If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page.

Hi Storytellers –

In my last issue, I introduced running lists of storytelling craft resources, including books, podcasts, newsletters, fellowships, and more. Free subscribers will see a preview, but the full lists are for paying subscribers – a good reason to subscribe today. An annual subscription to Sound Judgment is only $50! Subscribers get discounts (25-50%) to workshops, individual coaching and podcast tuneups, an increasingly popular service.

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Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

The beating heart of your narrative

I recently wrapped up my first course for Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, called “Writing & Producing the Scene: The Backbone of Audio Storytelling.” In addition to studying scenes produced by seasoned audio storytellers, the dozen students taking the course produced their own.

My students ranged in experience. Some were writers who had never produced audio before; others had years of experience as podcasters and radio journalists.

Over the course of six weeks, they could write and produce a scene or a portion of an audio story of their choosing. For time reasons, their projects had to be short — no more than two or three minutes long. Many created memoir; some made reported pieces. A veteran documentarian honed a segment of a documentary in progress.

Although their projects were wildly different, almost everyone experienced the same three problems.

1. Missing the story’s essence: Many had a hard time defining what their stories were truly about. What driving question were they trying to answer? What did they want to get across to the listener? Especially on first drafts, the focus was often unclear, even when the setting was beautifully evoked and the writing detailed. The listener comes away from such a story feeling like there’s a hole in the middle; it has no center. In feedback after feedback, I found myself asking the question: What is the heart of your story? Why do you care about these characters, this event? When possible, I’d try to guide students toward an answer by offering nudges based on the material. But only they could define the engine driving their interest in this story.

2. “Chekhov’s Gun” – You may already know this playwriting rule. In an 1889 letter, Anton Chekhov wrote, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” In other words, don’t include unnecessary material that raises questions (“Why is that gun on the wall?”) that you never answer. Almost everyone did – again, in their first drafts.

3. Creating static scenes that lacked momentum, the forward motion that takes the listener on a journey through a narrative arc. Momentum, created through character development, action, and scenes, is the ingredient that makes something feel like a story, not a report or snapshot.

Today, we’ll start with the most fundamental of these three issues: finding a story’s essence. (I’ll address Chekhov’s Gun and momentum in the next two issues of Sound Judgment.)

Defining the heart of your narrative

A friend and superb podcast editor recently referred to the essence of a story as “the beating heart of the narrative.” But how can we define that, exactly?

It’s not easy. There are some tried-and-true tools, like Gimlet founder Alex Blumberg’s test for a good story idea, as depicted in the classic audio reporting book Out on the Wire, by Jessica Abel:

“I’m doing a story about X. And what’s interesting about it is Y.”
Key to using this tool, wrote Abel: you must say it out loud, to a real person.

And there’s the focus statement that Sound School’s Rob Rosenthal employs: “Somebody does something because ______ (a motivation for doing that thing) but ________. (a challenge to overcome)”

We’re searching both for the central question the narrative is asking and the high-stakes moment of conflict that illuminates it. We’re also looking for the “left turn” in the narrative journey: Where does the train go off the tracks? What does the listener not expect?

The good news: In most cases, students fixed this problem in revision. In fact, according to the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder (Soul of a New Machine, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Strength in What Remains) and his longtime editor Richard Todd, clarifying a story’s essence is the single most important function of revision:

“F. Scott Fitzgerald “knew that there are at least two kinds of rewriting. The first is trying to fix what you’ve already written, but doing this can keep you from facing up to the second kind, from figuring out the essential thing you’re trying to do and looking for better ways to tell your story.”

This passage comes from the 2007 Nieman Storyboard column, “20 Writing & Editing Tips from Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd.”

Woah. This whole idea is too abstract for me to get a handle on

The effort to find the essence of your story can feel frustratingly ephemeral. It’s easy to get tied up in knots. Let’s make it more concrete with a couple of examples of student problems and solutions, with permission. Plus, look below at “Try this in your studio” for some good questions that can help.

Invitation to a hanging

Helen Mullen is a retired attorney whose family goes back generations in the west. Her grandfather, a Wyoming sheriff, was invited to a hanging in 1903. In her initial draft, it was unclear whether her story would be about a hanging gone wrong and how Wyoming treated criminal justice back then; about her grandfather; or about why her mother framed the invitation and gave it a place of honor on her living room wall for 50 years.

Typically, we experience difficulties with focus when we’re choosing between an abundance of possibilities, any of which might make a great story. In a long piece, it might be possible to address every important character, theme and plot point, but we can’t do so all at once.

When we’re torn, our indecision shows up immediately; it’s as if we’re pointing the listener in several directions at once. The poor listener gets confused. Confused listeners abandon stories.

Helen’s first draft began with this passage:
“The mechanism had been tested and retested because so much depended on its success. If the counterweight did not release, if the trap door did not open, if James Keffer did not die on the gallows that day in 1903 a lynching would surely follow.” [Note that the second sentence does a marvelous job of creating extremely high stakes.]

That “mechanism,” it turned out, was the gallows. In our group edit, most listeners had no idea what the first sentence referred to or whether the mysterious mechanism would be important. As a result, they felt lost.

One simple test for any story: Do we know, or can we easily infer, what the inciting incident was? In plain terms, what happened or is happening now?

Often, we choose to be indirect in an effort to build suspense. “Open loops” – asking questions you’ll answer later, as in every true crime podcast ever made – do hook listeners. But first we need to have our bearings; otherwise, we’re confused, not curious. Curiosity needs some solid ground.

In her second draft, Helen addressed the confusion by getting straight to the point:

During the last week in September in 1903 the sheriff in Fremont County Wyoming prepared to hang a man. The scaffold had been tested and retested because so much depended on its success. If the rope didn’t hold, if the trap door didn’t open, if James Keffer didn’t die on the gallows that day, a lynching would surely follow. This was the first legal execution in Wyoming in 10 years, and the state was desperate to shake off its reputation as a wild and lawless place.

Notice how the addition of the first simple, declarative sentence instantly tells us what this story will be about? In addition, rather than obfuscating what it was that had been tested, now she tells us straight out: “The scaffold had been tested…” We still have that great high-stakes setup. And now we also know why the stakes are so high: the state is “desperate to shake off its reputation as a wild and lawless place.”

We need to understand the inciting incident (the hanging) to care enough to keep listening. We still don’t know where Helen will go from here — whether her story will center on Wyoming’s lawless culture; the botched hanging and a subsequent cover-up; the gruesome crime committed by the convict; or Helen’s family’s involvement. But that’s OK, because we now have a base from which to move any one of these stories forward (but not all, unless she chooses to write a book).

Listen to Helen Mullen’s final scene.

Small changes can make a world of difference

Jay Gasser, a podcast producer in Canberra, Australia, also struggled with clarity about his story’s essence. He was building a scene for a true crime podcast about Jess, whose brother had been murdered. Unlike Helen, Jay had a singular focus from the start: the woman’s traumatic experience at a court hearing, not the murder itself.

But to care about her experience, we must first understand the inciting incident. In his initial draft, Jay struggled to focus on Jess and her parents while also explaining the murder itself. Following is Jay’s first draft of his narration, which was intriguing but left listeners confused about a few things: Where exactly was Steven? What did it mean that he usually sat in the driver’s seat? Was he killed that day? And were Jess and her parents crippled by the murder itself, or by an 18-month wait for a court hearing? The sudden shift from narration to a cut of Jess saying she had told “them” (who?) that she didn’t want to see a photograph was abrupt and, again, confusing; the previous scene felt unfinished.

