Writing Radio Copy: From First Word to Final Punctuation

LEAP OF FAITH RADIO PRODUCTION with Bobby Ocean

Unless you make it that way, writing is not hard. Nor is learning how to write more effectively.

There’s nothing much new in the language anyway. Most words are all old friends. I don’t know about you, but when I get around old friends, it seems like fun. Looking at our work with words this way, it doesn’t have to be such brain-wrenching work. Instead, we can play.

Just as in audio production, when time can be tight, it pays to work ahead. You’ve probably got a library of music and sound effects, maybe even a library of cool beds and transitions created in your less frantic time, when you have the space to be more leisure. Why not a folder of Phrases and Analogies, social reference and color words?

Make yourself a Reference Words file for your writing and fill it with your random incoming thoughts and expressions, overheard or inner-heard, that you find catchy or somehow compelling. That’ll come in handy.

Here’ a file example for Reference words. I mis-heard something on TV while walking through a room, but mentally wrote it down because it was catchy. “Elvis in your underwear…”

Next I found at least one use for it. In this case, it could be used to compare, as in “It’s something so-o-oo big…” Then I added more examples because with all that foundation work done the building practically began erecting itself:

(could work for trying to find the perfect gift…)

For mom, it’s Elvis in her underwear,
For dad, an even dozen power tools and a six-pack.
For her, something with a sparkle-rate pulsating in snych with her heart,
For yourself, it’s Beyonce borrowing your T-shirt – with you still in it.

Also, there is a “FROM (one extreme) TO (another) file and a LIKE (another extreme similarity) file.

So when I come across a cool as hell quote from say, Sir Francis Bacon, I’ll nab it for later, then sample from its essence and re-write like this:

[original quote: “Of time to come, may we all be disciples of time rather than its servants.”]

Re-imagined essence in a FROM-TO analogy:

“Independent people have an almost overwhelming array of choices in their lives — from the leveraged speculation of time to come, to the fractions of difference in its winners and losers…”

Re-imagined essence of Bacon quote in LIKE analogy:

“There are lessons to learn as we recalibrate our ecological course to green. After all, when we don’t learn from the past, we’ll just have to run through it again, like an inattentive student repeating a year of school.”

It’s Not Stealing If You re-write: “Reimagine” what you plunder. Go to the essence of the statement you want to convey, just BEFORE words, where the pure notion rests complete, with all its ideas of itself in orbit. From the raw, unspoken truth of the idea come unlimited means of means of expression. Choose one.