Patreon Drop!... Audio Drama School 1: What is This Thing?

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Hello, everyone.

It is Joe.

How is everyone doing?

I wanted to do one more preview of some of our Patreon content before we get started here with the season, but also just wanted to make a general announcement, let everyone know how the season is going to go.

What we're going to be doing is we will be posting our first episode of season five on October 14th.

Generally speaking, we'll be publishing episodes twice a month on Tuesdays.

So every other week.

Sometimes it gets a little messy.

Some months have more weeks than other months.

So it's not going to be exactly every other weekend, but it'll basically be twice a month on Tuesdays.

And that will be Midnight Burger, then followed by the second season of Welcome to the Horizon.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

We're going to have a Dabadoo time.

And thank you so much for joining us on this journey.

It's been about five years, going on five years working on Midnight Burger, and it has been a wild experience.

And if you've been with us this whole time, thank you very much.

And if you're just arriving, welcome.

This is Midnight Burger.

I'm going to give you one more preview of some of the things that we're doing on our Patreon.

We do a lot of things on our Patreon.

And one of the things that we did this past hiatus was there was a lot of requests for people to

know

about how I make the show and about the process of making audio drama in general.

And so I put together something kind of informally called Audio Drama School, which is just a series of like five lectures of me talking about not just audio drama, but also creativity and writing and how to, to, you know, think about your life in a more creative way.

And this is going to be the first episode of that.

It was a little uncomfortable making this because I talk a lot about myself and my own personal process.

And I'm not really someone who does things autobiographically.

But it was actually kind of therapeutic to do.

And it was nice to look back and actually pay attention to how I did do things because so much of what I do is kind of instinctual and I don't really write down what my process is.

So, this is going to be the first episode of that.

I hope you like it.

If you would like to hear more, of course, you can head over to our Patreon, patreon.com/slash midnight burger, listen to all five episodes, as well as the myriad other things that are on our Patreon.

So, once again, premiere of season five will be on October 14th.

We hope you enjoy the season.

All right, here is

the first episode of Audiodrama School.

What is this thing?

On the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia,

if you trudge through some rice paddies,

you can see in the distance some limestone caves.

Millions of years years ago, these caves were underwater.

They were part of a coral reef.

But time did its thing and now they are a row of hills on a strangely shaped island in the South Pacific.

The caves are full of holes due to eons of rainfall.

Tunnels have been carved into the stone and if you're of the adventurous, non-claustrophobic type,

you can climb into one of these caves and see one of the most amazing things on the planet.

A painting of a pig.

Paintings of pigs are not typically important,

but this one is.

It's important because it may be the oldest known piece of art.

over 45,000 years old.

For whatever reason,

all those thousands of years ago, someone covered their hands in red ochre and started making a picture on the wall of a cave.

It was a picture of a warty pig.

We'll never be able to know when the very first painting on a cave wall happened.

Whatever this first painting was may have been lost to time.

But whatever it was,

and whoever it was,

I have to say

that I think about that person

all the time.

The first artist.

The first human, really.

What were they thinking?

In that moment.

What inspired them to start?

And after the hours it must have taken to make this image on the wall of the dark cave where they made their home,

what was that moment like after its completion?

That moment where they stepped back and emerged from whatever haze of creation they were in and looked up at the cave wall flickering in the firelight.

What have I done?

They must have thought.

What is this thing?

Did they have any idea they had just discovered one of the most definitive things about our species?

Of all of humankind's discoveries, surely the discovery of our own symbolic mind is the most important one.

More important than the wheel, more important than fire.

All of a sudden, they could see their own mind looking back at them in this ghostly depiction of an Indonesian warty pig.

Of course, they couldn't have known what they'd done at the time.

Can any of us truly know how important our creations are at the moment they're created?

I bring this up because

I do the same thing.

I'm often there sitting at my desk.

It's four in the morning,

stepping back from the cave wall,

wondering what I'm doing.

What is this thing I'm doing?

Maybe that's the only way to start.

You start off doing a thing, not knowing what it is, and you keep doing it in the hopes that one day, someday,

hopefully,

you'll know what it is.

So for those of you who don't know,

I'm Joe.

