Today’s column on scenes is the third of my six-part series on the “Six S” framework for hooking and keeping your listeners. Read the overview here.

The 6S Framework is a set of practices that work separately and in combination to ratchet up the wow factor of your podcast or radio show. Before we get into scenes, here’s a reminder of the framework:

1. Sound Vision — Can you hear the story in your head? (read about Sound Vision)

2. Structure — Take listeners on a journey. (read about Structure)

3. Scenes — The engagement backbone. (continue reading below)

4. Surprise! — Even the most straightforward of episodes should contain surprises. Look for them. (read about Surprise)

5. Suspense — Intrigue creates forward momentum. (read about Suspense)

6. Specifics — Details create driveway moments. (read about Specifics)

Earlier this summer, I introduced this 6 S Framework at the National Federation of Community Broadcasters Annual Conference. When I got to this slide, an attendee raised her hand: “What do you mean, scenes are your engagement backbone?” she asked. 

At the most basic level, scenes — something happening to or by a character in a setting — transport us in our imaginations to another place and time. A few years ago, I was working on an American Scandal script with an amazing executive producer at Wondery. As a former magazine writer, I love description — to a fault. (In print, you can get away with more). This producer kept excising my beautiful sentences describing the fashion and demeanor of a political family at a gubernatorial inauguration. It was moody and evocative; the setting felt real. But it was dull. “Something has to happen every two minutes, Elaine!” she’d say. (Tip: This is a real thing. In Wondery’s style of immersive storytelling, something new does have to happen every 120 seconds.)

I wasn’t happy.

But she was right. In this kind of narrative, plot-driven podcast, the more action, the better, and the more one scene leads to the next, the better — and thus binge-listeners are born.

But good interview shows also include scenes: they’re the stories guests tell, if we elicit them. (And of course, as hosts, we share our own when relevant.) They don’t have to be high drama; you don’t have to have run from a gunfight or hang from a cliff by your fingers. Scenes that convey our interior feelings are often gripping. Scenes of all kinds help listeners take a sensory journey — and once humans are on a journey, we are typically compelled to stick around to learn what happens.

Here are two examples:

1. In Media Res: An obnoxious term familiar to English majors, like me, “in media res” is Latin for “in the middle of things.” It’s often used to describe leads to books and longform articles in which the action started before we arrived, but it’s equally common in narrative podcasts, TV shows and movies. Host Stephanie Wittels Wachs opens her Last Day episode, “A Love Story,” in media res: the first thing we hear is shots fired, squeals of excitement, and laughter. She and her producers are in the middle of learning how to fire guns at a Montana shooting range. It’s raucous. We don't immediately understand what’s happening, and we have to find out. It’s a highly effective technique. Listen and learn more here.

2. But what about the regular stuff of life? Can we weave effective scenes where the physical action is as mundane as changing the baby or doing the laundry? (I mean, I haven’t climbed any glaciers lately, have you?) Well, yeah. And these scenes can also serve as our “engagement backbones.” In fact, sometimes they’re better. In Sound Judgment Ep. #4, “Cinematic Storytelling with Crime Show’s Emma Courtland,” producer Mitch Hansen initially led with a scene in which a doctor desperately tries, and fails, to  save a patient from inevitable death. It seems as if it would be gripping — but for a variety of reasons, it fell flat. They replaced this life-or-death scene with the following, where almost nothing happens, and in audio, it’s breathtaking: 

Emma Courtland: To anyone who knows Steve Barnes, it should come as no surprise that one of his earliest memories—and certainly his most vivid memory—is the day that his dad, Gerald, first introduced him to baseball. 

Steve Barnes: He took me to my first game. I wasn't even two years old. And they carried me through the tunnel at Wrigley Field. And I remember seeing how beautiful and green it was, that not even two years old. I have that memory planted in my mind, 60 something years later, where I could tell you exactly what it looked like. It was the most beautiful, lush, gorgeous thing I ever saw in my life. 

Emma Courtland: It wasn't just the beauty of the field that seared that day into Steve's memory. It was the fact that that beauty had been shared with him by his dad.

One reason this scene works is because it sets the stage for the episode’s theme, which we’ll soon learn is Steve’s fraught relationship with his father. But another is that the writing invites us into Steve’s interior thoughts and emotions in an extraordinarily visual way.

By the way, each of these episodes of Last Day and Crime Show is peppered with scenes — they’re the engagement backbone, not just the leads.

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