Elizabeth Arnold  On Radio


RADIO VS. PRINT: SHORTNESS OF BREATH

I can talk about the difference between radio and print. Probably the most notable thing when you first start to write, especially if you come from print, which I did, is that you can only say so much without taking a deep breath. And you have a tendency to write shorter sentences and force yourself to write shorter sentences when you're on the air as opposed to when you're in print. And a lot of my friends who were in print, they write long sentences, and they try to break themselves of that, or at least break it up. And you can get away with it in print, where you can't get away with it in radio. And when you read things aloud, which is what I do when I write, I tend to write and then read it aloud to myself. And then you can hear and sense wherever you've got long sentences and where things should be broken up and where you get into sort of a pattern. Where you don't notice that so much if you're in print. You learn how to mix it up more when you're writing for radio. Because you can lose your beat, you'll lose a listener. Whereas in print you can go back, an incredibly long sentence and it goes round and round, circular sentence or whatever. You can go back and read it again and figure it out. It's not necessarily a good sentence, but you can get away with it, whereas you can't get away with it in radio.

LEADS: WHAT'S YOUR OPENING LINE?

Yeah, it's the same thing. It's definitely the same. You have to get the listener just like you have to get the reader. You have to draw them in. Regardless of the medium. And this is probably gonna sound a little silly but one of the things somebody taught me a long time ago which has always stuck with me, is when I sit down to write a story, and I'm thinking about it, and I have all kinds of leads and fun sorts of intros, or ways to get into the story, I usually scrap them all and I think, if I'm going to tell my husband tonight when we come home from work and say, tell him this story, what's going to be my opening line? And it worked. Not "Did you hear this?" or "can you believe this." But it's what follows the "Can you believe this?" or "Did you know that?" that I generally end up making my lead. What I think is the most interesting part of the story is generally what is the most compelling to the listener or to the reader.

Ranges from probably two-and-a-half would be the shortest, and the longest that I generally write is about eight minutes. Which isn't a lot. It is a lot compared to other radio, but it is not a lot of time. The news will be equivalent to a couple of pages typed and a couple columns in a newspaper. But back to what we were just talking about. I'm writing a story today about Ross Perot. And everyone I interview keeps saying to me, "Oh, you're doing a story about Ross Perot, c'mon we're all so sick of him. He's marginalized, oh I'm so tired of Ross Perot." There's my lead right there. It's almost like I've got to explain why I'm doing this story, but I'll get into this story by saying, "Everyone thinks that they're sick of Ross Perot, but blah blah blah blah," why I'm doing the story, why Ross Perot's still popular, why people are still interested, why 2,200 people went to his rally over the weekend. So sometimes the lead, it's just right there. It's the most obvious thing. But sometimes it's something you haven't thought of.

INVERTED PYRAMID: WHO NEEDS IT? AND WHAT ABOUT THE END?

That's one of the biggest differences between print and radio, and probably the best way... When I was in print I did everything from run the computer to paste-up to managing editor at one weekly. And the best example is, in print, the reason you write and you put the least interesting stuff down at the bottom is because the person that lays out the page ends up trying to make it fit and that's where they cut with the X-acto or that's what they used to do with the X-acto, or I used to do with the X-acto. In radio that never happens. In radio, your close is just as important as your open. In radio, everything is important, because you don't wanna lose the listener. So in radio it was the complete opposite, you want your end to be just as important and you want it to be just as compelling. And what you're trying to do is bring it full circle, as opposed to print where I should say it's inverted pyramid and you're sort of trailing off. I mean it'd be awful in the radio if you said "...um, uhhh, um, and I'm Elizabeth Arnold." (laughs) You want people to still be paying attention by the time you get to your name! But generally when I'm finishing a piece, a bad habit and one of the first things that sets new reporters or new writers, you can always tell, they wanna do a "in conclusion" or "to sum it all up" or it's almost the chance to do "and this is how I feel about this story." That's what you really wanna avoid. "In conclusion," or "to sum," or "in sum." If I'm having trouble with a close, I try and go back to my original lead, and think about what I set out to do, and what I established at the start, and find a way to end on that same note after developing through the piece so that it brings the listener back to the start.