Hi.

I created Midnight Burger.

I've talked a little bit in the past about who I am and how I got here and all that stuff, but just to sum up a little bit, I guess, I

started writing when I was eight years old.

And I did it because my life was a little weird and

it helped me to be completely in control of a world that I create.

That helped me to make things more normal.

There was always something that was completely in my control.

And that's the role that it played in my life.

And I never really had any aspirations of doing this for a living, doing this

when I grew up or anything.

It was just something that I did, something that I did to make things more normal.

But one has to do something with one's life.

And as

I was going through high school, I realized that I had had to go to college for something.

And I had always been doing plays at school

because those were fun.

So I said, okay, I'll go to school for acting.

So I went to drama school.

And as soon as I went off to drama school and I started studying acting, I suddenly realized that I didn't really find studying acting all that interesting.

Studying acting is interesting

for a lot of people.

I was just not one of those people and it wasn't resonating with me and I wanted something else.

But there I was.

I was already enrolled in school and so what was I going to do about it, you know?

And I had always written and at my school in particular, I could, if I wanted to, switch my focus over to playwriting.

So I thought, okay, I'll do that.

You know, I know theater.

I'm in the theater world.

I'll start writing for theater.

And I found myself myself really enjoying it.

I enjoyed writing dialogue.

I enjoyed the performance.

I enjoyed the collaborative aspect of it.

It was a lot of fun.

And so I did that for the remainder of my college life.

And then there I was graduating with a bachelor's degree in playwriting.

So I thought, wow,

okay.

I'm probably going to be ignored for the rest of my life.

So why don't I go be ignored somewhere where there's trees?

Because I was in in Texas at the time.

So I moved up to Portland, Oregon,

without really even knowing anything about it.

I'd been there once before for a week and I decided, sure, I'll move here.

Now, at the time, Portland didn't really have much of a theater scene.

It was one of those towns that like should have a good theater scene, but it just didn't.

And I don't know why.

But there were a few theaters there.

And I started to actually do okay as a playwright in Portland.

This is where I met

most of the cast of Midnight Burger.

I would write plays, they would be in them, and it was one of those times when you feel really like creatively free and like you can write something and then people can do it.

And it's a great feeling.

And then I started to get more attention for what I was writing, and I got a residency at a place called New Dramatists in New York.

And I started getting bigger commissions from bigger theaters.

And I started, you know, doing readings at nice theaters around the country.

I was like starting to make a living a little bit as a writer, as a playwright.

An impoverished living, but that's okay to do when you were as young as I was.

And then somehow that led me into getting a screenwriting fellowship at Walt Disney Studios, which was strange because I had never written a screenplay before, but they had read a play of mine that I had applied, because you apply blindly for things every day when you're a playwright.

And I had actually gotten this

year-long fellowship.

So I went down to LA and I started learning how to be a screenwriter.

And I basically had a year to learn how to write a screenplay and then launch my screenwriting career because there I was in Los Angeles now.

So I had to do something about it.

That led to Disney hiring me as a screenwriter on staff.

And I did that for a few years.

And, you know, working at Disney was an interesting experience

Writing sort of screenplays for in it in a sort of corporate environment is always going to be weird.

And

anyway, I did that for a while.

And then after that, I went out on my own as a screenwriter and did okay.

Nothing I wrote ever got done, but I think you'll find that's the case with

95, 99%

of screenwriters out there.

The vast majority of people who make their living as a screenwriter screenwriter never get anything done.

They get paid for it

and they make a lot of money doing it.

But back then, every major studio had at least 300 projects in development.

And so you just tried to be one of those projects in development and get paid for writing and rewriting.

And

it's a living and people do it all the time.

That kind of drove me crazy because I didn't understand why

because you know, in my naivete, I was just like, What?

I can't, what?

I wrote this whole thing, and it's just gonna sit there now.

And,

you know,

more often than not, yeah, that is what's gonna happen.

So, I started to get more and more frustrated as a screenwriter.

And I would just, I started complaining about it a lot.

And I started just like being really bitter about it.

And then at one point, I was talking to Finley about it, and I was just venting and venting and venting about screenwriting and how I think it sucks and all that stuff.

