After reading the thirty pages of Radio my outlook on digital storytelling on the radio has a whole new aspect.   I will be honest when I first purchased this book in my mind I was thinking “seriously I am wasting my time reading a comic book.”  I first started skimming it thinking okay just need to get the main points to blog about my reflections, but honestly after about page 5 I went back to the first page and read the entire book because of how interested in this topic I became.  There way of formatting this book or (graphic novel) I believe worked great as a conveying art of radio storytelling.  The fact that it was a in a comic book setting and the details it had really made me feel as if I was there with them in the meeting room, or there with them learning how to tell a radio story.  I would have to say I think they did a wonderful job of publishing and writing this book.  Some of the main points that I took away from this book was what kind of a story is worth telling, what details to get out of your interviewees, how much tape you have to whittle down, the editing process, how to properly tape an interview, and how to get on the public radio.

The first point I am going to emphasize and discuss is what sort of story really makes is worthwhile to tell and what details you really want to get from your interviewees.  Directly from the book they state, “Character driven, that they follow the same structure, a literary structure, that a fiction story might. “  To me this did not make sense at first and I did not agree.  How on earth could you tell a radio story about one specific character?  As I read on though it made a lot more sense to me and I understand that you need one character with a specific conflict, change, and resolution.  To me this is pretty cut and dry because if you had multiple characters on a radio story your listeners might get confused as to whom you are talking about at one point in the story.  If you have one or two characters they know exactly who is doing the actions, or who the actions are being done too.  I was also quite interested in their discussion on how exactly to do an interview to get you the information you need for the story you are trying to tell.  I strongly agree with the fact that how you act as a interviewer really sets the stage for how your interviewee feels.   If you yourself as an interviewer are nervous and uncomfortable you will make your interviewee feel the same way, but if you are eager to hear the story and get the details you will get so much more information out of your interviewee.  Another interesting idea about radio story telling is how important it is not just to hear the interviewee’s story but also get almost a 3 dimensional feeling of where they are, where this happened, what it looked like.  Along with getting the main points of your interview I was really interested in the facts behind how to properly tape an interview.  Where to put the mic, tilting the mic back to you after you ask a question, all these ideas I believe were really interesting and I had never really thought about them.

The last major interesting point I found from this Radio (graphic novel) was how much editing and withering down of tape actually goes into making a radio story.  IT BLEW MY MIND THAT THEY START WITH 12 HOURS OF TAPE.  They then wither down those 12 hours of tape to just minutes.  At first I was like that is not possible but as they went through the process I was quite amazed of how they find the key ideas of the story, break that down to one page, and then tape the key points of the story into one big story.  Radio story is a lot of work.