Storytelling Strategies to Hook and Keep Your Audience

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Hey there, storytellers. A little origin story from me today. I started Sound Judgment because I was frustrated. There was so much advice floating around the Internet about how to market your podcast. But there was almost nothing about how to make something unforgettable, useful, emotionally moving or entertaining in the first place. There was very little about the storytelling craft in audio—about how to make something that’s worthy of listeners' time. 

I've been studying storytelling for forever, first as a writer, then an editor, then a radio producer and reporter, even a book editor. And, of course, as a podcast producer and the CEO of a production company. I've always been fascinated with what it takes to become a beloved storyteller on just about any platform, including audio. 

And here's the thing: All the marketing in the world might get you new listeners, new readers -- new audiences. But to hook them and keep them coming back? To create a relationship with them? That's a whole other thing. Today on the show: a six-part storytelling framework for making work that audiences cannot forget.

The six strategies you're about to learn are drawn from the patterns I've seen across more than 150 behind-the-scenes lessons—lessons learned from some of the best storytellers I've had on Sound Judgment. You can put them to use right away, in your studio, at your writing desk, or on the stage as a public speaker. 

So stay with me: We're going to talk about structure, scenes, surprise, suspense, a sound vision, and specifics...and how to make storytelling magic. 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. 

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.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that we have a very short time to hook listeners into anything new. Maybe a minute or two. Maybe less. I've talked about ledes before on the show, and I'll do it again. But here's strategy number one, which is something you may have never given any conscious thought to. And that is how you can use sound to create the feeling that will attract your ideal listener. It's called sound vision, and it includes everything from music and sound design—or the lack thereof—to how you actually sound on the mic. You know, friendly, combative, sophisticated, conspiratorial, silly, fast-paced, thoughtful—whatever it is that makes you you. 

In audio, a sound vision is all the things we do to take advantage of the cool stuff we can do when we're bringing information and stories to your ears. Sometimes, the possibilities are so great that they convince us to tell a story in sound when we first thought it belonged on the page. Like Gilbert King, co-host of the award-winning podcast Bone Valley, about the wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield. Leo Schofield has been in prison for well over thirty years for a murder he didn't commit. Before making Bone Valley, Gilbert thought he'd be writing a long article, maybe a book. Then, he and his cohost Kelsey Decker visited Leo in prison, and everything changed. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Gilbert King: And I think after we interviewed a few people, the power of their voices and the power of their storytelling made us pivot. I love the way their voices break and crackle and emote. And it's just, it's something that's just more powerful in an audio experience. And as an author, I acknowledge that in this particular story.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Your sound vision is about creating a world that your listener wants to enter. In audio, it's how intentional you are about creating a tone, a mood, a feeling. This is how John Barth of Creative Media LLC explained the idea of a sound vision to me on the second episode of Sound Judgment. John was the founding producer of the public radio show Marketplace. In this clip, he's referring to one of their hosts, David Brancaccio. As I said, the unique sound of a show has a lot to do with the particular sound of the host. Or in literary terms, it's about finding your voice. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

John Barth: You know, when you're hiring a host, the host really does imprint their own sound, voice, style on the show. So it actually begins to define the brand that you're creating. So there was an editorial vision, but there also was primarily a sound vision. And I guess I owned that and it needed to be distinctive. I always imagined how the audience was listening to the show and the kind of listener I wanted to attract to the show. And so that had to be a certain sound. And so David embodies the willingness to pretty much do anything behind a mic to tell a story and enthrall an audience. He has incredible humor, and when I worked with him, our goal was to laugh uproariously before we went into the studio to do the live show. But my job was to get him as a host not only loosened up, but comfortable with a real range of emotion. So by the time that mic went on, he could really bring his full self to whatever he had to do in those 30 minutes. I mean, it was so much fun. It was great.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Once I wrapped my head around this term—sound vision—I started to become super aware of how it works when it's working really well. It helps, I think, to compare a couple of extremes. Listen to the difference between these next two clips. They come from podcasts that have one small thing in common. They’re both about people trying to make big changes in their lives. But they have entirely different purposes and wildly different audiences—and each employs a sound vision designed to attract their own very specific listeners. 