And at one point, she just said, do you like it?

And without even hesitating, I just said, no.

And all of a sudden, there I was with a big problem on my hands because that's what I did.

And I didn't know how to do something else.

So at a certain point, I decided, well,

why don't I try some other things?

Whatever those things are, why don't I try some new things?

And a friend of mine had an anthology podcast where it was an anthology fiction podcast.

And I said, hey, can I write something

for your show?

And he said, yes.

And so I wrote like a one-shot, one-person, half-hour-long thing.

It was called Live from the Zombie Apocalypse.

And it was fun.

I had a good time.

But then, you know, life moved on.

So when the pandemic hit, I needed to do something.

I needed to find a way to activate on all of the solitude and free time that the pandemic was going to bring, right?

I wanted to get back to the sort of the beginning of my sort of creative life.

And I wanted to get back to that time in my life when I was just writing something and we would do it.

I wanted to get back to that feeling that I had.

And I thought to myself, well,

all those people that I used to make things with, they're all just sitting at home right now.

So we all got together and I said, hey, let's do this.

And it was called Omega Station.

And it was three episodes, about a half hour long.

And

it was my first time really investigating the form of audio drama just to see what happens.

And I had a wonderful time.

Now, my thinking was when we were done with that, the pandemic would be over.

but we remember how that went.

So there I was.

I had just done something

that felt different than anything I'd ever done.

And I didn't really know what to do with all that energy.

And so I just, I called everybody again and I said, let's just keep going.

We'll start with an idea that I can just keep working on and I can keep expanding and we'll just do it until we're sick of it.

Great.

And so

that was Ben Nightburger.

We all started working on it.

I was really having a great time.

It was really

like rediscovering what I loved about writing.

I would write something,

Finley would have a look at it, we'd send it to the cast, we'd record it, we'd send it out.

It was beautiful.

And it was so great to just like rediscover that part of myself.

And then this thing happened where people started listening to it.

And people started talking to each other about it.

And people started talking about it online.

And it became a thing that was talked about often among, I don't know, the audio drama subreddit or wherever.

And that was nice too.

People are enjoying it.

That's always a great feeling.

And then

we were reaching the end of the first season.

And

an article came out in The Guardian that said, these are the 20 essential independently produced podcasts.

And we were one of them.

Only one of two fiction shows.

It was us and the Siltverses.

And that was really surprising.

And that's when I said to myself, okay, I'm really enjoying this.

I feel very creative again.

I feel really free.

What if I let it completely ruin my life?

What if I, not ruin my life, but what if I let it just take over?

Like, what if I leaned into it as hard as you can possibly lean into anything?

What would happen?

It'd be a shame to not know.

And what happened was all of this.

Here I am now.

And I'm now at this point

where I can at least attempt to turn around and tell people what I've learned.

Or at least what I've learned for me.

Because the things that I've learned might not be true for someone else, but I can tell you that they're true for me.

And I can tell you how I go about things.

And I can tell you what I'm thinking about things.

Take that for what you will.

Every creative person in the end makes their own rules and has their own metabolism and has their own process.

Some people really get a lot out of hearing about other people's processes and hearing other people's thoughts about things.

And so I'm going to attempt to do that with this series of little lectures that I'm going to be sending out to all of you.

If you're not a creative person, I hope this is helpful anyway, because it will be about

how I do this, if you're curious about how I do this.

Even if you're not writing audio drama, hopefully this will be something that will help you think about things creatively.

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You never know what you'll find at DSW.

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Here's another show we know you'll love.

Good afternoon, Night City.

It's your favorite guy on Network 54, Steamy Steve.

Facing Fate is back.

This season, the crew dives into Cyberpunk Red.

In Chromeheads and Corpos, a fight for survival four blocks from Night City's combat zone, where the stakes are life and death of the goose never stop.

There we go.

That's a cyberpunk.

Lovely party with your friends.

Facing Fate.

Chromeheads and Corpos begins October 13th.

New episodes every other week.

Listen to Facing Fate wherever you get your podcasts.

But since this is Midnight Burger, it is an audio drama, we are going to talk about audio drama.