[Narrator] Jess and her family had been crippled by an 18-month wait for this day in court to finally face the man who would attack their son Steven in the early morning hours of April 13, 2024. At Campbelltown, in the car park, Steven had been approached by someone he’d never met whilst he sat in the back of an ambulance. He would usually sit in the driver’s seat.
[Jess] “I had told them that I did not want to see a single photograph. I did not want to know what Steven’s last words were. I did not want to see anything that I could not see or unhear and that I wanted them to prepare me for those moments as best as they could so that I could make those decisions to leave when those things were happening.”

It didn’t take much revision for Jay to simplify the narration and clear up most of the confusion. In the process, he also added more raw emotion to the scene by telling us, “Steven died that day.” Here’s his new draft — subtly different but far more focused and effective.

Jess and her family had been crippled by an 18-month wait for this day in court. She was about to finally face the man who attacked her brother, Stephen in the early morning hours of April 13, 2024. Steven, a paramedic [Now we know why he’s in the back of an ambulance], had been sitting in the back of his ambulance on a meal break at McDonald’s in Campbelltown when he was suddenly approached and attacked unprovoked by a man he’d never met.

Steven died that day. [Clears up the confusion about the results of this attack.]

In the year and a half since Steven had died, Jess had done a lot of work slowly rebuilding the life that had been torn away from her. Jess and her family agreed they would face this trial together, face the man who had killed their Steven. [The narration is simpler, clearer, and more effective than cutting to Jess discussing photos. At that point, we hadn’t had enough context to understand what she was talking about.]

Now, with clarity around the inciting incident and an emotional explanation of where Jess and her family are right now [“Jess had done a lot of work…rebuilding the life that had been torn away from her,” / “face the man who had killed their Steven”], listeners will gladly take this narrative journey with Jay.

I’ll be teaching more scene writing and producing classes at the Center for Documentary Studies in September. Bookmark the CDS website for information when they become available.

Try this in your studio

We all struggle with story focus, which is one reason why everyone needs a story editor. A good editor can see the forest when all you can see is the trees. They’ll help you figure out what part of the story is most important, which theme or character you care about the most and how to address the problems I’ll discuss in the next two Sound Judgment issues – avoiding “Chekhov’s Gun” and creating forward momentum. If you don’t have an editor, look for or start a listening group or, if you can, hire an independent story editor.

Here are a handful of questions that can help you clarify your narrative focus:

1. Who is your protagonist? Public radio reporters and newspaper reporters may not have a protagonist in mind at all; we’re used to covering topics, issues, and events where we call on sources to provide information. But narrative requires a protagonist, a “story mule” to carry the story forward. It can be surprisingly hard to decide which of several characters to follow. One piece of advice from Jack Hart, author of Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Nonfiction – choose the character who makes action happen, rather than one whom is acted upon. Often, when you choose your protagonist, your story line will become obvious or at least apparent.

2. What does your protagonist want, and what’s keeping them from getting it?

3. How high are the stakes? What will happen if your character fails? The higher the stakes, the more we care. If you’re trying to decide between two different narrative arcs, choose the one with higher stakes.

4. Can you show your character’s passionate desire and the subsequent conflict through one or more scenes, rather than an explanation?

5. Finally, a newsroom’s favorite question: How does your story move the public conversation forward? In other words, what’s new?

Sound Judgment Kudos

My first Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Sally Herships, cofounder of new Artificial Intelligence Agency of San Francisco (with Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore), designed to “protect and advance artists’ agency in the landscape of AI.” Check out sfai.agency and consider becoming an early adopter of new tools for detecting the use of your work in training AI models. It’s free.

My second Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Richard J. Tofel, for his uplifting essay on the impact of award-winning journalism. I recently discovered Tofel’s cogent newsletter, Second Rough Draft, and I’m here to celebrate it. In this issue, Tofel shares how serving as a judge for Harvard Kennedy School’s second annual Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Journalism affirmed for him that it’s still possible for journalists to do work that makes a difference in their communities and the world at large. He writes, reading this work “…will, I am sure, buttress or restore of your faith in the capacity of journalism to make sense of our increasingly complicated and elusive world. You’ll also—and this is the intent of the Goldsmith Explanatory Prize—have a stronger, deeper sense of how government works, and sometimes doesn’t, in this country.”

My Own Sound Judgments

AIR board service: I’m so grateful to the dedicated board of directors at AIR – The Association of Independents in Radio; executive director Keisha Salmon and staffer extraordinaire Lynn Casper, and the hundreds of members who give so much to this professional association every day. With sadness, I stepped down from the board of directors in March after two years of service to devote more time to my own reporting and teaching, but I plan to stay involved. It’s been a wonderful ride. With its advocacy, wide range of training options, listserv, Slack group, rate guide and freelance talent directory, AIR remains the best deal around for every audio journalist and podcaster, no matter whether new or seasoned.

Right time, right place: Not long ago, I watched a fascinating talk by literary agent Alia Hannah Habib. So, when Women of Letters newsletter author Jana M. Perkins interviewed Habib, it caught my eye. Little did I know that by commenting on Perkins’ post, I was entering a drawing. I was delighted to win a free copy of Habib’s new book, Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch. Habib is an eloquent writer with a warm, personal voice that feels like she’s talking only to you. I couldn’t put it down. If you write nonfiction and want the inside scoop on how literary agents and publishers make decisions, this is the book for you. Thanks so much, Jana. (I’ve added Take It From Me to my Bookshop list. Find it here.)

A Costa Rican storytelling retreat in the works: I just returned from the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, a phenomenal trip. While there, I got the opportunity to lead an audio storytelling retreat at a magical center in a botanical garden (complete with sloths), surrounded by 360-degree views of the ocean. I’m planning it for late this year or early next, so make sure to watch this space for more information.

Resources for Storytellers: Craft Books, Podcasts, Newsletters, Fellowships, and Opportunities

As a writer and an instructor, I absorb a lot of knowledge from others about our complex craft. Now I’d like to share this continuously updated list of resources with you. This is a preview: these lists are for paying subscribers — a good reason to subscribe to Sound Judgment for only $50 a year and support the volume of work that goes into publishing it.
Two important notes: Everything listed here is evergreen with the exception of fellowships, grants, and other opportunities for storytellers.

If you’re job-hunting, follow me on LinkedIn. There, I reshare select journalism and storytelling job opportunities when they look like particularly good jobs. Job openings will never be on this list because job opportunities don’t belong behind a paywall.

Asterisks indicate resources that are new in this issue.

Good craft, journalism, and creativity books*

(My Bookshop.org shop, affiliate links. I add new ones every time.)

The Don’t Miss List: Near-deadline fellowships, awards, and learning opportunities

Read more

If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

Hi Storytellers –

A quick note before I jump into today’s issue:

Today, I’m introducing a new feature — a big running list of story craft resources, including my favorite books; podcasts about storytelling, writing and journalism; newsletters; organizations; fellowships, conferences, festivals and other opportunities.

Free subscribers will see a preview following the essay, but the full lists are for paying subscribers. It’s a great reason to subscribe today. And even more good news: I’ve lowered the annual subscription to only $50 permanently! As before, subscribers can get discounts (25-50%) to workshops, individual coaching and, this year, podcast tuneups, an increasingly popular service.

Twenty percent of all paid subscriptions will be contributed to organizations supporting journalists and storytellers.

