Radio texts

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided I want to use Vincent McInerney's Writing for Radio to improve my role-playing craft, specifically describing the world so that it has substance in my players` theater of the mind.

The first chapter presents a philosophy of radio, and argues for choosing mindvisible (his term) descriptions over what is too abstract to be visualized, or built up to be confusing in the mind. The way it teaches this is through text comparison. First come a few where it is clear one is better than the other: a few obtuse metaphors compared with a vivid description of the sinking of the Titanic; a description of life in a concentration camp, already taken from a radio broadcast, compared a discussion of torture in Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire - the former is very evocative, while the latter takes too long to digest for someone being given a description in real time, and in any event discusses things too abstractly.

The bigger texts are then left for the reader/student to digest, compare, perhaps edit for radio: descriptions of a party in Charles Dickens` David Copperfield and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace; descriptions of torture and its consequences in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Wolfgang Langhoff's The Rubber Truncheon; and finally fantastical texts, William Blake's A Memorable Fancy, and Peter Redgrove's Being Beauteous. I worked through them a bit, read them aloud, recorded myself reading them. Mostly I've come to appreciate the craft of Dickens, Orwell, and Redgrove quite a bit. Orwell especially - I've read 1984 in the past, but it didn't really hit me just how visually and emotionally powerful his prose was there.

For texts that were not taken from the book, I'll be looking into two accounts of Chateaubriand's entry to Constantinople, which I myself translated from the French. A friend sent the sources to me a long while back. The first account is by Chateaubriand himself, and seems very literary, but not very easy on the mindview; Julien, his lieutenant, I think, is more pedestrian in his descriptions, and more evocative for all that.

Recording and re-recording these texts to hear how they sound out loud is an experience. My own voice is still hard on my ears. I have to wonder whether my players suffer from my poor enunciation and diction. Something to improve before I get to work on the content of my words, I suppose.