My plan for today’s newsletter was to begin a strand of this newsletter about the craft of creating podcasts, which I will add to every month or so. Today I want to kick this section off by looking at the craft of writing narration with a focus on the narration of Erica Heilman of Rumble Strip.
Before I had a chance to fiddle with the new option of adding video to a post, now offered beta by application, my plan was to share short video clips from different podcasts to illustrate what I was talking about and use the video option to provide short examples of great narration, and less-good narration.
After I played with the format, however, I realized it didn’t quite do what I had hoped. At present, Substack only allows for one video, and it must go at the top; but since I’ve travelled this far, I will continue in a modified format, and only show one example of great narration, from a recent Rumble Strip episode.
The only way I’ve found to share audio clips…is with video, which is a bit odd coming from the audio world. The industry calls shareable video clips “audiograms,” and there are various paid and free tools to create them (I have yet to find a tool that will export short selections in an mp3 format, with a podcast player….tell me if you’ve found one please!)
The podcast app Overcast allows you to export selections of podcasts in a way that maintains the name and branding of the podcast…if you don’t already use Overcast and you aren’t wedded to Spotify by way of subscription, or Apple by way of convenience, give it a try (this is not an affiliate link).
When I began this project, I promised that I would speak to you like a producer…and by which I meant that I would discuss podcasts here as they are talked about during an edit or a table read. If you deeply listen to a lot of podcasts, I hope reading about the craft of podcasts will deepen your understanding of what you’re listening to, and what went into how they are made.
For me, narration is one of the first things a show has to get right in order to be successful. Sure, you need good tape, and a compelling subject, and proper editing and mixing…those are a given. But without the narration hitting the mark perfectly, all the rest of the pieces can fall apart. You have to get it right.
Narration scripts need to deliver information, and then present it to the listener with colour and tone…which can be done a million different ways, depending on the subject and the intended audience.
The narrator needs to have the right personality so that he/she/they connect with the audience. Sometimes that means the narrator is right out front, loud and proud, with a big presence. Other times, it needs to be done in a quietly competent sort of way, that connects the story with its intended audience. And then other times, the job of the narrator is to get right out of the way and leave room for the tape to speak for itself.
Rumble Strip is a Peabody Award-winning podcast produced by Erica Heilman. I had no plans to cover this series in Bingeworthy; although I love this podcast, it doesn’t fit the mandate because it’s not serialized or sequential. But she’s also one of the best narrators I’ve come across, so I’m thrilled to be able to introduce her work in my discussion about craft.
Rumble Strip is a short-story narrative podcast that focuses on the lives of various people, mostly in her home state of Vermont. Here’s how she describes her work on her website:
Erica Heilman invites herself into people’s homes to find out what they know, hate, love, what they’re afraid of, and how they’re more like you than you’d realized. These are messy, obsessively crafted stories of the everyday.
Even though she says that she invites herself into homes, I would say that her steady and devoted work producing Rumble Strip over the last decade has meant that she gets invited to many places and homes, and in the process, it does genuinely feel like she’s cultivated a sense of community, of place and persons, with her podcast.
So let’s try this experiment….If you haven’t already, scroll back up to the top and listen to, or listen again, to the short clip I’ve embedded here…and then come back down here for some more talk about craft.
If you listen from the beginning of the show
Heilman positions this story in time and place when she shares how this story found her (this is before this clip because the Overcast sharing feature allows a maximum of 90 seconds of a show). A listener wrote to her, telling her of a fascinating person he’d met on a farm property that was for sale, and he thought he should share this with Erica, so she can share it with the world.
With this short anecdote, it’s only about 15 seconds, you get a sense of how the Rumble Strip stories foment and come to be. Ideas are passed along to Heilman. Doors get opened to homes and places for the purpose of sharing a beautiful moment, or a difficult moment, or something that just needs to be shared for one reason or another. After a decade of doing this, you get the sense that this podcast has helped maintain a sense of community, and pride, that holds focus on one small, underpopulated, mainly rural, state.
I’ve been to Vermont a few times, it’s a long drive from where I live in Ontario, but with this show, I feel like Heilman brings Vermont to me. She makes it come alive, with all of its quirky and out-of-the-way places, and I get to meet some folks that I wouldn’t come across otherwise.
Is it strange the way I write about this as though I was actually there, as though I also had a conversation with these folks?
But I think that’s the point of her writing. Heilman does this; she does bring you to where she is, and this process means that you get to share some magical moments along the way.
Her writing gives you a connection, without being obvious or trying hard
She uses an economical number of words to convey just exactly what needs to be said. And then the sequence she uses to piece together these words, sometimes just sentence fragments, build and create a beautiful picture for you to imagine as you listen.
“A listener called Victor wrote to me and said
he’d met an extraordinary man,
In a tea house,
that used to be a chicken coop,
Deep inside an elaborate garden,
that runs down to a stream …
/
When I went to visit Armand,
And we sat in the tea house
Drinking coffee.”
These details might seem unnecessary (teahouse, chicken coop, garden, stream), but the way she frugally pieces them together gives you a wonderfully unusual image of something that doesn’t fully make sense. They are brushstrokes on a canvas, but with words.
I love the juxtaposition of a chicken coop being turned into something else…have you ever been inside a chicken coop? The smell of ammonia can be daunting. It’s hard to imagine one that could promote a relaxed and convivial gathering, where one could enjoy a tasty warm beverage.