Photo by Kirk Cameron on Unsplash

The one crucial question most of us don’t ask, but should

Recently, photographer Katherine Emery, a member of my inaugural Artist’s Way group, shared a BBC article about loneliness. Writer Matt Warren detailed the many forms of loneliness, including feeling alone in a crowd and feeling lonely in a disconnected marriage.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

“Or perhaps you feel like Robert Walton, the polar explorer from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who is surrounded by dependable shipmates but really just craves one true friend, “the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

Think about that for a minute: “the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

This phrase struck me as that feeling we have, if we’re lucky, when we’re talking with a friend and the words are tumbling out, like puppies rolling over one another with abandon.

We don’t simply understand each other intellectually — we’re having a shared emotional experience. Perhaps it’s born of having things in common or sharing worldviews or sparking in each other an “aha moment.”

But often it’s because we’re sharing a story and the friend is hanging on every word, asking the perfect story question: “And then what happened?”

They want to know what we think and how we see the world. In turn, we too are desperately curious about the visions of their head and the turnings of their heart.

In such a moment of communion, there is no loneliness.

A while ago, I interviewed audio storytelling legend Julia Barton, former executive editor and VP of Pushkin Industries. She was instrumental in developing Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History and Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. (She’s now a radio historian; you should subscribe to her newsletter, Continuous Wave.)

To introduce that Sound Judgment episode, in which we discussed three “best-of” audio stories, I spun this tale — undoubtedly a familiar scenario:

It’s the middle of the night. Your room is dark except for the LED numbers on your alarm clock. They spell out 3:30 am. You’ve just woken up with a great story idea. You need to scratch it down on the pad next to you so it doesn’t disappear.

It doesn’t. You get excited about it, you start doing some research. Maybe you talk to a few people, ask some questions. The story starts to take shape. You invite a guest to record an interview. It’s starting to have form and meaning and music. You’re up late too many times trying to make it great or maybe just finish it and put it out there in the world.

Why?

I think for all of us, it’s because we want to make an impact. We want listeners to resonate with our work. We want to know it matters.

That’s not unlike Robert Walton’s desire for “the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

That wasn’t my first introduction. I scrapped my first, conventional one, which fell flat because my heart was nowhere in it. My eyes had replied to the transcendent work of the three storytellers we discussed — Jason Reynolds, Erica Heilman and Andrea Bernstein.

But you would never have known.

Their work, dramatically different from each other’s, reached the hearts of strangers. It was intimate, because they dared to be their own particular selves. Their particularity met that of so many listeners.

As Julia wrote in a column about audio storytelling many years ago, the work she celebrated was dangerous:

“Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face, to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.”

Substitute good writing, good speechmaking, good film, theater or visual art and the same is true.

Conformity and mimicry reaches no one. It’s being iconoclastic, following your own curiosities that tugs on the hearts and minds of thousands.

Counterintuitively, this kind of work creates impact because you’re only tugging on the heart of one person at a time — that one person who probably felt alone in a crowd before encountering your work and whose eyes, though you may never see them, reply to yours.

Isn’t the real reason we make art to share the particular, peculiar ways we see the world with others in the hope that they will see themselves and us in the work? (Fascinatingly, we are born “longing to be seen,” says psychiatrist Curt Thompson.)

We all have different reasons for creating. But deep down, maybe you believe that pursuing and sharing stories is our attempt to stave off the loneliness of being human. To listen deeply to others and to express who we are through words, sounds, and images. To experience what it feels like when our creation sends sparks through the nervous system of another human being whose eyes, now, “reply to mine.”

What gets in the way

At one level, you might say, this sounds obvious. But for many of us, especially in the west where we are trained to revere logic and to dismiss emotion, it’s brutally difficult.

Despite the trillions of words spilling out on the Internet every second, it’s hard to express ourselves honestly. We distrust our intuition when we’re choosing stories to capture, interpret, and tell. We struggle not to copare ourselves to others and come up wanting. We give lip service to forgetting about the algorithm and give in to the seduction of AI.

In a world that rewards conformity, we often struggle to dig deep enough to know ourselves in the first place. To know what we dream, and think, and want, and go after it and share it, damn the consequences.

To bravely answer the question, “Who am I?”

I know this fear is the biggest obstacle holding audio storytellers back because I’ve worked with people on the cusp of creating something new for years. Often, they say they’re coming to me because they’re overwhelmed by logistics and unfamiliar technology.

But it takes two minutes for their real doubts to emerge: Who am I to put my voice out in the world? What if I’m not good enough? What if I’m wrong? What if my idea has been done before?

What if I’m judged?

This is what I believe:

What makes us unique is, of course, a wild combination of things. But the essence of what makes you, you — the only you in a world of eight billion people — is your creativity. It’s your worldview. It’s how you shape images and thoughts and feelings into art that you then give to the world.

Your creativity is alchemy, an “only-you” blend of your identity, culture, genetics, family, and especially your lived experience.

Early in any work of art, we must answer the audience’s unstated question, “Why do I care?”

If you’ve been telling stories for any length of time, this is hardly news.

But this answer might be:

“‘Why do we care’ is really, ‘why do you care,’” (ital. mine) says Catherine Burns, director of The Moth, the revered live storytelling program. “If you can convey to us why you care, chances are, so will the audience.”

When that voice comes up, the one that says, “Who am I to…?” take a pause. Breathe. Tap into your lived experience and believe the truth: somewhere out there is someone who really, really wants to know how you interpret the world.

Proof

If you need evidence that the art we gravitate toward is made by people who trust their curiosity and intuition, consider a few examples.

We want to know how Jad Abumrad, not someone else, interprets the history of the remarkable African musician and activist Fela Kuti in Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

It’s why Wicked did so well at the box office, because director John Murray Chu went all-in on a 20-year-old dream, even though he found it intimidating to recreate Oz.

It’s why Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s fantastical, political tales, threaded through with her advocacy for human rights, made her the most famous novelist in Turkey. She persists despite threats from the Turkish government.

We’ve probably all heard a saying that sounds trite: The world needs your gifts.

So many people don’t believe that. And that’s a tragedy.

But that’s my message today: The more energy you put into your own curiosities, your own rabbit trails, your own intuition about and interpretations of the important questions, the clearer, truer, and more resonant your voice will be.

So, for today, believe that that thing you want to make, in the way you want to make it, is real and true and good.

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NEW: Resources for Storytellers: Craft Books, Podcasts, Newsletters, Fellowships, and Opportunities

As a writer and an instructor, I absorb a lot of knowledge from others about our complex craft. Now I’d like to share what I plan to be a continuously updated list of resources with you.

To date, it includes the following categories:
— Great books on storytelling, journalism & creativity
— Specific storytelling resources I’m loving now
— Current fellowship and grant opportunities
— Consistently good newsletters and podcasts on narrative and audio storytelling
— Organizations that will help you learn, find work, and advance your career

This is a preview. These lists are for paying subscribers — a good reason to subscribe to Sound Judgment for only $50 a year and support the volume of work that goes into publishing it.

Two important notes: Everything listed here is evergreen, with the exception of fellowships, grants, and other timely opportunities for storytellers.

Also, if you’re job-hunting, follow me on LinkedIn. There, I share select journalism and storytelling job opportunities. Job openings will never be on this list because job opportunities don’t belong behind a paywall.

Good craft, journalism, and creativity books

(My Bookshop.org shop, affiliate links)

Specific podcast episodes, newsletter issues and other resources worth your time

Sound School, Rob Rosenthal: “Don’t Write, Tell”
An excellent short episode of this craft podcast by veteran Transom instructor Rob Rosenthal on what to do when you can’t figure out how to tell your story. Go to a bar. (Or a coffee shop.)

Nieman Storyboard: 14 Tips for Building Character
This column is full of great examples for building character and showing character through scenes.

