Hi everyone!
This is an excellent question. I was asked it recently at a panel at a convention, so I thought I would take a moment to write an article about it and let you know what I think.
When you’re building an audio drama, you don’t have the visuals on screen. In comics, in movies, you can “show rather than tell”, but in an audio drama, you have little choice!
There are a few things you can do, which maybe I’ll go into in another article in a bit more detail, things like soundscaping, things like sound effects, or having the footsteps really precise and walking away from the from the microphone. However, that’s not going to be a catch all for everything that you need in order to tell the story.
So how do you do exposition? There are a few choices.
One of them is narration, which I generally choose not to use in an audio drama, but I will use in an audio book. (In fact, by my definition, that’s what differs between an audio drama and audiobook.)
Secondly, you can have the characters explain what they’re doing.
A more skilled way of doing it – the best way for an Audio Drama in my opinion – is that, rather than a direct explanation of “I am now going to pick up this thing”, is to think about what an average person would say when doing that thing.
For example, you slip in the shower! You don’t say, “I slipped in the shower”. You say, “ow”, and you hear some sound effects.
And then you might hear the character say something like, “Oh, I feel like such an idiot”. So now you know it was an accidental slip in the shower.
Building your dialog around what you want to display is a very important aspect of delivering a really good Audio Drama without excessive exposition!
– Ed
