Tips: Questions To Ask About Your Story

Here's a short handout to get you started writing "short and tight" - the way you'll need to for Radio & TV. Radio coach Valerie Geller contributed this very handy checklist of things to ask yourself:

1. How does this story affect my listener?
2. How can I describe things more visually?
3. How can I make someone care about this?
4. How is it that I'm putting this story on air?
5. How can the presented problems be solved? What are the solutions?
6. How did this happen? How could it have been prevented?
7. How else can I tell this story?
8. How would I tell it to a friend?
9. How can I make it better?
10. How would I tell it if my life depended on NOT losing a listener.

Writing for broadcast is really a two part process...what you write, and then how effectively you edit your own work. You should be a very critical editor at all times in the process, from when you first formulate a theme for your story, to just before you hand it over to another editor to get his or her take. So, it's a good idea to have a vision for your story...we'll go over that in a bit. Before we get too deep into the idea of "story visioning" - it's important to know what to listen for in your own work, and in the works of others. You have a chance to model your work after a story you admire, and use some of the same techniques a favorite reporter uses. So, how to listen?

Here's a very handy guide to listening...it's called: Questions for Listening (Courtesy Andrea DeLeon, National Public Radio)

1. What is the specific focus of the piece...what's it about?
2. Did the piece make us care?
3. Are the stakeholders all here? Are their points balanced?
4. Is there too much information? Not enough?
5. Is the piece written for the ear...you know, to be listened to, not read?
6. Are there scenes in this piece? Visuals? Can you see what's going on?
7. How could more sound and more scenes improve this story?
8. Could it be made simpler?
9. Is the structure of this story the best it can be?

Ask yourself these questions as you listen to stories being told, and you'll be teaching yourself to think like an editor.

Story "visioning" is an idea I heard about from a fantastic radio reporter named Melanie Peeples. In her training seminars she talks about this idea, which is really a more complex version of a story outline. Before we get into her visioning idea, let's listen to a recent political story she did for NPR, called Republican Leads Race for Louisiana Governor.

Here's the story visioning worksheet that Melanie has so generously allowed me to borrow from:

Questions for Story Visioning...before you start

1. What is this story about?
2. Who stands to win/lose in this story? Who are the stakeholders?
3. What is my focus statement? (A short description, no longer than a few lines)
4. Who do I need to interview: Side 1, Side 2, Real Person, Expert, etc.?
5. What is this story REALLY about? What's underneath it all?
6. Where should I interview the subjects? What does the place look like, how can I describe it?
7. What questions should I ask?
8. What more do I need to learn before I start working on this story?