Nieman Storyboard: Six Writing Tips for Crafting Scenes
Nieman paired this column and “14 Tips for Building Character.” They’re both from a 2005 Nieman Narrative conference, so the only audio happening then was radio. But they’re both still incredibly relevant.

The Audio Awards Archive – a new database of audio awards finalists and winners
“All the winners in one convenient place”
Created by independent producer Aseloka Smith
(Great for sourcing new listens and podcasts to learn from — and aspire to)

The Don’t Miss List
Near-deadline fellowships, awards, and learning opportunities

The IIJ 2026 Freelance Journalism Conference
Presented by the Institute for Independent Journalists
March 5-6, 2026
$89

The Carter Center Rosalyn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism
For U.S. and international applicants
Program with mentorship
$10,000 stipend

Read more

Read to the bottom for a list of places to donate directly to help laid-off journalists, to support freedom of the press and more.

Also, starting today, 20% of all paid annual and founding member subscriptions will be donated to organizations that help journalists and writers. I recently reduced annual subscriptions to only $50 a year. Consider supporting this work, donating to help the profession, and getting the other benefits of a paid subscription.

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Today’s post is Part 6 of my series on six essential elements of great storytelling. Read the first five on the Substack app at Sound Judgment.

Did you know you can leave a comment, ‘like,’ and share this newsletter? Follow the link below to join the Sound Judgment community on the Substack app and join the conversation. Not only is it free to use, but it’s also ad-free.

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If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

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If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

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I am writing this with a heavy heart, knowing that tonight there is one fewer shining light in the world. Alex Pretti, the man who ICE agents murdered today in Minneapolis, was a registered nurse who was devoted to his patients. He wanted to make the world a better place.

There is little, if anything, more shattering than the killing of innocent people by our own government. I know you, like me, are mourning, outraged, and resisting.

I write today’s issue for you because I made a commitment to providing this series. And while craft lessons are only tools, and may seem in the moment unimportant, our ability to communicate the honest truth in a way that reaches people’s hearts and minds is anything but trivial. Our words and images are incredibly powerful. When we use them for truth and compassion, we are fighting back against oppression and injustice and for the restoration of democracy.

If this series is useful to you, please like, share and comment.

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If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

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If you like this issue, please share it with a friend.

A quick note before I jump in:
I’ve lowered the annual subscription to only $50. As before, subscribers can get discounts to workshops and, this year, podcast audits, an increasingly popular service. You’ll also get access to the full archives. Most issues are free to everyone for the first three weeks before going behind the paywall.

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If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

That’s me. Photo: Katherine Emery

Hi Storytellers —

A few years ago, producing Degrees, a podcast about climate-saving careers for the Environmental Defense Fund, I met photographer Pete Muller. He’d produced a remarkable National Geographic photo essay chronicling something I’d never heard of: solastalgia, the feeling of being homesick for a place that you haven’t actually left. Rather, through climate change and human intervention, it has left you. The landscape has been altered so dramatically that it no longer feels like home.

As Pete described to Degrees host Yesh Pavlik Slenk, “It no longer provides solace.” Solastalgia is a longing, an ache that cannot be resolved.

Pete traveled the world for two years creating his photo essay. He visited wildfire-ravaged Campfire, California; Peru; Russia, and Australia’s Hunter Valley. There, he met Glenn Albrecht, the philosopher who coined the term solastalgia. He and his wife lived in what had been bucolic farmland. The region now looked post-apocalyptic. Mammoth canyons, strip-mined for coal, scar the earth for miles. These holes are so immense that they can be seen from space. The leavings — the earth that had covered the coal seams — pile high up next to these man-made canyons, as Pete said, “changing the topography fundamentally.” The Albrechts would drive 20 miles out of their way to get to their home, navigating away from the most distressing views. Virtually all of their neighbors left. Like many people Pete encountered on his travels, the Albrechts now lived alone.

Solastalgia isn’t just a longing for a familiar landscape. It’s a loneliness for the community you once counted on. It is grief.

I bring this up because, perhaps, we can experience the ache of solastalgia not just for a physical place but for a country built on an idea, the American experiment of democracy. And secondarily because I want to explore how we can create projects pegged not on an event, not on the news, but on an emotion, an idea, or a phenomenon.

Before Pete began chronicling solastalgia, he’d been a war photographer. His work was inspired by the news. He went where the fighting was happening. Then he took on this project, a challenge that stretched his skills and his thinking about what makes something a story.

As a theme, solastalgia became something so powerful that, looking at his images, you feel it in the pit of your stomach. But it was a slippery concept to chase, just like themes of, say, betrayal, love, silence, and joy are slippery – themes that for us as storytellers hold tremendous promise, but can easily dissolve in the execution. As Pete told Yesh, chronicling solastalgia was trying to make the invisible visible. So too with any of our most profound, most human experiences.

Going underground

But let me go back to the solastalgia that has been plaguing me, pulling me underground. I began this newsletter three years ago. For almost all of that time, I never missed my own two-week deadlines. Then, a few months ago, I began to miss them. Like Ava Duvernay chronicles in this razor-sharp essay, “I Tried to Write This, But Couldn’t…” I started writing to you several times, but, as she writes, “nothing felt finished.”

I didn’t know why until last week, holding session #7 for the incredible group of storytellers, journalists, and other artists in my Artist’s Way cohort. Like me, many have been perched in uncertainty, trying to navigate to what’s next — not because they necessarily want to change, but because the landscape in which we work has changed so drastically in the last year.

We don’t talk about politics in this group. But last week, hearing powerful, creative women admit to feeling self-doubt, or avoiding risk, or being exhausted by striving for perfection without feeling free to express honest creativity, I brought up the political chaos we’re living in. These feelings don’t indicate something individually wrong with us, I suggested. We can’t help but absorb the pain, frustration, and anxiety of an administration that seems more cruel every day. How could we not? The storytellers in this group are avid about understanding, sharing, and bettering the human condition.

That’s when I realized that the paralysis I’d been feeling stemmed from the same emotion waking me up every morning at 2 a.m: solastalgia for the America (largely an illusion) that I thought I knew. Writing in her newsletter The Isolation Journals, Suleika Jaouad recounts the story of a woman beset by one catastrophe after another — a hurricane, wildfires, and illness. “She found herself undone,” Jaouad writes. The woman told her, “I realized nothing prepared me for it. I didn’t know how to find my words anymore.”

This week, in my Artist’s Way group, I learned that two members had lost parents recently. Neither of these women have been able to create for months – one, not at all; the other, not up to her desire. They both questioned themselves: “Why not?” they asked, with similar, shared bewilderment, fatigue, and frustration.

From the outside looking in, it was written all over them: grief, like fear, steals our words. Both cloud our minds, especially for those of us who tend to divorce our minds and hearts, who assume we can keep barreling through anything, maintaining the American level of productivity we’re trained for. When we can’t, it feels mystifying. Shameful, even. What happened to the “little engine that could?”

What happened to me, I think, was a level of solastalgia I was completely unprepared for. I’d spent months reporting on food insecurity, and just after my last piece came out, the Trump administration threatened to withhold SNAP benefits for 42 million people. Like many journalists, I’d been close to the issue, sure, but more importantly to human beings doing whatever they could to put food on the table and to share sustenance with neighbors and friends. I couldn’t wrap my heart around this, along with so many other cruelties. Like Suleika Jaouad’s storyteller, I didn’t know how to find my words anymore.

As storytellers, most of us, at some point, get close to trauma. We often have to for our storytelling to offer some semblance of the truth of the human experience. For the work to be any good. But sometimes that good work takes an emotional toll, even if we would choose the same experiences all over again.

