Listening to “Retention,” Part 1

Note: For the next three days, I’m going to be discussing the origins of “Retention,” the episode that I wrote for the audio science fiction anthology series The Outer Reach. It’s available for streaming here on the Howl podcast network, and you can get a free month of access by using the promotional code REACH.

Until about a year ago, I had never thought about writing for audio. As I’ve recounted elsewhere, I got into it thanks to a lucky coincidence: I was approached by Nick White, a radio producer in Los Angeles, who had gone to high school with my younger brother. Nick was developing an audio science fiction series, purely as a labor of love, and since he knew that I’d published some stories in Analog, he wanted to know if I’d consider adapting one for the show. I was more than willing, but after taking a hard look at “The Boneless One” and “Cryptids,” I decided that neither one was particularly suited for the format. There were too many characters, for one thing, and it would be hard to make either story work with a smaller cast: the former is a murder mystery with multiple suspects, the latter a monster story that depends on the victims being picked off one by one, and each has about the right number of players. I also couldn’t think of a plausible way to tell them using auditory tools alone. Since I didn’t have an obvious candidate for adaptation, which in itself would probably require at least a week of work, I began to think that it would make more sense for me to write something up from scratch. Nick, fortunately, agreed. And when I started to figure out what kind of plot to put together, one of my first criteria was that it be a story that could be conveyed entirely through dialogue and sound.

I was probably overthinking it. When I went back recently to listen to old science fiction radio shows like Dimension X and X Minus One, I discovered that they weren’t shy about leaning heavily on narration. Radio playwrights didn’t worry much about honoring to the purity of the medium: they were seasoned professionals who had to get an episode out on time, and by using a narrator, they could tell a wider range of stories with less trouble. (Most of these scripts were adaptations of stories from magazines like Astounding and Galaxy, and many wouldn’t have worked at all without some degree of narration to fill in the gaps between scenes.) Which isn’t to say that they didn’t rely on a few basic principles when it came to dramatizing the situation. For instance, we rarely hear more than two voices at once. Even on the printed page, it can be difficult for the reader to keep track of more than two new characters at a time, and when you don’t have any visual cues, it’s best to restrict the speakers to a number that the listener can easily follow. A scene between two characters, particularly a man and a woman, is immediately more engaging than one in which we have to keep track of three similar male voices. As I concluded in my earlier post on the subject: “If I were trying to adapt a story for radio and didn’t know where to begin, I’d start by asking myself if it could be structured as five two-person dialogue scenes, ideally for one actor and one actress.”

This is the same structure that I ended up using for “Retention,” and I stumbled across it intuitively, as a kind of safety net to make up for my lack of experience. Most of what I know about audio storytelling arises from the fact that I’m married to a professional podcaster, and the first thing you learn about radio journalism is that clarity is key. When you listen to a show like Serial or Invisibilia, for example, you soon become aware of how obsessively organized it all is, even while it maintains what feels like a chatty, informal tone. Whenever the hosts introduce a new character or story, they tell us to sit tight, reassuring us that we’ll circle back soon to the central thread of the episode, and they’ll often inform us of exactly how many minutes an apparent digression will last. This sort of handholding is crucial, because you can’t easily rewind to listen to a section that seems unclear. If you stop to figure out what you’ve just been told, you’ll miss what comes next. That’s why radio shows are constantly telling us what to think about what we’re hearing. As Ira Glass put it in Radio: An Illustrated Guide:

This is the structure of every story on our program—there’s an anecdote, that is, a sequence of actions where someone says “this happened then this happened then this happened”—and then there’s a moment of reflection about what that sequence means, and then on to the next sequence of actions…Anecdote then reflection, over and over.

I didn’t necessarily want to do this for my script, but for the sake of narrative clarity, I decided to follow an analogous set of rules. When I write fiction, I always try to structure the plot as a series of clear objectives, mostly to keep the reader grounded, and it seemed even more critical here. It soon struck me that the best way to orient the listener from the beginning was to start with a readily identifiable kind of “found” audio, and then see what kind of story it suggested. In my earliest emails to Nick, I pitched structuring an episode around an emergency hotline call—which is an idea that I still might use one day—or a series of diary entries from a spacecraft, like ones that the hero records for his daughter in Interstellar. I also began to think about what kinds of audio tend to go viral, which only happens when the situations they present are immediately obvious. And the example that seemed the most promising was the notorious recording of the journalist Ryan Block trying to get a representative from Comcast to cancel his account. What I liked about it was how quickly it establishes the premise. In the final script of “Retention,” the first spoken dialogue is: “Thank you for holding. This call may be recorded or monitored for quality assurance. My name is Lisa. To whom am I speaking?” A few lines later, Perry, the customer, says: “I want to disconnect my security system and close my account, please.” At that point, after less than thirty seconds, we know what the story is about. Tomorrow, I’ll talk more about how the structure of a customer service call freed me to follow the story into strange places, and how I was inspired by a famous anecdote from the history of artificial intelligence.

