Writing the Radio Short Story

Irish Jesuit Province

Writing the Radio Short StoryAuthor(s): Philip RooneySource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 77, No. 912 (Jun., 1949), pp. 278-283Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20516003 .

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WRITING THE RADIO SHORT STORY By PHILIP ROONEY

E are all storytellers, every last one of us. The man who first said that everyone had the makings of a good novel in him was a neat phrase-maker but a poor listener. If he had

been listening and paying heed to the babel of voices all about him ?in pub, club, train, tram, by the fireside, in the field and on the

open road?he'd have realized that not only has each one of us an

unending store of stories in him, but that most of us spend a large part of our waking hours in telling these tales.

We don't always realize what good storytellers we are, of course.

There's a tale told of a noted American radio storyteller who was once asked to say just when he started to tell short stories.

" When?" said he.

" Why, I'd been telling short stories?and

darned good ones too?for all of five years before I discovered that it was short stories I was telling."

And so he had. You see, he was a travelling salesman, a commer

cial traveller who sold reaping machines, mowers, ploughs, harrows,

spades, tractors, and what-not to the farmers of the middle West. Each

day, as part of his duties, he telephoned to the head of his firm a

detailed account of his previous day's activities, of the sales he had

made, of the difficulties he had encountered and overcome, the com

plaints he had listened to and diplomatically smoothed over.

Quite soon this storyteller in embryo realized that in his daily tele

phone talks he had a wonderful opportunity to create a good impres sion of himself and his capabilities as a salesman and travelling repre sentative. His daily reports were no longer bald statements of sales

made and complaints received. In persuasive fashion he described the

difficult clients with whom he did business?and the more difficult the

clients were, the more vivid the colours of his descriptions. With lavish

and lively detail he told of the complaints and grumblings of dissatis

fied customers, and the account of each complaint was most skilfully built up to sound like a warning of disaster for the firm. And then,

quietly and modestly, he told of the masterful steps he had taken to

avert disaster, to brush aside difficulties and quell complaints. Daily the

w

This talk was broadcast from Radio Eireann in February, 1949. It

is published here by kind permission of the Director.

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RADIO SHORT STORY

telephone report was made, growing each day more subtle and success

ful in its purpose?the telling of a story: the story of a successful

salesman.

Now we are all, in our way, as apt as ever that Yankee salesman was

in the game of shaping the facts, colouring the details and heightening the emphasis to make a story that will amuse, impress, or entertain a chosen listener. All we need is the urge or the necessity to tell the

story and a listener to tell it to. That is the important point. We must

have a listener, for the spoken story must be told and listened to.

The importance of the listener will be obvious to everyone who has

ever whiled away an idle half-hour in telling a tale to a friend. The

listener plays just as big a part in the story-telling as does the teller.

It doesn't matter how slight the story is or how significant : it may be

no more than a would-be amusing account of yesterday's golf-match or a vindictively malicious retelling of last week's scandal, if it ?s a

spoken story the method of telling it will be determined by the need

to arouse the interest and engage and hold the attention of a listener.

Straightway the story becomes a personal matter between teller and

listener.

Every genuine practitioner of the craft, from the A. J. Alans of the

crystal set era to the Frank O'Connors of last week's programmes, has

proved that the basis of all radio storytelling is just that sense of

contact between the storyteller and his listener. It isn't difficult to see

just why this is so. The audience which listens to a radio short story is not just an audience of thousands of listeners; it is an audience of

thousands of individual listeners, each listener relaxed and easy by his

wireless set, waiting for the radio story to be told to him alone.

The reader of short stories has the printed page between him and the teller of the story, his direct contact is with the printed page in his hand and not with the writer behind the words; the radio listener, that indi vidual listener multiplied a thousandfold, has no such aid?or impedi

ment; he is in direct and immediate contact with his storyteller, and the

story that is to succeed in holding him spellbound in his chair must be

simple and direct?and as intimate as a fireside chat.

Twenty-odd years ago the late A. J. Alan talked himself to fame

by adapting this age-old technique of the shanachie to the requirements of the new storytelling medium?radio. His stories?whimsical, gay and fantastic tales?were stories specifically designed to be spoken; on the printed page, divorced from the persuasiveness of a seemingly

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IRISH MONTHLY

casual conversational delivery, they sometimes lost point and story

telling punch, but on the air they wove the true storytelling spell. Each and every one of them had one thing in common : from its first casual

phrase to the. neat twist in its tail, every A. J. Alan story was an in

timate story, depending for its full effect on its success in creating a

man-to-man atmosphere between listener and teller, an atmosphere which that final storytelling surprise seemed to dissolve in a chuckle o? amusement shared?shared between the teller and his listener.

Now that is not to say that the radio storyteller need be no more

that blood brother to the club, pub, or fireside pest whose technique of storytelling is merely a matter of button-holing an acquaintance and

launching out into a spate of autobiographical anecdotes. The radio

storyteller knows only too well how insecure his hold is on the button

hole of his unseen listener; his primary purpose in telling the story is

not to please himself but to please his listener.

The listener?that lonely listener by his wireless set?is not a parti

cularly exacting person, but he does make certain demands. First and

foremost it's got to be remembered that he hasn't drawn up his chair to the radio with any idea of indulging in twenty minutes of mental

gymnastics. He is depending on his ear alone for enjoyment and un

derstanding of the story being told; he cannot, as the reader of the

printed story can, take the story at his own pace, flicking back the

pages to pick up the threads and to refresh his memory; he must be

satisfied with what he can hear during the brief and fleeting moment in

which the storyteller's voice is sounding in his ear, and hearing is

normally a much more difficult business than seeing : the ear does not

work nearly as fast as the eye, nor can it take in anything like the same

amount of detail. Every story that is designed for a listening public must be designed with that fact in full and constant view.