What I’ve realized over these last fallow weeks is that the way out is not by barreling roughshod toward the next deadline, emotions be damned. The work we create under those circumstances is robotic; we might as well let AI do it. No, the way out is the opposite of numbing ourselves, of intellectualizing. It’s by feeling it all. By letting feelings slay us emotionally and physically. By, sometimes, letting the work and the world break our hearts, and allowing others to witness heartbreak through us.

This is how I’m pulling myself out of the paralysis of writer’s block, but it’s also a way to deepen and make the work, I hope, that much richer and more resonant.

So if you’ve been feeling like you can’t find the words anymore or that “nothing feels finished,” you’re not alone.

It won’t last forever. But you may need to give yourself a fallow period in which to allow the heartbreak in first.

— EAG

P.S. If, however, what you’re feeling is more than you can handle on your own, please talk to a therapist, or get help at the National Mental Health hotline: 844-623-0524.

P.P.S. — In the interest of centering whatever it is you make – a podcast, nonfiction book, a speech – on a theme, not an event, you’ll undoubtedly love Jonathan Menjivar’s guest appearance on Sound Judgment. We dissected how he made the multiple-award-winning podcast series “Classy,” about class in America. When he first proposed the idea to his boss, he was met with a blank stare. But he found a brilliant way to make the invisible visible.

I’m excited to be back with you, now, at least every two weeks. Thanks for bearing with me.

Sound Judgment Kudos

In most issues, I give Sound Judgment Kudos to storytellers who are making sound judgments choices that improve our craft or serve others.

My first Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Maine-based photographer Katherine Emery. She approaches photography as a storytelling medium in much the same way as Pete Muller did for National Geographic. She made the photos for this Maine Monitor story, but only after asking multiple, profound questions about the meaning I hoped to get across and the people I’d met. She recently took new photos for me that took my breath away. (See the one above.)

My second Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Alice Florence Orr of Podcast Review, for compiling “The 12 Best Writing Podcasts to Listen to in 2026.” I’ve often searched for good writing podcasts (surprisingly hard to find) and so this is a welcome roundup. Check it out and give me your reviews.

My third Sound Judgment Kudo goes to all of the hardy, independent newsrooms that continue to do important work in this increasingly troubling media environment. It’s Giving Tuesday and my email is brimming with outlets looking for help. There are so many worthy ones, from international news sites like The Guardian to national treasures like ProPublica and NPR to amazing niche outlets like the Food and Environment Reporting Network, Civil Eats, Grist, Long Lead, Sentient Media, Tradeoffs, KFF Health News and Longreads — just to name a few. Support at least one of these if you can, or a local nonprofit news outlet or NPR member station. And share your recommendations for others in the comments!

My own Sound Judgment: I’m delighted to share that I’ll be teaching a course on developing scenes, the backbone of great storytelling, for Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies in February. It’ll be interactive; students will walk away having produced at least one good scene, complete with revisions. More details to come.

I’m also developing an exciting, much-needed workshop on how to moderate engaging panels from start to finish (otherwise known as “Make panel discussions not suck”). It’s a skill, everybody, and you can be dynamic, memorable and valuable. More details coming soon. Keep an eye out: The first one will be free!

I’m also excited to present a workshop on “Storytelling for Connection,” to nonprofit grantees of Maine’s United Midcoast Charities in January.

As always, it’s a joy to be with you.

Elaine

Epilogue

“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it.”
– Irving Penn

Your likes and especially your comments make a huge difference and help support my work! And please share this newsletter with a storytelling, story-loving friend.

Want to support the effort that goes into making Sound Judgment? Here are a few other ways to do so:

• If you need a seasoned and encouraging story editor for your podcast, online narrative or multimedia project, email me. I’m shifting some of my work to spend more time doing what I love the most.

• Add your name to the Sound Judgment workshop waitlist to be the first to know when I schedule new workshops. Email me if you’re looking ahead to the January conference season and you’d like to book one of my new workshops on live presentations & panel moderating.

• Upgrade: Become a paid subscriber and get access to the archives, discounts on workshops and individual coaching.

If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

Hi Storytellers —

A while back, I stumbled upon an unusual podcast: Aaron Calafato’s 7 Minute Stories. Every week, Calafato, a trained actor and a dad of three from Ohio, tells a single, extemporaneous story about his life. Since founding the show in 2018, he’s told more than 300 short, captivating and mostly heartwarming stories about subjects ranging from the death of the movie night to a wondrous Elvis impersonator to racing Shamu, the killer whale.

The show is a sleeper hit: he says more than 30 million people have tuned in. Recently, Aaron expanded the 7 Minute Stories universe to add Storytelling University, bonus conversations (on the 7 Minute feed) about the art and science of storytelling. Storytelling University has featured guests like journalist Soledad O’Brien and Julie Shapiro, co-founder of Audio Flux and former artistic director of Third Coast International Audio Festival.

If that weren’t enough, on YouTube, Aaron recently kicked off a streaming show called Night Stories, which he describes as old-fashioned, live, late-night radio: just stories, no politics.

Like many audio journalists, I love live storytelling and have always wanted to try it. And yet it scares me. I was thrilled to talk with Aaron about his process and his purpose.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I can’t wait to learn more from you, Aaron. I think of you as a live storyteller who just happens to be podcasting.

I never thought about that, but it is a live captured thing that happens just to live in that audio space.

You’ve said that the medium doesn’t define your nature. What do you mean?

One of the things I get nerdy talking about, because it’s such a hack for anyone in the business of storytelling, is that the medium of how you tell stories does not define the fact that you are a story catcher first.

We catch [stories] in our memory. We catch them by ruminating about them. We’re constructing them internally.

Then after we catch stories, we tell them. And usually the storytelling mechanism is a social experience. It’s around the dinner table. It’s, “Hey, you won’t believe this story that just happened to me today!”

It’s the social bond. It’s the architecture of who we are as human beings.

Then the question becomes, how do you do it? I tried it with writing, but I sucked at it, but then I tried it with [for instance] sculpting. That’s the medium. So the medium, to me, is a very important way of doing it, but it is not the definition of storytelling.

I love just telling stories to a live audience, either in person — one person or a thousand people — or across an ocean through audio as the medium. I also love telling short form stories. So I put all that together and it’s telling a story every week about my really simple, normal life that, just like everybody’s, has extraordinary moments in its normality.

That was and has become my definitive medium. From there, we’ve spun it into different things like conversational podcasts like this. We’re spinning out animations. We’re universe building. But the foundation always is, “I gotta tell you the story about this thing that happened to me. Do you wanna listen to it?”

Story Catching

How do you catch a story? That’s a phrase that seems to come naturally to you, but not to most people. Or we catch stories, but we don’t know how to deliberately catch and retell them.

It’s a hidden thing, isn’t it? We’re always result oriented. Most of us, including myself, are like, I want to just tell this great story. I want to write this great novel.

It’s the product.

But one step before that is the medium. And that’s usually where the focus is. The focus is, “I love telling stories with a trumpet. I want to be a great trumpet player.” That’s not a terrible approach, but if you really look at the great storytellers across all mediums, they go one layer deeper, which is, “What’s informing the trumpet? What part of me is informing the note?”

Let’s dive into The Gun. In this story, you’re 11 years old. You and your mom are visiting her boyfriend and his kid, Matt, for the time. You set the stage: We’re going to hear about something that most adults would immediately say is not going to end well.

