The Process So Far

We’re (mostly) done with our first project. There will be one or two more quick edits of our scripts, and we’ll step back into our recording booths, such as they are, for a final take, but we’re through the woods. The part most of us dreaded—hearing our recorded voices played for the world—is over, and we’ve survived.

Speaking for myself, there were several parts that I found interesting. I enjoyed continuing to get used to Audacity. I realized during the Soundscape project that one of my video games actually has a function quite similar to Audacity built in, and it was fun seeing how that continued to translate to this more serious application of the software. I was able to do a lot more work finessing the sound clip to get it to sound how I wanted than with the first assignment, and this has been the rare sort of project that has engaged me with technology I’m not used to without bogging me down in needless complexity. This also fits the “rewarding” category, as I feel like I’ll use this in my personal life, even if I never make a recording for money. I definitely intend to find a way to fit Audacity into my writing world.

So far, the technical aspect hasn’t provided many challenges; on my work computer, I accidentally downloaded too new of a FFMPEG codec initially, and it wasn’t compatible, but it was an easy fix thanks to Google. Everything has come down to the writing, specifically the problem of telling the story I want to tell in this many words. I started with a problem I have in many classes—too many words—but have moved on to the more complex “trying to recapture the depth of meaning in the long version while maintaining the brevity of the current form.” It’s a challenge I’m still working on, and it’ll probably take me the whole of the deadline to get where I want it to be.

Seguing into genre, this is where I find the biggest change. In my writing—fiction, but even written nonfiction—I spend a lot of time on concrete details. The way blood sits in snow like a cherry Slurpee, or how wet sagebrush scents the air like a Christmas tree tossed into a campfire. How when you punch the bully’s jaw it sounds like someone dropped a carton of eggs on the supermarket floor, but you can’t tell if it is your fist or his face that has done the cracking, not when the adrenaline has pushed all senses to background noise except the drum of your heartbeat. This is all rough draft stuff I came up with on the spot, but it is stuff I feel I could polish into compelling fiction. On the radio, though, most of it is crap. It’s the argument from the second week of class, whether a downed powerline should be a snaking black tendril or just a downed powerline. I need some of those details—I’m not reading an instruction manual—but if there are too many, the reader is still trying to envision the image I’ve created while the story rambles on down the path without them. In fiction classes, I’ve been tasked with being more visual; a recent workshop response from an instructor said that my characters were good, the plot compelling, the pacing great, but “the language doesn’t sing.”

I’m sure we can all agree that a radio essay should sing as well, but it isn’t the operatic flourishes of literary fiction; it’s the catchy tune of contemporary pop. The irony of this metaphor isn’t lost on me, because what I’m cutting language to make space for is reflection and depth of meaning, which shoots the pop comparison all to shit. It’s a rather impressive task we’ve set for ourselves, stripping our words down so they hum along and are catchy, while saying more than we did with all of our flowery expression. It’s reminiscent of poetry, in a sense. While poetry might be the opposite, stylistically—after all, fiction writers get sent to poetry class to learn to expand their descriptive ability—both forms are about economy of language. Whether we’re talking the shortened space of a stanza or the compressed pocket of radio space between commercials, you have to get to the point and say it clearly. So that’s what I’m learning, though I didn’t apply it to this post, clearly—get to the point.