Radio free will

If you haven’t yet listened to Invisibilia, the new podcast launched earlier this month by NPR, I encourage you to download its latest installment right now. As soon as it was over, I simply thought: “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.” It reduced my wife to tears in two out of three episodes. And if it’s so successful, it’s because it takes place exactly where radio lives and breathes. It describes itself as a show about “the invisible forces that control human behavior,” which means, in practice, that it’s a show about thought, and particularly about how we’re shaped by our thoughts and those projected on us by others. Which is really what radio professionals do for a living. Radio’s true medium isn’t words, or even sounds, but the sequence of thoughts in the listener’s mind. This applies to all forms of narrative, but it’s especially stark in radio, where that chain of thoughts is all there is. Unlike written works, which allow us to reread or skim ahead at will, radio is ruthlessly linear: while it might be possible for a listener to replay a section of a podcast, it’s unlikely to happen. Everything has to be as clear as crystal in the moment. And Invisibilia is the product of a creative milieu that has spent years thinking in practical terms about the nature of human thought and awareness.

I happened to start listening to Invisibilia shortly after reading Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a comic book produced fifteen years ago by the cartoonist Jessica Abel and Ira Glass of This American Life. The idea of a visual guide to radio is faintly amusing in itself, particularly when you consider the differences between the two art forms: comics are about as nonlinear a medium as you can get between two covers, with the reader’s eye prone to skip freely across the page. Yet this little book is as elegant and practical an introduction to any narrative craft as I’ve seen—it leaves you wanting to make radio. It also attunes you to the many small bits of trickery that a show like Invisibilia uses to manage the presentation of its material. Its hosts, Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, keep things obsessively organized while maintaining their chatty, casual tone. Whenever they introduce a new character or story, they tell us to sit tight, reassuring us that we’ll circle back soon to the central thread of the episode, and they’ll often inform us of exactly how many minutes an apparent digression will last, which is the auditory equivalent of thumbing through the pages of a book or article to see how much longer a section has to run. It’s obvious as hell, but it works.

And much of the interest of radio as a metaphor for other kinds of storytelling lies in how visible its bones can be. As Glass notes in Abel’s book:

This is the structure of every story on our program—there’s an anecdote, that is, a sequence of actions where someone says “this happened then this happened then this happened”—and then there’s a moment of reflection about what that sequence means, and then on to the next sequence of actions…Anecdote then reflection, over and over.

Glass compares this structure to that of a sermon or homily, and he concludes that radio is an inherently didactic medium. It isn’t enough to tell your listeners something; you also have to tell them what it means. What’s funny is that this sermonizing doesn’t necessarily emerge from a particular social or political agenda, although it certainly can: it’s more a solution to the structural problems that radio presents. When we’re reading a book, we can pause to consolidate our thoughts and figure out how we feel about the material, which satisfies us that our time has been well spent. The ceaseless stream of radio doesn’t permit that kind of silent reflection: as listeners of Serial know, if you stop to try to figure out what you’ve just been told, you’ll miss the next tidbit of information. A compelling radio show allows us to briefly outsource that critical faculty to the program itself, which frees up those levels of the brain to continue paying attention.

It’s a good trick, but also a risky one. Radio can be insanely persuasive to dittoheads and latte-drinkers alike because its didacticism is embedded into the fabric of the medium itself, which so shrewdly mimics our stream of consciousness that it can be hard to separate it from our own conclusions. Even television can’t compare: if we’re watching a news broadcast, we can tune out for a second to gather ourselves, trusting in the stream of images to keep us oriented. Radio, at least in its most successful incarnations, doesn’t allow for that kind of distance. (If it does, it needs to be as consciously built into the structure as anything else, which is why programs like This American Life often use extended musical breaks to provide five seconds or so of breathing space.) If it’s true, as many say, that we’re entering a golden age of podcasting, it also means that we need to be aware of the kind of thinking, or the suspension thereof, that it creates. Radio can be used to educate us, move us, or entertain us, but it’s only after the program has ended that we have a chance to think for ourselves. Invisibilia is a masterpiece of the form, but it’s also an example of the same invisible forces that it describes. And if its message has any meaning, it’s that we occasionally need to make time for the kind of scrutiny that it gently requires us to abdicate.