The first is an opening scene from The 13th Step, an investigative series about sexual misconduct in the addiction treatment industry from New Hampshire Public Radio. It won the DuPont Award—widely considered the Pulitzer of broadcasting. I'll be delving into the 13th Step creative process in a couple of upcoming episodes of Sound Judgment, so if you haven't followed the show yet, follow it now. The woman asking the question is reporter Lauren Chooljian. 

Clip from The 13th Step

Lauren Chooljian: So, so you get there. What do you remember? 

Elizabeth: Green Mountain is a completely different vibe than I'm used to. It didn't feel like treatment. But I remember I had my first real God moment there because the view is incredible.

Actually, it was really cool. One time, somebody was having a really tough time. And so like we all had the idea, like, Hey, Mary Kate, can we go down to the helicopter landing pad and watch the sunset? And she brought us down. We all screamed from the mountain and it felt so good. It was like a movie.

Like we just sat there and screamed. It was really cool. That was really cool. And I remember that moment. I was like, if I didn't believe in God before watching the sunset and this view, I do now. It was like that. It hit me.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Hear how moody that is, how the music brings you right to that helicopter pad. It's almost dreamlike, and fairly somber—not quite threatening, but not upbeat, for sure. And the speaker's voice is untreated. You can tell she's talking on a phone. It sounds honest without any artifice. Just what you want from an series produced by a investigative reporter who's going to tell you the truth. 

Now, let's listen to a clip from Daily Creative, a personal development podcast for people in creative professions. In this clip, host Todd Henry is realizing something about himself. 

Clip from Daily Creative

Todd Henry: You know, often the enemy of bravery isn't some oppositional force. It's just sheer inertia. It's comfort, it's that things are fine. And I realized, oh, I've got a vision of the way things could be better. The thing that's keeping me where I am is comfort.

And then I realized, and I have the capacity to do the thing that I see in my head. But what's standing in my way really is the past. It's all of this stuff that I've been doing for 18 years.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Now, few people would ever actually make a choice between listening to these two podcasts— no one but me, and I love them both. But notice the way their creators—Lauren Chooljian and her team at NHPR and Todd Henry and his producer Joshua Gott—made very deliberate choices about how they sound. We already talked about how moody and dramatic The 13th Step Sounds. In contrast, everything about Daily Creative is upbeat, light. You know humor will play a role. 

Todd Henry is affable, friendly, even while he’s coming to an uncomfortable truth about himself. Yeah, he’s going to decide to throw out 18 years worth of work—the episode is titled The Curious Death of Todd Henry. But he’ll do it willingly for the cause. And we will come along happily to improve ourselves as well. 

I chose these two clips because they’re both fairly highly produced, and they sound entirely different. I wanted to illustrate the concept of having a sound vision that appeals to your audience. You need to think about how you want them to feel while they listen. 

So why should you spend time on this—especially if you're hosting a fairly straightforward interview show? The truth is, we all create some kind of sonic brand, regardless of whether we plan carefully or fail to plan. Without design, that sound is often subconsciously influenced by what we’ve been hearing for years. For instance, that’s why This American Life's Ira Glass is so widely mimicked or why so many of us still adopt the “anchor voice.” It’s also why so many shows don’t hook listeners: They’re flat, bland, unemotional — frankly, boring. And they often lose listeners in the first 60 seconds. 

A well-thought-out sound vision makes your audio memorable — and differentiates it from the competition. 

But wait! What if you don't have a podcast? You're a writer, an author, or a public speaker? You can translate the idea to the page, the screen, or the stage. How will you use words, tone, mood, and even body language to attract your audience? Same idea. Maybe your readers have little time—they want facts, quickly. No fluff. Or maybe they like romance novels. They love detailed description and snappy dialogue. Or you're giving a motivational speech to a roomful of corporate leaders—and you'll move energetically and speak dynamically, from the heart. That's my idea of a sound vision translated to a different platform. 

