Masterful Stories

Lessons from Golden Age Radio

John V Pavlik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315530758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The early eras of radio storytelling have entered and continue to enter the public domain in large quantities, offering unprecedented access to the Golden Age of Radio. Author and Professor John Pavlik mines the best this age of radio has to offer in Masterful Stories, an examination of the masterpieces of audio storytelling. This book provides a chronological history of the best of the best from radio's Golden Age, outlining a core set of principles and techniques that made these radio plays enduring examples of storytelling. It suggests that, by using these techniques, stories can engage audiences emotionally and intellectually. Grounded in a historical and theoretical understanding of radio drama, this volume illuminates the foundational works that proceeded popular modern shows such as Radiolab, The Moth, and Serial.

Masterful Stories will be a powerful resource in both media history courses and courses teaching audio storytelling for modern radio and other audio formats, such as podcasting. It will appeal to audio fans looking to learn about and understand the early days of radio drama.

1

A THEORY OF MASTERFUL STORIES

Since at least the time of the early Greek philosophers Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, storytelling has been recognized as a vital part of the human experience.¹ Storytelling, especially through the ancient tradition of oral communication (i.e., the spoken word), has been a means to convey culture, to share insights and values, and to communicate across generations, time, and place. The twentieth-century advent of radio broadcasting produced an environment in which a substantial amount of resources, talent, and energy generated a new era of masterful stories in the audio format. Because of this audio format, it was natural that early radio program creators tapped into the techniques of the traditional live oral form of narrative known as storytelling.² In storytelling, actors convey events through the spoken word and sounds, often embellishing or improvising as they tell the story.

Expanding beyond the human voice, pioneering radio innovators developed deft techniques for creating compelling stories using a wide spectrum of audio elements. The early era of radio broadcasting, from the 1920s through the 1950s, especially in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, is widely known as the Golden Age of Radio programming. Of course, not all or perhaps even the majority of early radio programming was masterful. In this book we focus primarily on one programming genre, dramatic radio plays. Over several decades, innovators produced a relatively large body of quality work, which we draw upon for our analysis.

For the purpose of studying quality dramatic programming from radio’s Golden Age, this book defines masterful stories as more than simply the ability to proficiently deliver a story in audio format. Masterful stories demonstrate exceptional levels of adroitness in creating a multi-dimensionally engaging narrative.³ Masterful stories are narratives that deeply and enduringly engage the audience. We define this notion of engagement as the ability to occupy, attract, or involve a listener’s interest or attention.⁴ Professor Tim Crook, Head of Radio at Goldsmiths, University of London, argues that the audio format of radio supports a powerful capacity to engage the mind. “It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension.”⁵

We contend that masterful stories achieve engagement of the mind through three broad dimensions. First is the emotional. This is the ability of a story to engage or involve the individual on an affective level. It taps into what the individual values or arouses her or his passions. These are stories that make a listener feel or care, often deeply and across a broad array of emotional domains, from fear to disgust, surprise to anger, happiness to sorrow.

Second is the intellectual. This is the ability of a story to engage the cognitive, rational, or analytical side of the mind. These stories especially provoke the listener to think or imagine and can even lead to learning. Of course, some stories trigger the imagination in emotional ways as well. As with the emotional dimension, this intellectual engagement is often across a wide range of more knowledge-based or factually-oriented domains, from the scientific to metaphysical, historical to sociological.

Third is the dimension that transcends the here and now. This is the ability of a story to make a broader connection from the specific facts or premise of a story to a more general aspect of the human condition. Such a story connects to a greater truth or larger whole. It places the present or narrow and specific circumstances into context and enables the listener to understand or see the individual case within that context. Sometimes it is across time or history, and sometimes it is across place, culture, or political boundary. Transcendent stories offer insight and explore the realm of wisdom. Transcendence gives the story an enduring quality that can extend the story beyond the contemporary or local place, culture, or problem. These stories stick with the listener long after the play has ended. They linger in the listener’s memory. The listener can, in a sense, lose her or himself in such a story. In this way, listeners might enter a psychologically intense state known as flow when absorbed in a masterful story.⁶

Transcendence can play a powerful role in the human experience, across a broad array of activities. In her book Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand writes about the sometimes transcendent nature of horseracing.⁷ “For the jockey, the saddle was a place of unparalleled transcendence,” she writes. “‘The horse,’ recalled one rider, ‘he takes you,’ adding, ‘Aboard a racehorse in full stride … I am so completely in the race that I forget the crowds. My horse and I talk together. We don’t hear anyone else.’”

Without such a transcendent connection, a story might entertain or even inform, but it is little more than comfort food or even cotton candy for the mind. It occupies an audience member’s attention and passes the time, but does not leave her or him intellectually or emotionally nourished or enriched in a meaningful, substantial, and satisfying manner.

Of course, all three of these dimensions—the emotional, the intellectual, and the transcendent—are sometimes interwoven and indistinct. When threaded together effectively, they form the foundation for a masterful story.

As shown in the two parts of Table 1.1, stories can engage the audience emotionally, intellectually, or both (or neither). To create masterful stories as theorized here, a narrative must engage the audience to a high degree, either intellectually or emotionally (or both). These conditions are necessary but insufficient, however, to achieve masterful status. To create a masterful story, the narrative must also engage the audience by transcending the human condition, by connecting the specifics of an individual story across time, place, or culture. This is illustrated in the second part of Table 1.1. When a narrative engages the audience intellectually or emotionally alone, it can be a good story. When a story engages the audience both emotionally and intellectually, it may be a very good story. But when it also transcends the human condition, it becomes a masterful story and gives birth to an enduring classic. A story that achieves intellectual and emotional engagement as well as transcendence is a masterpiece. Such old time radio productions endure today and, in many ways, transcend the arena of popular culture. They represent a form of art, artistic expression, or sometimes journalistic excellence in their own right.

In some ways, the three dimensions of this theoretical framework are foreshadowed in the writings of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his three means of persuasion or persuasive appeal.⁸ Pathos, the emotional, taps into the affective dimension of a message. Pathos has a motivational appeal. It employs vivid description, emotional language, music, and numerous sensory details. Logos, or the logical, means persuading by the use of reasoning. Whether by inductive or deductive reasoning, logos relies on facts and statistics used to help support an argument. Ethos is an ethical appeal. It rests on the credibility of the source of a message, or the authority or wisdom of a communicator. Aristotle’s pathos parallels the emotional or affect dimension of this book’s multi-dimensional theory of masterful stories. Logos parallels the intellectual dimension. Ethos parallels the transcendent quality of masterful stories.

TABLE 1.1 Multi-Dimensional Theory of Masterful Stories

Part One
Emotional Engagement Intellectual Engagement	Low	High
Low	Poor Stories	Good Stories
High	Good Stories	Very Good Stories
Part Two
Transcendent Engagement	Low	High
High Intellectual Engagement	Good Stories	Masterful Stories
High Emotional Engagement	Good Stories	Masterful Stories
High Emotional and Intellectual Engagement	Very Good Stories	Story Masterpieces

This book’s theory of masterful stories rests on a large body of work from a cross section of disciplines, media, and forms. These include the theater, motion pictures, and oral traditions in less formally structured arenas as well as performance arts and entertainment such as vaudeville. Vaudeville was a form of live stage entertainment especially popular in the United States and Canada from the 1880s–1930s. Many of its actors and producers later contributed to early radio programming.⁹

The creators of Golden Age Radio programming drew from existing stor...