“And so we ran down the stairs, no parents, and Matt goes and reaches into this box, and he makes this gesture to me like you would when you put your finger over your mouth, and tell someone to ssh. And he pulls out what looks like this huge handgun with a really long barrel. I thought maybe it had a silencer, but I only thought that because I think I saw that in the movies, but I froze.”

What was the genesis of this story?

Well, going back to the whole story-catching thing, every week, I’m constantly rummaging up stuff in the basement. You know, Rocky Balboa in the [2006 Sylvester Stallone] Rocky Balboa movie, there’s this scene where Pauly’s back working at the meat factory.

Rocky goes down there and he’s kind of stuck at this place in his life. And Pauly says, “What’s wrong with you, Rock?”

Rocky says, “There’s some stuff in the basement.” I love that phrase that Stallone wrote: “There’s stuff in the basement.” And so, when I’m rummaging for those stories, I’m going into the basement. And sometimes you find stuff that’s like, “What the hell was that?”

So this story came from a dissonance. It came from a memory that I had that was profound, that meant something new to me as an adult. And it shocked me and I wanted to explore it and tell it.

Let’s dig a little deeper into what you just said, that you’re rummaging around in the basement for these memories. As a reporter, I’m used to finding true stories about other people. What do you find are helpful prompts for figuring out a good story from your own experience?

I find prompts prevent me from going into the basement. What I do is remain open to the stories that come at me, and then be willing to go down the path of finding the story, cultivating it and telling it.

I’ll give you an example. My wife and I are in Walmart and we’re walking by the gun section. I think, “Isn’t it weird that they have a gun section?” And then I look at a BB gun — there’s something, there’s an item. When I see that item, I remember this thing that happened to me.

Now, there are a lot of people who remember [something] and that’s it. They internalize it and they’re done. But I think, “Wait a second, what was that all about?” And if I feel it trigger a memory, I will usually realize, “That’s important. It might be worth investigating.”

And then I will tell my wife the story. I tell it privately in conversation.

So the second stage is if I tell it to a trusted person and it hits me and it lands on them, then that actually is something I should start to cultivate, and share, if I feel it’s right for my show.

It usually starts with a simple memory — an object, a smell, some sort of sensory reminder.

I’m always open because I am naturally always telling stories. I want to tell stories that help me move through the world, that help me connect with people, that help me share intimacy with partners and friends and family. Because if I don’t share stories, how the hell do they know me? It’s an offering to other people.

Scene-setting and sense memory

In the story you shared with me, The Gun, you and this boy, Matt, are in the woods. It’s a beautiful fall day. We can hear and feel the leaves crunching under your feet, which I think is, in part, why I feel like I’m in that world, because it’s so sensory.

But then the mood change is palpable. The pacing changes. How did you think about constructing that scene?

I only have a little bit of time [to tell the story]. How do I quickly establish the environment? Usually I do something very simple and easy to understand because I’m not Dickens, where I can spend six pages describing a wall. I always go to the universal — the crunching of leaves. If the crunching of leaves senses something for me, it senses something for everybody.

The way the air is, if you’re in a geography that has a climate that changes, that has four seasons, we all know that air smell — it’s a fire, there’s some sort of camping. There are also seasonal smells that we don’t talk about, but we all feel; rain has a smell. So I’ll use the senses to quickly establish the environment.

I do this for two reasons. One, it’s to explain to you, the listener, where you’re at really quickly, to level set. Because it’s you and me, it’s not just me. I don’t want this to be a lonely story. This is you through me and you next to me in it. Let me put you behind my eyes. I’m gonna show you what I’m seeing, but I can only have this much time.

The second thing I’m doing is for me. Remember, I’m performing this live. I need to know where the hell I was, what it looked like, what it smelled like. I’m actually using it as a sense memory, as a way to position myself, because I don’t know what the next line is going to be.

Right, so you’re feeling into the story.

I know generally where I’m going, but the word is spoken, not written. It’s not read off a script. So my mindset is, when I remember the leaves, then I remember, I saw [Matt’s] face. So then it gets me in. Once I’m in, now I can get really detailed.

I don’t want this to be a lonely story. This is you through me and you next to me in it. Let me put you behind my eyes. I’m gonna show you what I’m seeing, but I can only have this much time.

I need to transport myself through a universal connection like the senses. And then I need to look around as if my head’s on a swivel. What am I seeing? What little [details] do I see? I don’t need [to share] much, because the audience is smart enough to build their own world.

Dissonance

Talk to me about the concept of dissonance, which is more often referred to as tension or conflict. In this story, I hear a subtle change in tone and pacing, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.

The way to do that is to share the environment and what [we] want to happen — and then sprinkle in the reality of what’s actually going to happen. When we take a walk in the woods, we want the leaves crunching under our feet. We want that transcendent moment of breathing in the air. We want to look through the trees and see that sort of [autumn] sunlight. That’s a good memory. We get transcendence from that.

While this happening, out of the corner of your eyes, something else begins to emerge. Sometimes that emergence coalesces with the ideal and it’s a really fun story and we all feel good. But sometimes what emerges is dissonance. And that’s where emotions start to come up. Now you’re inside of yourself going, “What’s happening?” I want to take you into my mind, into what it felt like for shit to start going out of control.

I love that idea of looking for dissonance. I did a podcast episode a couple years ago now with a woman named Katie Colaneri. Katie is the senior podcast editor at New Hampshire Public Radio. This episode was about the greenlight process that she had worked on for a year to figure out what would make the cut as a documentary, a series or even just a story for their longform documentary unit. She’s always looking for what they call the “holy shit moment.” You need that surprise. You need that, “Holy shit, that happened?” moment.

There’s a lot going on in this clip. Let’s listen.

“It was a fall day, and the leaves were crunching underneath my feet. And I remember the trees just gently swaying back and forth, and the leaves just falling all over the place. And then Matt starts shooting the gun just in the sky, just firing it.

And I didn’t hear a bang when he shot, but I thought it was probably the silencer that made the sound go dull. But then something happened. It changed from just him shooting out into the open to him starting to shoot at animals, like trying to find woodland creatures and trying to kill him and hurt them.

And sometimes he would shoot and he would miss, and sometimes he would shoot and he would hit. And I looked at his face and his eyes, and I didn’t like what I saw.”

This American Life uses a storytelling method called “action, stakes, reflection.”

So the action: You walk into the woods, he starts shooting, and then the stakes get a lot higher when he starts shooting. You don’t just call them animals, you call them woodland creatures. That immediately feels like Bambi — you can’t shoot a woodland creature. And then you have this reflection, which is “I didn’t like what I saw in his face, in his eyes.” Is this just what you do naturally or are you thinking about it?

I never start with the mode. If anything, that methodology probably comes from listening to great storytellers. So if I had to give credit, part of it’s being in a storytelling family. They naturally tell and you learn without knowing what the methodology is, what works. So when my uncle or my grandfather tells a story, I listen to them. Or I listen to an episode of This American Life or Spalding Gray, right? I was an active consumer of great storytellers. I always told my stories, but I’m always listening first.

My grandfather, when he told a story, he would do just that. He would lay out the environment: “I’m at this dance. It’s 1942. I just joined the military. I have my crisp suit on and I’m looking for the girl to dance with. And then all of sudden I see another guy cut in and it’s like everything went in slow motion.” So he’s doing this thing. And then he gets in a fight and then there’s a reflection. I’ve absorbed those things.

I will tell you there is an intention behind it. I would say a methodology like what you just talked about can emerge if you say to yourself, “I need the person who is listening to this to fully understand where I’m coming from. I need to tell them exactly what I see and I need to make them feel like they’re a part of this.”