The second S in my 6S framework is structure. Remember, all of these strategies are designed to help you not just hook your audience, but keep them with you. 

There's nothing like having a structure for your content to help you create more easily while also instilling habits in your audience. Maybe your favorite host always asks the same lightning round questions—so you always stick around until the end because those answers are so much fun. That's structure. 

Structure also provides creative constraints. In other words, it gives us guardrails for what to include, when and how — and equally important, what to leave out. 

In their show about dead celebrities, Famous & Gravy co-hosts Amit Kapoor and Michael Osborne employ one of the most tightly built structures I’ve noticed in a podcast. The result is compelling blend of the profound — and hilarious. In each episode, Amit and Michael ask each other the same 12 questions about each dead celebrity. They've drawn a blueprint that makes it easy for them to wrestle raw content into meaning that sticks. This blueprint, this creative constraint, makes producing easier. They don't need to script the show because they always know where they're headed. It's their answers that make it fun and illuminating—you never know what's coming. In fact, they barely talk to each other before they tape. They research the celebrity separately and draw their own conclusions. 

Their 11th question, out of a dozen, is always this: Would you want this dead celebrity's life? Regular listeners now are in the habit of listening to the end because they want to hear how Michael and Amit will answer that interesting question—and whether or not they'll agree. This question leads to some lively discussions.

Clips from Famous & Gravy

Michael Osborne: What do you got? I mean, what’s the case against?

Amit Kapoor: There’s such a thing as too much gratitude, and that’s where I question it. 

Michael Osborne: Based on everything we’ve talked about, the big question is do you want Oliver Sacks’ life?

Amit Kapoor: It’s tough, but I think I would take it. Because he had the influence he was always seeking. He got to do the thing that he was made for on this earth. The reason why it’s a qualified…

Michael Osborne: Based on everything we’ve talked about, do you want this life?

Amit Kapoor: I like Leonard Cohen.

Michael Osborne: The depths of pain he experienced are familiar to me. But man, that he found what looks like salvation—the hope that that represents not just to other people, but—that’s something that comes from the inside out. So I’m a yes, man. I’m a yes. I want this life.

Amit Kapoor: It’s so important to have that and to be vocal about that…

Elaine Appleton Grant

By the way, if you're wondering what the 12th and final question is, you'll just have to follow Famous & Gravy. 

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!

Our fourth S in the 6S framework for hooking your audience and keeping them with you is surprise. It's the left turn when we're expecting a righthand one that makes us listen. It's the twists and turns of an involved, high-stakes plot that we love, or the ending of the movie or the novel that we didn't predict. 

There’s hardly a story or a conversation or a speech that doesn't need something surprising. Katie Colaneri is the senior podcast editor at New Hampshire Public Radio. She fields a lot of pitches for documentary series. She's got her eye out for something in particular. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Katie Colaneri: What are they doing in the story and what access do you have to them? What are the surprises or as we like to call it, the holy shit moments? Every Document story has several of them. Just the things that make you go, Oh my God, you're never going to believe—blah, blah, blah. The thing about this story is this. So we want people to start to think about, what are the things that have surprised them, that have either happened or about the people who are involved. Is the story going to peel back a layer of something that maybe people thought that they understood before, and explain it in a different kind of way?

Elaine Appleton Grant

Now, you may not be making documentaries. Probably not. What if you're producing an interview show, or doing a how-to, or writing a blog post, or co-hosting a show about the movies, or giving a speech about supply-chain management? For any content to be memorable, we have to learn something we didn't expect. The search for fresh, new information is a constant in the lives of good interviewers. Kelly Corrigan, host of the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders and the PBS show Tell Me More, worries about this a lot. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Kelly Corrigan: I mean, part of what I'm doing is trying to make your listening or viewing or reading minutes actually worth it. Like the, the thing that you and I are asking for when we put stuff out there is attention. And what could be a more exquisite currency than attention? I mean, in this world where there is so much coming at you—to ask for that, it's like asking for someone's soul. I mean, you are asking for the most precious thing that they've got.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Through that frame, it couldn't be more important to offer audiences something new. It's not easy. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Elaine Appleton Grant: What's an example of one of your episodes that you just think of off the top of your head—just intuitive head—where somebody told you they hadn't said something before, or you found yourself saying something you hadn't said before?