You can end with a strong quote, you can end with looking ahead, you can end with what's coming next or whatever, but if you can try and tie it together, if your original statement, say, is that "Ross Perot is popular but has no political clout," you could end by even saying he's got rallies next week, blah blah blah blah, but no matter what happens at those rallies it's not going to have any impact on the tax bill that Congress is considering this week or whatever. So you're advancing the story, but you're still going back to the start of the story.

HOLDING A LISTENER

There's a tendency in print, and I know this just from traveling with print reporters on the campaign, where we're all writing the same story, there's a tendency in print to try and put everything in the first graph. And then section out each thought in that first graph in the following paragraph. So you establish, say, five things in that first graph, and then the graphs that follow it, it's almost like it's enumerated, and you go blah, blah, blah. In radio you don't have to do that. You can, you're basically pulling a listener along and you're trying to hold that listener. And so you can introduce new thoughts all the way through your piece. In fact, that's a good way to hold them as opposed to establishing it all at the top, 'cause then you're just gonna lose them. Establishing it all at the top and then sort of trailing off as we were saying earlier. In radio you want to hold this person so you can introduce new thoughts, you can surprise them, you can introduce questions, whereas in print you sort of top-load it. And in radio you constantly remind the listener of what it is you're writing about, or that you're talking about. Whereas in print you don't have to do that, it's in front of them, there's a headline, they can go back. They can reread things. In radio you have people coming in at the middle of it and they start listening. And you try and find little sign posts that you try and stick in instead of saying "he" or maybe you use the person's title again. You're sort of reminding the listener what it is you're talking about all the way through, which is something you do in radio and you don't need to do in print.

NATURAL SOUND: PAINTING YOUR PICTURE

Painting a picture is exactly what it is. First I'd like to say is that's what I love about radio. Coming from print, you had the picture. And you never knew if the picture was going to work with your story or not, but that was your other element. In radio you have sound. It's like a collage that you can use to emphasize a point, that you can establish the mood to begin with, establish the mood at the end. And also, in radio, you can never quite get, no matter how terrific a writer you are, you can never quite get the rasp in the 88-year-old man's voice talking about why he doesn't want Medicare benefits slashed, and when you have him, there's just no way you can write that. When his voice is there, that's what I mean by collage, you can do ambient sound, which can be as simple as, I did a story in Alaska about a village in the Arctic Circle, and I went up there, and there was no sound, I mean, there was just nothing. There was no identifying sound, which is what you're looking for, 'cause you want to set the stage. You want an identifying sound. And there wasn't one. It was just dead, it was nothing, silence. But I held my microphone out anyway. And I went home that night and I listened to my tape. And it was just the faintest of all wind noises, that was a very constant wind, not like a theatrical wind. Just a very faint wind and it just said it all. It said the Arctic, it said frozen wasteland, and I ran it all through the piece — which was actually about a 20-minute piece — I ran this underneath. And you always had the sense that you were out there. So that's the first layer. Ambiance. And the second layer's all the voices. And you could also just use sound...the tendency is to overuse sound. Prison. Doing a prison story. All these slams, like the most cliché, just like hackneyed phrases in print, you have clichéd sound. (makes noises) I remember doing one of my first prison pieces, and it started with a slam and ended with a slam, and you can definitely overuse sound. But there is also another prison sound that you wouldn't think of. And it's just their voices and the noises and the guards and sort of rattling. So you don't need the door slamming to say "prison". A lot of these, they're almost subconscious, some of these sounds. And you'll know what they are, right away. You won't realize it, but it's right there. That's what's wonderful about radio, is that you can do that.

ETHICAL CHALLENGE: PREFABRICATED NATURAL SOUND

At a very small station I worked in in Alaska, we had, I remember I was very excited because we got a CD collection of sound. And it had everything, from the flat tire, to a saw, to this or that. What was interesting about it — they used it for radio drama — what was interesting about it was, it was so good that it wasn't believable. And I think, that's almost also a danger, ethically, it's just something I wouldn't think of doing. But also, sounds don't sound like that. They do in the movies, but they don't always. Sometimes you collect sound, and your editor goes, "I'm sorry, that doesn't sound like people tromping around in the snow, you can't use it, it's distracting, it sounds like aluminum foil," but other times, like I said, you'll get sound and you're not sure it's gonna work, and it works perfectly. On the campaign, I always would get sound because it brought rallies alive, on the Bush train trips, you know, the sound of the train, and it's so much better than something that you'd get that's supposed to sound like a train.