And, you know, I checked out a few of these other things that people have made, like, you know, a one-hour seminar on how to make audio drama and all that stuff.

And I checked all that out.

They do seem to start with what is audio drama.

And the thing is, you guys know what that is.

Especially

this group in particular, I think, pretty much knows what an audio drama is.

I guess the one thing that I'll say differently than

other people who talk about these things is that I actually make a separation in my mind between audio drama and audio fiction.

Maybe other people do that.

It feels like it's a little bit different.

Audiodrama, specifically, is about dramatization.

It's about the story progressing through character interaction.

There is very rarely an omnipotent narrator.

There is just people interacting and the sound that surrounds them.

That's what I consider audio drama.

If you're just narrating a story and you've got some sound in the background, I would call that audio fiction.

It's not a dramatization, really, of anything.

You're not assuming a role, you're just telling a story, which is great.

Finley does that all the time.

She's next door in the other studio doing that right now.

Something that you'll hear people say is that

when you're creating an audio drama, you have only four tools.

You have sound, you have dialogue, you have silence, and you have music.

I actually think that you don't have any of those things.

I think that when you're making audio drama,

there's only one tool.

And that tool is the mind of the audience.

The mind of the audience isn't willing.

There isn't a story.

Everything you do in audio drama, every word you write, every sound you make, all of that is just you trying to encourage the audience to imagine the story for themselves.

Some people really hate that.

Some people...

Some people just despise audio drama as a form, right?

Because audio dram operates differently than other dramatized forms.

I don't know, I've never encountered anyone who says, yeah, you know what, I just don't like movies.

Or I just don't like television, right?

They will say, though, I just don't like audio drama.

Which is understandable.

Because audio drama takes work

on the audience's part.

In the end, audiodrama, all it ever is, is an invitation for the audience to imagine something.

And honestly, a lot of audience members just kind of say, what, you mean, I have to do it?

And truth be told, yes.

The story takes place in your head.

A lot of people don't like that.

It's understandable why they don't like that.

That's the form.

You can only give them so much.

It's really about about them giving themselves something.

About giving them the opportunity to tell the story to themselves.

One of the challenges of talking about audio drama is that

there's nothing to talk about.

And what I mean by that is there's no standardization.

There's no long history of the way things are done and how things are supposed to go.

There's no standardized script format.

There's no standardized way that you're supposed to talk to people or creatively supposed to communicate with your collaborators.

Nothing is set in stone.

No one has a doctorate in audio drama.

I mean, maybe somebody does.

I'd love to talk to them.

What's their deal?

And so, when you're talking about audio drama,

there's not a bunch of tried and true techniques.

There's not a lot of precursors, which is weird because it predates television.

And yet, somehow, for me

and for other people making it, it feels new.

It feels different.

It feels like a new thing in the world.

And maybe that's because we've taken audio drama the way that it used to be and we've put it into the realm of podcasting.

So it's separated now from the standardization of broadcasting it on the radio.

It's now in this very unrefined,

unregulated space of podcasting.

And because of that, you can move in a lot of different directions with it.

And when you can move in a lot of different directions with it, there's no rule book to go by.

And that's kind of a good thing.

You know, and when

Philip Glass, famous composer, he'll tell the story of when he was first learning the piano.

And he was a young man, and he had this incredibly strict French piano teacher.

And she would sometimes have him and the other students spend hours and hours getting one tiny fragment of music exactly right.

Exactly the way that she wants them to play it.

They would play it over and over until she was satisfied.

And it was maddening for Philip Glass, and it was very difficult for him.

And he didn't really realize until much later in life what the point of all that was.

The point of all that

was to make this dividing line between technique and style.

There is technique, the way it's done, and there's style, how you deviate from it.

For her, his teacher, you can't have style until you first have the technique.

You need something to say, I choose not this.

You need something to deviate from.

You have to have the thing to reject the thing.

And the problem with that, when we're talking about audio drama, is that there's no thing to reject.

We're literally making it up from the ground up.

We can do anything we want to do in this form right now because there isn't a library of books about how you do this.

the only rules we have, really, are some basic rules of storytelling.

But even those kind of go out the window.