Kelly Corrigan: I mean, 90 percent of the time something like that happens. It's happening right now. I have never talked about this very specific problem that I often have before on a microphone. I've told my husband about it, you know—like when I finish an interview, he's like, how'd you do? I'm like, I couldn't get them off their talking points.

And you know, the more professional they are…Samantha Power is a great example. So Samantha Power is the head of USAID. She was the UN ambassador under Obama. She's a great thinker. She won a Pulitzer for her writing. She's devoted to making the world a better place. She's one of the most impressive people I've ever met.

And she's constricted by her job. Like she has a big public job where there's people who work for her who cover her press and they want to talk to me beforehand and they want to make sure it's going to stay on the rails and we're going to cover this and cover that and I nod along and—you know, I will satisfy the requirements, but it doesn't mean I'm going to stop there. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

But as I learned from Kelly, you only need one moment—one surprise—to create something that stands apart, that's different from what everyone else is doing. She did this in an interview with Bryan Stevenson, the world-renowned criminal justice advocate and bestselling author of Just Mercy. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Kelly Corrigan: I didn't know that Bryan Stevenson played the piano until the morning of the shoot. And him playing the piano is such an important part of every day of his life. Here's another thing I didn't know, that came up the morning of the shoot. 150 guys on death row have his cell phone number. That's who they call. He's like their family. He's their brother. He's their priest. He's their father. He's their son, if they're really old. So you think about what it would feel like to be carrying 150 people's fate. And then you think about how much you would need to play piano, to step away from all that and to make something beautiful. And to be alone inside a cloud of music. And it—it just was—to me, it was like this incredible unlock of these two disparate pieces of information that to me seemed so related. 

Elaine Appleton Grant: So what did you do? 

Kelly Corrigan: I went right there. I brought it right up with him. And then, amazingly, on the set where we were shooting, there was a baby grand piano. And between shots, he went over. And I was like, would you like to play piano? Like, would that be relaxing for you? And he's like, I would love to. So he's playing the piano. Then all the cameramen are turning towards him. And so it's actually a beautiful part of the episode is when I'm asking him about it, we cut to the B roll of him playing piano on a break.

Bryan Stevenson: When I play the piano, it's the one thing that takes me out of my head. It's just fully engaging. So I love being able to step out of my life into this world of music. And I'm curious about every piano I see. It's a bad, bad habit, but I want to know, well, what does that one sound like? And what does that one sound like?

Kelly Corrigan: You just have to touch every piano you pass.

Bryan Stevenson: I just feel like it's saying something. I want to hear what it's saying. 

Kelly Corrigan: Bryan, Bryan, come over. 

And, you know, it was the most special thing that happened, and it's not in any other Bryan Stevenson interview. And that's how you differentiate from 60 Minutes or CBS Sunday Morning or whoever else has, you know, interviewed Bryan Stevenson, which is pretty much everybody. I mean, I'm sure he's been interviewed 1,000 times.

Elaine Appleton Grant

As listeners, we are just as surprised as Kelly. And so we won’t only remember these human moments, we’ll share them with our friends. In fact, maybe I should retitle this section on surprise: How to generate word of mouth and grow your show.

Surprise goes hand in hand with the fifth S in our framework for hooking and keeping your audience: suspense. Now, most of us aren't producing true crime—we're making podcasts that support our business, or we're interviewing celebrities in our field, or we're teaching people how to do something. So why would I even use the word suspense for podcasts that aren't about serial killers or rescues from disasters? 

Here's why. No matter the medium, any good story or interview poses a question and a promise, explicitly or implicitly. A big question hooks us. I call it a driving question, because a driving question moves the story or the issue forward. It's the overarching one for your whole podcast, radio show, your Substack, even: It's a big enough question that you can answer it, again and again, in each episode, differently. For instance, the driving question in Good Life Project is obvious: What makes a good life? Or How I Built This—well, how did she? Or in a whodunit like Bone Valley, the question is almost always: Who hurt someone else, and why? In this case, it's “Who killed Leo Schofield’s wife?” The promise we're making to our listeners is: You will learn the answers. But not yet, or there's no suspense. 

