex than anticipated. The story did eventually start to take shape, and we tweaked the last little bits to make it all fit together.

The story was, 5 servants for a family get together every weekend in their employer's home. The family goes away every weekend to their beach house in Long Beach for family time, so all the 'help' have the house to themselves. They play poker over drinks, and gossip about the things they saw or heard about the family. The real storyline is in what the family does over the whole timeline.

The most helpful part in writing this drama, I think, was the fully developed characters. We spent a lot of time creating a background and personality for each character. It made it easier to write because we knew more how each character would react to the different twists that came up, or how they would speak. Having them so developed definitely made the story more interesting too. Everyone was sort of unexpected, like the young gardener and pool boy was in a gang for years, yet sees the little girl of the family as a sister and looks out for her. Another character, Olga, is unexpectedly a very attractive woman with no German accent like the name may suggest.

After a while of working on the project, it started looking like a soap opera, mostly because of the mandatory cliffhanger at the end of each episode. Some were a bit of a stretch to set up the next episode, but I found them fun to write.

Another challenge in this assignment was remembering it was for radio. Some scenes became confusing because a visual would be needed, so a fair amount of editing had to be done.

Overall, I think the whole project went pretty well. We had a pretty good story set up and were eager to write more of the scenes. Although I'm proud of it, I think the whole thing was pretty confusing. It took a week for just my group to understand what was going on. There were definitely too many characters for a radio drama. We had 9 characters in total that were in just about every episode. Each episode would have several scene changes in it too, although separated by a flashback sound effect, would be difficult to understand.

Tips for writing a radio drama (learned from my mistakes, and comparing to more successful dramas):

• Keep it simple. Limit it to only a small number of characters.
• Keep the setting simple, and somewhere easily recognisable by sound.
• Have a complete storyline in each episode, with a good cliffhanger at the end.
  
• Give characters unique/identifiable voices.