All of which is merely to say that the radio story simply cannot be

loaded with anything like as much detail as the story on the printed

page. That fact rules out involved, complex story structure. The

cunning arrangement of plot and sub-plot, the deft interweaving of

many storytelling threads into a subtle pattern over which the reader

of stories can linger with admiration will do no more than confuse,

bewilder, and irritate the listener?and an irritated and bewildered lis

tener need do no more than stretch out a hand to the tuning knob and

break contact with a storyteller who persists in wandering from the

narrow and easily followed path of straightforward narration.

280



RADIO SHORT STORY

Complications of plot must go, and with them every character that is not absolutely essential to the telling of the story. The listener, his hand poised in judgment over that convenient tuning knob, must not

be asked to make the acquaintance of a bewildering gallery of fictional

characters; for him two will be pleasant company, three a quite suffi

cient crowd; to ask him to spend most of his twenty minutes' listening time in a feverish attempt to sort out the identities of half-a-dozen

characters is to invite him to exercise his privilege of casting story,

storyteller and characters into the outer silence. A very few characters will do, and that brace or trio of fictional

people must be easily identified and readily remembered. It is the

storyteller's job to introduce those characters with a vigour and bold ness that will impress their images indelibly on the listener's mind. The

picture created must be clear and vivid, and that vividness and clarity is less likely to be achieved by a wealth of descriptive detail than by a few bold and impressionistic strokes. In the radio story there is

neither time nor place for elaborate personal and scenic description; the people of the story and the background of the story are created

partly by the storyteller, who supplies the bold and firm outline, and

partly by the listener, who supplies the colour and detail out of imagi nation and memory stirred to life by the storyteller's skilful suggest ions. Once again the storytelling depends for its success on the sense

of contact between teller and listener.

Much else that goes to the making of a radio story is a matter of the

simplification that makes for clarity. The radio story is written to be

talked not read, and the most successful and popular talkers do not

bombard their listeners with resounding Johnsonian periods, rolling subordinate clauses, and polished and ponderous pieces of elegant

phrase-making. In all conversation, even in the one-sided conversa

tion of radio storytelling, it is surely a matter of courtesy and com

mon-sense to make listening an easy and effortless affair. A direct, conversational style, an even and easy flow of narrative, an unforced

and convincing progress from incident to event and from crisis to

climax are the essential requisites. The radio story must not be slow in pace, but it must be unforced

and unhurried; it is manifestly better storytelling policy to grip the lis

tener's attention firmly with a few striking and significant happenings than to flash from incident to incident at the stream-lined speed of a

non-stop express. The express storyteller may get to the end of his

281



IRISH MONTHLY

storytelling journey at dazzling speed, but the trouble is that the speed is dazzling; so many storytelling signposts will have been passed at

such high speed that the storyteller's fellow traveller, the listener, may well be pardoned for failing to appreciate the importance of the stop

ping place at which he has arrived, and may well wonder if the journey was really necessary or worth-while. The successful story is the one

which moves at even, smoothly-flowing pace within the cardinal points of beginning, middle and end.

So far so good. The method of the Yankee salesman telling his

daily success story over the telephone will serve us admirably up to a

point as a headline in the fashioning of radio stories. Indeed, many

expert radio storytellers scarcely alter or add to that method at all

and do their best work without employing a single technical trick of

storytelling that could not be effectively and unobtrusively used by a

speaker making use of the telephone to interest a listener

in a plausible, convincing account of some humdrum, exciting or amusing happening. But for the greater number of radio story tellers this method may well prove too good to be true, too subtle in

its very simplicity to be used with any confidence, and in most efforts at radio storytelling the would-be storyteller is well advised to vary the method and make free use of dialogue.

The advantages of dialogue are obvious. It has been said that the

ideal radio story is one about a man from Belfast, a girl from Cork and a character from amongst the Joxers and Junos of O'Casey's

Dublin. Simplification of that kind and reliance on dialect to establish

the identities of the characters would, of course, be destructive of any

subtlety in storytelling, but there's no doubt that there is a very large

grain of sound advice in the quip. In all radio storytelling the voice

supplies the colour, the emphasis, the subtle shadings of meaning; in

dialogue, rather than in direct narration the voice of the storyteller has full scope to build up character and bring the people of the story in vivid and memorable fashion to the listener's mind; the finest and

most delicate shades of humour, of terror, of pathos can be more

sharply impressed upon the listening ear in a single line of skilful

dialogue than in paragraphs of direct narration. It is the radio story teller's handiest tool, this use of dialogue; but the dialogue of the radio

story must be something more than the dialogue of the printed page

adapted for broadcasting by the simple process of cutting out the

printed storyteller's stage directions, the "

he saids "

and "

she replied" 282



RADIO SHORT STORY

and "

I admitted ". Radio dialogue is dialogue meant to be spoken; ft must have the ease and natural quality of casual conversation, but

it must also have sharpness and point that will impress its significance upon the attention of the listener in vivid and unmistakable fashion.

Above all, radio dialogue must never be talk for talk's sake; not a

single word of dialogue must be used which /does not help to

carry on the action of the story, build up character, or create atmos

phere. It is an expression of the inner meaning and total significance of everyday speech : it is dramatic dialogue.

That, then, is the radio story, a story told with a mental eye lifted

in the direction of the lone listener waiting by his wireless set; a story to be talked and not read; & story to be told* and listened to; a story

which depends ultimately for its effect on the degree of co-operation achieved between teller and listener.

When your story is written, find out how it falls upon the ear. Don't

read it yourself. Ask a friend to read it to you; and then, in the place of that lone listener, you will be in a position to decide whether the

story is apt to earn a word of praise?or a turn of the tuning knob.

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Writing the Radio Short Story