I'm going back to Famous & Gravy for the clever way they found to create suspense to start every episode: the quiz show. This is Amit Kapoor.

Clip from Famous & Gravy 

Amit Kapoor: This is Famous & Gravy, a conversation about quality of life as we see it, one dead celebrity at a time. Now for the opening quiz to reveal today's dead celebrity. 

Michael Osborne: This person died 2014, age 86. She was a Tony-nominated stage actress. After her first marriage, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer.

Woman: Good grief. No idea. Alright, keep going. 

Michael Osborne: She was a college professor and a ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit. She also made several appearances on Sesame Street. 

Man: Oh man, Toni Morrison? 

Michael Osborne:

Not Toni Morrison. In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Woman: Now that I should know. Although I was busy in 2011. I missed it. 

Michael Osborne: That whole year? 

Woman: I missed the entire year. 

Michael Osborne: What an excuse. Throughout her writing, she explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community, and the collective past. 

Woman: It's not Maya Angelou. 

Man: Maya Angelou? 

Woman: Not Maya Angelou, is it? 

Man: Maya Angelou.

Michael Osborne: Today's dead celebrity is Maya Angelou.

Woman: I didn't even say it right. Maya Angelou. 

Michael Osborne: I've been saying Angelou my whole life, and it's actually Angelou. I love you back.

Maya Angelou: She does not know her beauty. She thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance, naked, under palm trees, and see her image in the river, she would know. But there are no palm trees on the street.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Here's a different kind of great example from This American Life. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Quorum is a story about a classic, dreaded task for early career journalists: covering town meeting. Is there anything that is, usually, more boring? 

Well, in the hands of NHPR reporter Sarah Gibson, this one kept me on the edge of my seat, because she employs two devices really well: the function of time, and the inner feelings of our main characters, who are underdogs. In the next passage, two sisters in the small town of Croydon, New Hampshire, are fighting to keep their school budget from being sliced in half. Here, I'm discussing it with editor Katie Colaneri. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Elaine Appleton Grant: …find a way to get 283 people to come to a revote. And if they don't reach 283 people—and remember, the whole town is only 800 people—then they're going to fail. 

Sarah Gibson: Amy and Angie are driving from house to house trying to convince people to come to the revote. They've never done a campaign like this before.

Woman 1: We're bad at this. 

Woman 2: They say, we're not registered voters. Okay, that's fine. 

Sarah Gibson: Angie and Amy grew up in Croydon. Their car has an American flag tinted on the back window. 

Elaine Appleton Grant: The reason I wanted to play this is because the entire rest of the piece is suspense. This could be practically the same setup that you use for true crime. What's going to happen? All along the way, every single reporting and editorial decision is made to make it more suspenseful. Are they going to make it? Are they going to get this person to come to the meeting? Are they not? Is someone going to run out the clock at the meeting? What are the votes going to be? Et cetera, et cetera.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What's a creative way you could add suspense? And how can you insert new questions and conflicts along the way, to keep that curiosity going? That's my challenge to you.

Finally, the more specific we can make our language, the more sparkling and memorable it is. In the last 18 months of speaking with incredible storytellers for this podcast, no one has been better at this than Sam Mullins. In 2023, Sam won the the Best Podcast of the Year award at the Ambies—the Podcast Academy's attempt to rival the Oscars. Sam won it for his documentary series Wild Boys, from Campside Media. It’s about two strange teenagers who mysteriously appear in Sam’s hometown of Vernon, in British Columbia. Here’s how he introduces us to Vernon.

