- What do you notice about the importance of the audience in the questions? Try to put what Alison Macadam writes about the audience in your own terms. Add something that you think might be missing or that helps you keep your own focus on the audience (300 words, minimum!).
The audience is the driving force behind each question you ask. In the case of defining your story’s driving question, you need to think about what kind of experience your audience is going to have when listening to the story. In order to keep your audience on the same page as you, it is suggested that you pick one question to ask and answer that one question really well. The article states that if you have more than one question, you probably have more than one storyline, which can be hard to follow for a listener or make for a less compelling story if you’re jumping between ideas. In conjunction with this concept, it is important to remind yourself that you cannot cover an entire topic in one episode or storyline. With that being said, you will need to leave things out to create a compelling and comprehensive story. When thinking about your driving question think about what angles you want to tell the story from so you can better paint the picture for your audience. In storytelling, the goal is to capture and maintain the audience’s attention, so when brainstorming how you will tell your story, it is important to think about how the audience will be perceiving it. When diving into what makes a story memorable to an audience member, we oftentimes forget that they will not remember every detail of the story we are telling. Instead, we need to turn our attention to the main points, memorable quotes, and themes and articulate those high points in the story. In thinking about these high points in the story, we should also be analyzing how we want our audience to feel after the story and what we want them to remember. In doing so we can articulate the main points of the story effectively so the audience has a compelling experience listening to the story and takes something memorable away from it.
- Revisit your first Interview Podcast (Peer) and listen to it at least one more time. Go back to the raw interview audio you collected and write about what got left out. Your published story was not about what got omitted. Write about at least two omissions that helped you make your podcast more focused (300 words, minimum!).
In full length, my raw interview was closer to 5 minutes long as Allie and I were talking in a conversational manner. Overall, in the raw interview there were two overarching storylines to tell but ultimately led me to choose her most memorable childhood memory to pursue in the podcast because I felt like it was a more compelling story. The storyline I left out was regarding where she was from and what she did over Winter break, in which she works at a Carhart store and talks about meeting customers’ dogs that came in. In omitting this story it helped make the story more focused on who Allie is personality-wise. In this assignment, we were telling a story to get to know the person better. While I feel that her job in her hometown is a piece of who Allie is, I wanted to articulate a storyline that I felt accentuated her interests and passions as well as hear her personality shine through the story, which was more evident in her childhood memory. In addition, I also omitted parts of why she was in the course so that the intro was shorter and we could jump into the story quicker. Reflecting on the episode I am unsure if it made for a better listening experience. I think adding in a few more seconds of audio to give more context as to who Allie is would have been helpful for the listener.