And then the description of the location; set inside a garden, just up from a stream. It sounds like a beautiful rural landscape, as the crickets and songbirds provide the soundtrack for the narration script. Maybe this location is not beautiful, how could you know? But the way she describes this place, I’m ready to pile into my car and take the nine hours it would take to drive there to see for myself.
In music, composers use the technique of counterpoint to say the same musical statement twice, in two different ways. A musical phrase is played by one instrument, which is then echoed or inverted, or harmonized, by another instrument. It uses a common theme, and then turns it around in some way for you.
“We drank coffee, in a tea house.”
The two beverages share the same melodic structure (they are warm and contain caffeine) but yet their taste, their harmony, are very different from each other.
“Armand’s Garden” uses this musical concept of counterpoint to provide a memorable juxtaposition.
I also love that she embraces imperfection. If you listen closely, she stumbles ever so slightly over words, but then lets it go.
She says “I’m not a very good gardener, I don’t understand design…”
Ever so slightly, she stumbles over the word “design,” which makes me wonder whether she was reaching for the word, or it just didn’t fully make sense to her as she said it aloud. It’s very subtle, you almost don’t hear it. But when you start to consider why it was left there, it made the whole story feel a bit more authentic to me. Some editors want perfection and demand re-takes of scripts. But I would say that doing that here would lose the sense of intimacy and connection to the story. No one speaks perfectly. We all jumble words when we speak in real life.
And then she continues on … ”And sometimes I just look at a plant, for a really, long, time…”
And again, at those words “really, long, time,” you can hear a very slight pause, like a second thought. What was she thinking to herself as she read these words? Do I really believe this? Was it actually a long time, or a shorter amount of time? I feel like I can hear her inner thoughts in the way she articulates her words.
I’m not advocating for imperfection, or that we should publish something before it’s actually done…but done skillfully, it’s these small stumbles and pauses in language that make it all seem more…real. It’s almost like a conversation that you’re overhearing, and that if you had a thought to interject, now would be the time.
There’s something about the way that Heilman writes that feels very honest and human. And what I find fascinating is that her manner of speaking and asking questions is the same as when she’s doing an interview, as it is in her scripted narration.
If you listen to the rest of the episode, you can hear her turn of phrase when she’s conversing, or the way she asks questions to Armand. “What do you get from plants that you don’t get from people?”…and then later Arman discusses that God tells him where to plan everything, she digs in to see where this would logically go, and asks “So what kind of advice might you ask for when you’re planting, a, um, rhododendron?”
What makes the narration sound different is that she’s up close with the mic, and not just in the same room as the interview.
She has a way to connect out to her audience in a way that doesn’t push you to see life through her eyes, but rather invites you to look at the world in the same way she does.
When she talks about gardening, how she starts dreaming about her plants after long winter, she says this:
“I get something…or I hear something, I don’t know what it is…”
This is a phrase that could so quickly and easily sound fake, or contrived. But when she says it, you feel the same thing, even if that thought had never occurred to you before. Quite likely you don’t know what it is either, but now you’re willing to see it as she does.
If you listen to the whole show, which is an entire world in under 18 minutes, you see even more examples of her spare but stylish narration.
I love how concise she is with her show opening. In just 10 seconds, she’s mentioned her collective (Hub and Spoke), her show, her name, and then we dive right into the “cold open” as we call them in the business, which is another way to say that the story, or the subject, introduces itself. Armand introduces himself and his love of plants, which sets the scene for a story about a garden.
Heilman has been making Rumble Strip for a decade, publishing episodes more-or-less monthly. But this last year, the show has received lots of attention; a Peabody Award, an interview with Rob Rosenthal, a review by Sarah Larson in the New Yorker this October. In the audio world, you don’t get bigger than this.
People have stopped to notice Heilman and her craft, because she’s just really good at what she does. And she does it all completely independently; nor does the show doesn’t burden you with a bunch of ads. It feels artful and soulful, which is why it both connects and inspires.
If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, take a listen to the whole show:
Instead of sharing different clips here, which is not allowed in this format, I will briefly refer to other examples of shows that I’ve already covered in past newsletters.
In my review of Outlaw Ocean, my complaint of this not-awesome narration is that his voice drops off a cliff at the end of most phrases. Even when I was gripped by the story, the elements were exciting and the action was in the tape, Ian Urbina would come in with his narration, and it sometimes sounded like he was falling asleep. There’s a way to be a low-key narrator, but I don’t think this is the way that works.
The narration script for Shameless Acquisition Target has very challenging production values….her voice is peaking for most of the series, which I found to be very challenging from a listening perspective. But, I was able to overlook this because the writing was just so much fun. Her zippy style, full of self-deprecating humour and witty comebacks kept me engaged…even though I truly wished that someone had been able to get her to turn down the gain on the mic while recording.
Perfection is generally the goal of every podcast, and there are lots of versions of what that looks like in the end. What I want to hear is a story that grabs me and pulls me in. I want the narration to be spoken like it’s being told to me, which is a personal thing, not a speech at a podium in front of an audience. I need this level of engagement so that I’m able to look into a world that’s being shared with me, and hopefully see it a bit differently after the show. I want to feel that I’ve learned something, or been taken somewhere, or been shown a world I don’t normally occupy.
Listening Queue:
I’m working away on this one…a trigger warning here for parents of young children who have survived remote school over these last few years…
I will share this soon, but not before I dig into some more research and figure out what the teacher who taught my kids in Grade 1 has to say about all of this, and hopefully connect with producer Emily Hansford. Coming soon!
ALSO…
Some glorious holiday listening coming your way. Tuck this into your feed for some good relaxed holiday listening… Shaking Out the Numb…also from Erica Heilman.
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