Clip from Wild Boys

Sam Mullins: The boys couldn't have known it, but they showed up in the right place at the right time. In a sense, this only could have happened in Vernon. You need to know about my hometown. Vernon's located in the Okanagan, a region in the interior of British Columbia, sort of halfway between Vancouver and Calgary. Historically, it's been a middle class place, but the whole region has sort of been transformed into an outdoor playground for the wealthy. The Okanagan is known for its vineyards, golf courses, ski resorts, its lakes, and the mythological beast, the Ogopogo, who lives in one of said lakes, allegedly.

Vernon's a white town. It's a hockey town. There's lots of churches, there's lots of retired folks, there's a winter carnival parade every year, and the city has never once held a gay pride parade. The crown jewel of Vernon, and in my opinion the whole Okanagan, is Kalamalka Lake. It deserves a Google image search. Seriously, do that now.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Sam never uses the word “conservative” to describe the townspeople. Instead, he notes that Vernon has never held a gay pride parade. If he’d called the residents conservative, listeners might have glossed over the story entirely. Worse, they may have begun to silently argue with the narrator over this stereotype. “How do you know? What do you mean by that? Who are you, and can I trust you?” By recounting a tiny fact, though, Sam has offered us an indisputable piece of history. He allows us to make of it what we will. 

How does he do this? Sam doesn’t have some secret inborn trait that makes him excel at specifics. He’s a comedy writer, he says. “I’m obsessed with lists.” In this case, he and his wife played a list-making game. The object was to write “one-sentence morsels” to describe Vernon. He gave the resulting long list to his story editor, Karen Duffin. Karen helped him choose the best morsels to include in the script. We all need a good editor. 

Even more interesting is the specific way he describes a family in a story he told for The Moth, a live storytelling event series, and also a radio show and podcast. 

Clip from The Moth

Sam Mullins: …a table of four, so I go up to the table with water glasses to greet them, and something about these people immediately put me at ease. They just seem really calm and present and just like good people. And right away—it was two parents and two grown-up kids about my age—and right away the father shook my hand. He's like, What's your name? I'm like, Sam. He's like, You look like a Sam. We started talking and having banter, and they were really into the fact that I was a struggling slash failed actor and writer. And they kind of became my number one priority, and they were my oasis in the mayhem. And they really knew how to dine. They had a lot of nice appetizers and fine wines. I cleared all that away and I got them set up for entrees.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What elevates this writing to be so noteworthy—to be so unforgettable—are the words he uses to tell us not what these people looked like—we never learn that—but how they made Sam feel. “They were my oasis in the mayhem," he says.

And that’s the six Ses. All of the stories I referenced are linked in the show notes. Go listen to them, with an ear out for what I have showed you here. 

That's a wrap on my 6S Storytelling Framework. As a quick reminder, the 6 Ses are sound vision, structure, scenes, surprise, suspense, and specifics. And one other thing: In narrative, they all wrap around characters who take the audience on some kind of journey. In conversations and interviews, characters still matter, a lot—but ideas might be the star. 

That's all for today. To put these concepts into practice or learn more about curating guests, becoming a great guest, holding compelling interviews, and more, visit our website, podcast allies dot com slash workshops. That link is in our show notes on your listening app or at sound judgment podcast dot com. 

Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies LLC. Tina Bassir is our podcast manager. Audrey Nelson is our production assistant. Huge thanks to long-suffering and incredibly talented audio engineer Kevin Kline. And Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Thanks for being here. Follow the show now so you don't miss our next episode on The 13th Step, with reporter Lauren Chooljian and editor Alison MacAdam. And if you liked this episode, listen to the full episodes about each of the shows mentioned on Sound Judgment. You know the drill. Links are in the show notes. 

Clip from The 13th Step

Woman: I didn't make that. I didn't make the sun. I don't—you know—water the trees every day. Again, that spirituality is just finding anything that's bigger than me. And it was very easy to see something larger than me in front of me there. You know? 

Lauren Chooljian: Did you like thinking about all this stuff again?

Woman: Yeah. No, it is. It's good. Cause I—you know, for the last few years, thinking of Green Mountain, it's very difficult to not think of Eric. Talking about that allows me to almost see it without him. It's almost like a shadow. It's like his shadow isn't there while I'm thinking about it right now, which is nice.