I always approach stories like that. All I’m doing is transferring to them what the experience is like.

Why tell stories from your life, week after week, for seven years?

What I love is that storytelling circumnavigates barriers. It’s a direct connection to the heart and soul of another human being.

I feel I have a calling, in my small way, to create content that makes people feel connected. I want the community that I’m building to feel good. I want you to feel that you’re not alone. Like, I have weird experiences in the woods. I had this thing that happened and maybe, for them, there’s a private story that happened that they don’t want to talk about. It’s for them or their family, therapist or priest. But when I tell my experience, it affirms that private story. Great storytellers affirm the majority of stories that are private.

If you liked what you read, you’ll love the whole, sound-rich podcast interview with Aaron, coming soon. You’ll hear a a deeper dissection of “The Gun” and a treat: Aaron coached me on how to find a story from my own life suitable for a live performance.

Sound Judgment Kudos

In most issues, I give Sound Judgment Kudos to storytellers who are making sound judgments choices that improve our craft or serve others.

My first Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Chioke I’Anson and RESONATE Podcast Festival and Lauren Passell and Tink Media, for filling a serious gap in the difficult podcast landscape with a new show called Pitch Party. As I’Anson describes in the trailer, it’s an effort to help great independent storytellers find distributors — something that’s become much harder over the last couple of years. The show features a different pilot from an independent producer each week. Tune in to discover new shows and also for some great narrative shop talk.

My second Sound Judgment Kudo goes to the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), which is offering ten HEAL fellowships for journalists reporting on solutions to the youth mental health crisis. Fellows will receive stipends of up to $5,000. The SJN promises that the three-question, one-video application should take no more than an hour to complete. Applications are open October 20 - November 17, 2025.

My third Sound Judgment Kudo goes to the middle and high-school winners of NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge. Ameya Desai, a fifth grader from San Jose, is the middle school champion for her story, “Far From Home - Shikata Ga Nai.” Avani Yaltho won the high-school challenge for her story, The Things We Buried. Congratulations to you both!

My own Sound Judgment

I had no idea that my return to the NPR airwaves after 14 years would spur so many old friends from all over the country to get in touch! My story about the coming clash between the hunger crisis and the national volunteer shortage, “Food pantries rely on elderly volunteers to feed hungry Americans,” aired on NPR in October.

Finally, I’m planning to be at Resonate this year. If you’ll be there, send me a note! I’d love to meet you in person.

If you liked this issue of the newsletter, you’ll also like these:

E for Emotion

Life on Pitcher Pond

And, with Resonate around the corner November 7-9, last year’s
13 Lessons for Storytellers from Resonate

As always, it’s a joy to be with you.

Elaine

Epilogue

“In Our Town, after Emily has died in childbirth, Thornton Wilder has her ask the Stage Manager if she can return home to relive just one day. Reluctantly he allows her to do so. And she is torn by the beauty of the ordinary, and our lack of awareness of it…and she asks the Stage Manager ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?’ And he sighs and say, ‘No. The saints and the poets, maybe. They do some.’”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

Don’t forget to click the ♥️ if you like this post!

Want to support the effort that goes into making Sound Judgment? Here are a few ways to do so:

• If you need a seasoned and encouraging story editor for your podcast, feature series or multimedia project, email me. I’m shifting my work to spend more time doing what I love the most.

• Add your name to the Sound Judgment workshop waitlist to make sure you’re the first to know when I schedule new workshops. Email me to suggest additional workshop topics.

• Upgrade: Become a paid subscriber and get access to the archives, free and discounted workshops and individual coaching.

  
  

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Hi storytellers —

A slightly different note from me today. My regular one is coming in the next few days, an incredible interview with live storyteller Aaron Calafato of the podcast 7 Minute Stories.

Have you noticed friends saying they’re having a tough time writing lately? Or doing whatever the creative thing is that they do? (Maybe you’ve been feeling that way?)

I’m hearing from friends and acquaintances that their creative lives are in some kind of limbo. They’re feeling stuck. “I just can’t sit down and make anything right now,” I’ve heard many times.

Or they’re at a crossroads.

“I’m ready for something different,” they tell me. “It’s a feeling... I’m done with what I’ve been doing for so long, but I’m not sure what’s next. But I know it’s more creative, richer and more meaningful. And more fun!”

Does that resonate?

Well, it makes sense. The world feels like it’s burning all aroun…

Read more

If you like this issue, restack or share it in a Substack note or share it with a friend!

Today, some heartfelt guidance from Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The 1619 Project and a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, and Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine.

DATE CHANGE! I scheduled a few new workshops, including a brand new Artist’s Way Workshop & Cohort. We’ll read the book together and discover the alchemy of a group of creatives uncovering and recovering our own creativity in this 12-step program. It can be transformational. THE DATE HAS CHANGED! It now starts Monday, October 14, 4-5:30 pm ET. Scroll to the bottom for more details or register now by clicking on this link.

But first, it’s a great time to upgrade to a paid subscription! Until September 15, 2025 paid subscriptions cost only $5 a month or $50 annually. They…

Read more

Read more

If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

Hi Storytellers —

First, welcome to a slew of new subscribers! I’m so happy to have you.

One of my recent deadlines fighting for time with this newsletter was this feature story about the state of food pantries in America for The Guardian. As I wrote it, I found myself considering not just sensory details, but how to intentionally use the element of time to create urgency.

I “grew up” in audio first as a talk show producer and then as a news reporter at local NPR stations. In both formats, it’s easy to neglect the element of time.

So often, we’re presenting an argument or exploring facets of a topic (interview shows) or we have only 60 seconds to four minutes to share the news (local reporting and national radio features).

But in longer forms such as narrative feature writing, audio series, streaming video, and memoir, among others, we can use time to keep the action moving forward and the audience glued from beginning to end.

To be honest, in my many years of doing this work, I hadn’t given the element of time much thought beyond anchoring a story in time and place or showing change from one point in time to another. So I had to chew on it a while before I realized how transformative a ticking clock (literal or metaphorical) can be.

Consider a detective novel. In a good one, we’re hand-in-hand with the detective as they follow clues in a race against time. The urgency comes from the combination of high stakes and not knowing whether the detective will prevail before time runs out.

Here’s the problem I started with: I’d done a lot of reporting on federal food cuts and how food pantries work. I’d decided to profile one small food pantry facing big problems even before the administration cut more than $1 billion in federal food aid. But when I began writing, I’d visited them only twice. How could I create a sense of suspense?

My model: a This American Life story

I had a few great examples in my head: First, a terrific This American Life story, Episode 776, “I Work Better on Deadline.” Segment: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Quorum.” by NHPR Reporter Sarah Gibson and TAL Producer Chris Benderev. The story stemmed from a surprise: Overnight, a group of Free Staters had engineered a draconian budget cut to the Croydon, N.H. school system. The town stood to lose more than half of its school funding.

A pair of twin sisters, political novices, decided to mount a campaign to restore the funding. The campaign would end with a revote at a special meeting. The sisters’ task: To persuade 283 people to vote to restore funding, in a conservative-leaning town of only 800 people. The stakes were high. They faced an obvious deadline: the revote, which would take place in 40 days.

In the first half of the story, as Gibson chronicles the sisters’ door-to-door efforts to sway their neighbors, she mentions time every now and then.

But her story really heats up on the day of the revote. Here’s how Gibson introduces that section:

“Finally, the day of the vote -- May 7. Voters are lined up at the registration table by 8:00 AM. It's cold. There's no heating in the hall, but there's a fireplace roaring at one end.”

