I absolutely love the Big Finish Missy series. I should probably get around to the second volume sometime.
I really hope they´ll do many more of those
I absolutely love the Big Finish Missy series. I should probably get around to the second volume sometime.
Oh okay. :-) In one episode of the "Missy"-Series they had a character write letters to another character and "packed" the narration in there. I thought that quite clever. Actually an episode I would recommend...they go "all in" on the "evil / twisted Mary Poppins"-vibe.
I don't like that style at all. It's too vague and hard to follow. It's trying to pretend that you're listening to the soundtrack of a TV show, which seems dishonest to me, as well as self-defeating. Nothing is at its best when it's trying to be something it isn't.
You are of course entitled to your opinion and your own listening preferences, but this blanket statement doesn't hold water. There are many audio dramas that work perfectly well without narration. It's not a necessity.Audio drama works best with at least a modicum of narration.
Well it depends if its written well enough. For example the Doctor Who audio dramas are written in a way that you really get all information you need thru the dialog. Granted, that style needs some getting used to and you need to be more attentive.
Sacrificing clarity out of some kind of purist rejection of narration is foolish. I mean, how do you let the listener know what a location looks like, how a room is laid out, what an alien or a robot or a vehicle looks like? Descriptions like that are important in science fiction, fantasy, and action, and you hobble yourself by depriving yourself of that tool in the storyteller's kit.
To me, this statement misses out on one of the fundamental strengths of audio drama - and that is that the writer doesn't need to describe what everything looks like, nor should they.
When it comes to science fiction or fantasy, I disagree. In those genres, setting is particularly important. And they often involve settings, creatures, and devices that have no counterparts in the everyday world, so they can't be conveyed to an audience through sound effects alone.
You can easily recognize the sound of an automobile or a dishwasher, but if you hear some weird electronic hum, how can you tell whether it's a hovercraft or a robot or a force field or whatever?
But stories that do rely heavily on setting and visuals are also valid, and I just don't see the value in deliberately choosing to limit the tools in your kit in a way that makes it harder to tell those stories.
Not to mention that if you don't have narration, you sacrifice internal monologue. You can't tell a scene from the point of view of a character who isn't speaking, say, if they're alone when they witness something, or if they're watching a scene clandestinely and don't want to be heard. It limits the range of things you can do in a story.
There are certainly some audio stories that don't need narration, but there are also plenty that do. And you have more versatility if you allow for both.
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It's not a zero-sum question.
And yet sound effects simulate fictional things all the time. As a kid I had an entire BBC Sci-Fi sound effects tape of things that don’t exist.
By use of dialogue and context.
It's entirely possible to write explanatory lines that don't feel forced or info-dumpy.
But isn’t insisting that audio stories “work best” with narration also limiting the way a story is told?
And in addition, I wonder if stories that must rely heavily on setting and visuals to be told might be better suited to mediums other than audio, but that's a whole other conversation...
I’ve never said it was. You only need to look at my work in this medium: of the 30+ audio dramas I’ve written, about half of them have a narrator or a narration element. In those cases, that form worked best for those stories, so I used it.
But my larger point is, narration is not mandatory in this medium.
Hollywood had decades of popular and successful audio dramas that had no narration. These days we call it old time radio, and a lot of it is still fun to listen to.
When it comes to Doctor Who, that's a franchise that often does rely on visuals, like the designs of its aliens and monsters and worlds and costumes. I often find such things frustratingly vague in the audios. It's easy to talk about conjuring things with your imagination, but the imagination still needs a starting point, some rough idea of what category of thing we're imagining,
Now you're being disingenuous. The point is that you got to see what those sound effects represented. I'm talking about context, whether they're enough by themselves to let you know what they represent.
My point is that it makes no sense to limit yourself to only one option, to omit a useful tool from your kit. I don't disagree with you that dialogue and context can be useful. I'm just saying that narration can also be valuable. They aren't warring options. They're just different tools in the kit, and what I'm saying is that I see no point in throwing out one of your tools.
James Swallow said:To me, this statement misses out on one of the fundamental strengths of audio drama - and that is that the writer doesn't need to describe what everything looks like, nor should they.
When it comes to science fiction or fantasy, I disagree.
Christopher, I would be very interested in hearing your reaction to the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. It's a sci-fi/horror comedy-drama fiction podcast done in the style of a community radio news program, about a community where every conspiracy theory and sci-fi/horror trope is true. Think of it as Stephen King meets NPR.
The reason I bring it up is that a huge amount of the artistic success of Welcome to Night Vale derives from the ability to evoke images in the audience's minds without actually describing anything in specificity. Sometimes Night Value uses de facto narration in the form of Cecil's broadcasts, but sometimes it doesn't.
As I've been saying over and over, I never said that doing a story without narration could never work; I just think that in the case of Doctor Who audios, the lack of narration is frequently -- not always, but frequently -- an impediment, and I find it artificial to rule out the option when it could be beneficial.
In the case of a horror/thriller thing like you're describing, obviously lack of specificity is a good thing. Alfred Hitchcock certainly knew that what the audience doesn't see is scarier than what they do see. But not all fiction is the same. There are other kinds of stories where it is preferable to have a clear visual sense of things, like in my Tangent Knights series where evoking the visual specifics of tokusatsu costume designs, action sequences, and locations is an important part of the tale. And Doctor Who covers a wide range of stories, so sometimes the lack of visual clarity is more of a problem than other times. I'm arguing against absolutes; I think more flexibility about the use of narration would be beneficial.
I cited how it's often unclear what a monster or an alien world is supposed to look like from sound effects and the odd bit of dialogue alone, but another case where it's often a problem for me is in the historical tales. Now, presumably British listeners would know what kind of costuming or scenery to imagine in something set around, say, the English Civil War or something, because they would've seen historical dramas about it and studied it in history classes growing up; but there were stories where I didn't know enough about the period to imagine what things looked like. It's best for stories not to assume their audience knows things, because there will always be some who need explanations more than others.
I did want to point out one element that seemingly differs from your stated preference for visual specificity, but I also tried to point out that Night Vale at many other points adheres to your desire for a narrator or a narrator-like device.
Again, I'm not speaking in general about every audiobook. I'm not saying it always has to be done one way. I'm just saying it doesn't make sense to me to avoid narration in those specific cases where it would help.
The Marvel podcasts on Spotify have been on there for years.But this way I can download a permanent copy, instead of only having a few weeks or months to listen to it before it disappears.
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