Storytelling Strategies, Part 3: Scenes

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Elaine Appleton Grant

Hi, storytellers. This is part three of our new Sound Judgment quick-hit series on six storytelling strategies for hooking your audience and keeping them with you. We’ll release all six strategies in a single episode next week. But first, we’ve broken them down into bite-sized chunks. Today, we’re talking about scenes. They’re obviously a staple in longform narrative storytelling, like true crime and documentaries. Don’t ignore them, though, for interview shows—you just have to interview well to elicit good, sensory anecdotes from your guests. Between the lines, you’ll hear how useful they are on the page and the stage as well. As a reminder, all six strategies come from today’s best audio storytellers. But these are storytelling strategies that don’t care what media is yours. So stick around, writers, public speakers, screenwriters and video producers—and of course, podcasters. This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved storyteller by pulling apart one episode, at a time, together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant. 

The third S is the backbone of audience engagement, and that is scenes. Scenes transport listeners to another place and time. A few years ago, I was writing a script for Wondery's show American Scandal—a history podcast. As a former magazine journalist, I love description — to a fault. My producer kept getting rid of my descriptions of former NY governor Eliot Spitzer’s family at his inauguration. “Something has to happen every two minutes, Elaine!” she’d say.

I wasn’t happy. But she was right. In plot-driven work, the more action, the better. As one scene leads to the next, binge listeners are born. But scenes also make good interview shows great. We tend to call them anecdotes. They’re the stories guests tell, if we take pains to elicit them. They don’t have to be high drama; guests don’t have to have run from a gunfight or dangle from a cliff. Scenes that convey our interior feelings are often gripping. It's human nature to want to know what other people feel, and it's often through a little story about our lives or the life of someone else - that we get to be inside someone’s head. This is where the emotion comes out, and emotion is what we connect to and what we remember. Listen to this simple scene from The Rich Roll Show. He's interviewing author Charles Duhigg about Duhigg's book, Supercommunicators. Duhigg tells this short story as a way of illustrating a premise of his book, which is that two people can think they're having the same conversation, but in fact, they're not. 

Clip from The Rich Roll Show

Charles Duhigg: It's easier to trust and like the other person. As I was driving over, I was thinking about, where does this book come from? And I remembered, there's a number of incidents, but there's this one that I've actually never talked about before, which is my wife and I were on vacation in Florida—which was weird because it's not like we like Florida or really go there very much.

But we got into this screaming fight in a hallway. About money, which again was super strange because it's not something we fight about. We don't—we're not really fighters. And for some reason I hadn't thought about this for years and it just popped into my mind and I was like, you know, what we were really talking about were emotions. Like we were talking about the fact that Liz feels scared that she doesn't understand—that's my wife—feels scared that she doesn't understand money, I feel frustrated that I don't have someone to talk about money with… If we had just started the conversation by saying kind of what you just did, just saying actually, let's talk about our emotions and our marriage and how we're relating to each other right now, it would have been so much better. But instead we started—we were going to have this emotional—instead of having an emotional conversation, we had an emotional conversation that was disguised as a practical conversation. And it was disastrous. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Scenes also help listeners take a sensory journey. As the narrator, you're taking us with you...and once humans are on a journey, we can't help but want to see, like the bear that went over the mountain, what's on the other side. We are engaged. And in the recounting of a scene, we get important information about a character's wants, needs, values and emotions. 

Here's a great example of a scene that shines because it calls on the senses. Listen to this memorable scene from Crime Show, a former Gimlet podcast hosted by Emma Courtland. 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: To anyone who knows Steve Barnes, it should come as no surprise that one of his earliest memories—and certainly his most vivid memory—is the day that his dad, Gerald, first introduced him to baseball. 

Steve Barnes: He took me to my first game, I wasn't even two years old, and he carried me through the tunnel at Wrigley Field, and I remember seeing how beautiful and green it was, at not even two years old. I have that memory planted in my mind 60 something years later, where I could tell you exactly what it looked like. It was the most beautiful, lush, gorgeous thing I ever saw in my life. 

Emma Courtland: It wasn't just the beauty of the field that seared that day into Steve's memory…

Elaine Appleton Grant

That clip tells us that Steve will love baseball for the rest of his life, and it shows us—doesn't tell us—why. But also, through the scene and the tone of his voice, it tells us something about how much he loves his dad. His dad, the con man whose actions killed at least one person—that this Crime Show episode is about. Surprise!

It's one thing to hear new strategies and another to try them out in community. We're solving that problem, with a handful of new, affordable, interactive workshops. We just held one on mastering the art of the interview that went over like gangbusters—we're doing it again soon. We're also holding workshops on the six strategies for creating unforgettable work, and on the thing that gives us all headaches—how to curate great guests and what it takes to be a phenomenal guest yourself. That one's gonna be really fun, because I will share you with how NPR producers book guests. So check out our current and future workshops at podcast allies dot com slash workshops. That's podcast allies dot com slash workshops. You don't need to jot that down, though—the link is in the show notes. I can't wait to see you there. 

Thanks for joining me for the third in my six-part series on storytelling strategies for hooking new listeners and keeping them with you. Number four covers a necessary element in all of our convent: surprise. Fresh, new information or the personal story we don’t expect from a buttoned-up guest. For shows and resources mentioned in this series, see our show notes at sound judgment podcast dot com. And if you’re enjoying this series, please share it with a friend. Sound Judgment is produced by Podcast Allies. I’m Elaine Appleton Grant. See you in part four!