The moderator spins down-home stories, using up precious time. You can feel the sisters’ tension in Gibson’s narration:

“At first, people figure, maybe Bruce is stalling to give stragglers time to find their seats. But pretty soon, it's 9:20 AM. And people are getting antsy-- glancing at each other. Wait, this is the school budget revote, right?”

It goes on like this, with time checks coming more and more frequently. The tension ratchets up with each time check. Then Gibson says,

“And finally, 70 minutes in, it's time to vote. People form a long line to put their ballots in the box.”

We think it’s going to end, but then there’s a problem with the number of votes.

Only minutes remain before the clock will run out. We wait, breathless, for the resolution.

I won’t tell you what happened — hopefully, now you’ll have to listen for yourself. But I will say the ticking-clock structure of this story seared itself into my brain.

Importantly, the story’s organic, high-stakes deadline helped NHPR’s podcast team greenlight the pitch. “We need to be able to be there as [the story is] happening and watch it unfold,” Senior Podcast Editor Katie Colaneri told me. (Go behind the scenes of this story, and NHPR’s greenlight process, on this episode of Sound Judgment.)

Documenting events in real time helps create the sense that we, the audience, are immersed in the action, in the world that Gibson recreated in sound. It’s as if we, too, are sitting in town meeting, as that ticking clock seems to gets louder and louder. More urgent.

It’s impossible to look away.

Use cliffhangers to make the medicine go down

The piece does something else brilliantly, solving a problem that vexes any storyteller attempting to explain a thorny issue without losing our audience: it sandwiches context in between cliffhangers. We learn about an arcane rule that allowed the revote. We learn the history of the town meeting. And we learn about some of the characters in Croydon, all while the urgency to answer the central question keeps us listening.

Cliffhangers make the context medicine go down easier.

That’s a technique I remember learning from Mark Kramer, one of the luminaries of creative nonfiction, from his narrative nonfiction class at Boston University. When you need to impart context, do it after you drop a cliffhanger.* Drop it in small doses, then return again and again to your narrative journey.

I also had a raft of other great examples in my head: Every ball game anyone’s ever watched. Sports announcers have all the ingredients they need: Conflict, obvious high stakes, a deadline, and a central question that they keep returning to: “Who will win?”

You can squeeze a lot of context in between innings and quarters.

But can I do it?

So here I am, chewing over my problem with the food pantry story. I’m facing my own writing deadline: I have to solve this now, because in about 24 hours, my editor is expecting a draft, my first for The Guardian.

So I ask myself a question that turns out to be useful: What organic deadlines do my main characters face?

The answer is obvious: Every morning before the pantry opens, volunteers must complete a number of important tasks before they can open their doors. There’s never quite enough time. Simultaneously, pantry visitors are lining up outside, waiting for hours for those doors to open.

I could unfold the story over the course of a single morning, as we get closer and closer to opening time. And I could sandwich context in between time checks.

Using two contrasting measures of the same couple of hours — the tedium of visitors’ lengthy, anxious waits versus the hectic efforts of volunteers — would give me a natural structure. Suddenly I could see the whole story as if it were a movie scene.

I’ll let you decide whether the resulting feature works. I just know the structure brought me closer to the characters, the scene, the stakes and the setting, and made it far more fun to write.

How have you employed the element of time to bring motion and urgency to your work? Please share your examples in the comments!

*Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and published by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, is a classic book for creative nonfiction practitioners.

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

Try This in Your Studio

1. If you’re looking for a story to tell, test your story ideas to see what, if any, time urgency is built into them. Choose an idea with conflict, high stakes, a clear central question, and an organic deadline.
   Keep in mind that you can have more than one deadline in a story. Your story could unfold in multiple scenes, with different time elements in each.
   And a deadline can be subtle: A story about an impending divorce might have a small scene in which a couple is fighting while glancing occasionally at a clock, knowing the baby will wake up in ten minutes.

2. If you’re in the midst of a draft, ask yourself: “How does time work in the lives of my main characters? Are there any natural, organic ways in which time affects them?” Plan at least one scene in which time plays a crucial role.

3. Take another look at a draft of a story you’ve written. Can you add a sense of urgency by inserting the element of time? Perhaps not by naming minutes, hours or days, but simply by showing a character moving quickly to accomplish something, or moving so slowly that it’s causing conflict? Perhaps something that doesn’t seem political actually is, by virtue of bureaucracy deliberately slowing down to gum up the works?

4. Share a story you’ve read or heard that uses time to create urgency. Please explain what struck you about its time element in the comments and share a link. I’d love to build a good database of examples. (I encourage you to share your own story!)

   ---

Sound Judgment Kudos

In most issues, I give Sound Judgment Kudos to storytellers who are making sound judgments choices that improve our craft or serve others.

I can’t write kudos without acknowledging what a stressful, almost incomprehensible month it’s been for those of us in podcasting and journalism. Pineapple Street Media, one of the best narrative storytelling podcast shops in the business, shut down.

This week came the news that Amazon would dismember merge Wondery into Audible, keeping some narrative shows but largely focusing on celebrity-driven, video-first chatcasts. More than 100 talented people lost their jobs, and countless independent podcasters and production companies are likely to be affected in the coming weeks and months.

And, of course, there was the Senate’s dreadful rescission vote and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s subsequent heartbreaking closure announcement.

I wish I had some answers, but at the moment it feels like I need to say two things.

First, I share your pain and distress over the tremendous loss of talent and outlets for audio journalism. If you’re affected and would like to talk, please reach out.

Second, no matter what happens to existing platforms, the world’s need and desire for well-crafted, effective stories isn’t abating. It may ultimately take a different form, and be supported by different kinds of organizations, but it won’t — can’t — go away.

With all this in mind, here are my kudos this week:

My first Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Alex Curley, who developed the website adoptastation.org in response to the rescission. This brilliant site helps you find and donate to stations by state — but then it encourages you to adopt another station that’s lost more than half of its funding.

My second Sound Judgment Kudo goes to the fans of Central Florida Public Media in Orlando and WUSF in Tampa. Listeners donated more than $200,000 to each station following the rescission vote. In fact, this unprecedented level of generosity helped many public radio stations throughout the country, providing both much-needed funds and a morale boost just when it was needed.

Here’s hoping that it will continue in October, when stations hold their regular annual fund drives.

My third Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Dennis Funk, who has evolved the production studio Written in Air into a full-fledged audio magazine. Using one of the best phrases I’ve ever heard to describe good audio storytelling, Funk calls it “armchair travel for the human heart.”

In a statement, he says, “With so many shows being canceled, studios closing and hundreds of audio workers under- or unemployed, this feels like the right time to be building what comes next in narrative audio.” Find more information about this international, diverse audio magazine here.

Don’t forget to click the ♥️ if you like this post!

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If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page. You’ll help others find Sound Judgment and I’ll know I’ve made a friend!

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If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page.

I’m starting a new project, which I’ll unveil in the near future. I need your help. Please tell me what you’re working on. Share links to your podcasts or feature stories, or tell me your launch or pub date. Share your work-in-progress victories and especially your challenges. Just hit reply to this email. And thanks in advance!

Read more

If you like this issue, please click on the ❤️ at the top or bottom of the page.

I’m starting a new project, which I’ll unveil in the near future. I need your help. Please tell me what you’re working on. Share links to your podcasts or tell me your launch date. Share your work-in-progress victories and especially your challenges. Just hit reply to this email. And thanks in advance!

Read more

Please click the ♥️ if you like this post! It helps fellow storytellers find Sound Judgment.

Read more