Because in playwriting, you push towards intermission and then you push towards the curtain.

In screenwriting, you have 30 pages for act 1, 30 pages for act 2, 30 pages for act 3.

In TV, you have the A, B, C, and sometimes D story.

All these rules,

these are all regarded as good rules of storytelling in playwriting, screenwriting, TV writing.

But they arose because of the way the audience interacts with what you're doing.

The audience needs a break for a two-hour play.

So you put an intermission there and you make that a part of the structure.

But you need that structure because the audience needs to take a break, not because that's the best thing for a story.

In screenwriting, it needs to be a very strict 30 pages because everything costs a lot of money and people need a way of quantifying that.

And so when things are divided into these 30 page sections, then the studio gets a sense of what this means, how long this will take to shoot, how much it's going to cost.

And in TV,

commercials.

You have to dramatically push to each commercial and each commercial has to have like a button at the end of it, right?

So that you can go back into it as soon as the commercials are over.

And that becomes a part of the way you tell a story.

But you don't need that.

You don't need that in audio drama.

These rules arose because of the way the audience interacted with what you were doing.

They arose also because of commerce

and because of corporate needs.

And we have, over the years, turned them into rules of storytelling.

You don't have any of these in audio drama.

And when you don't have them,

what does that do to the rules of storytelling?

There's no TV show out there where I would have been able to say, the first episode of this show is going to be a half hour long.

In a couple of seasons, the season finale is going to be almost three hours long.

You can do that in audio drama and in nothing else, which is great.

But also,

it makes it very difficult to talk about it.

Because in the end, all we really have are our instincts, which can be very frustrating, especially for people who really need the technique, who really need the rules.

Because there are some truly great artists who are really like that.

They really like rules and they really like technique, the laws of technique, and their art is still wonderful, even though they are very sort of technically restrained.

And a big part of that is because it's not connected to a major industry.

And if you want to, you can read articles about the podcasting industry and what it, and you know, the state of the podcasting industry.

There's people who blog about it and write newspaper articles about it and stuff like that.

But when they're talking about the podcasting industry, those articles are about Call Her Daddy and the Joe Rogan experience and Smartless.

It's not about you.

It's not about Midnight Burger.

It's not about Midst.

It's not about Cam Lan.

Because

for these things,

you are standing on the frontier.

And on the frontier, you do it because you say you can.

You do it because you say you want to.

And that's really all there is.

When humans decided that they wanted to learn how to fly,

They didn't have the rules of aerodynamics.

They didn't know about lift and drag and thrust and all of those things.

The only thing that they could really do is build the thing they wanted to build and then shove it off a cliff.

And in my opinion, that's how all art should be.

You shove something you love off a cliff and see if it flies.

And if it doesn't,

you know something now.

So when you do it next time, you do it differently.

So this series is going to be be about any of the things that I have learned while doing Midnight Burger.

It won't be too technical because technical stuff has a lot to do with what kind of equipment you use.

But we will talk about sound design.

We will talk about dialogue.

We will talk about world building.

We'll talk about all sorts of things.

And at the end of every episode, there will be some homework.

an exercise that you can do to expand your horizons a little bit.

Now of course you don't have to do these.

These are are totally optional.

But the reason why assignments can be good sometimes is that it puts you in a place that's outside of your personal zone of safety, right?

It actually creates a different zone of safety for you.

You can go into this place of you've been assigned something and you can say, well, I have to write this because it's been assigned.

It's not me doing it.

I am not putting myself out there.

I'm just doing homework.

I'm just doing something somebody told me to do.

It's not my fault, you can say.

That sort of should be the point of creative exercises.

It gives you a barrier that protects you from criticism and protects you from being vulnerable and making yourself too vulnerable too soon.

And when you're in that safe zone, you'll find that you're much more free to do things and try things that you haven't tried before.

So that's the point of the exercises that we'll be doing.

So

why don't we get to the very first one?

I want you to think about a question.

Something that's been on your mind recently.

Something that you keep coming back to.

Something that seems kind of stuck in your head.

Something that you're kind of obsessed by.

Like you keep thinking, what is the deal with blank?

Or why am I feeling blank?

Or how can I get to blank?

I want you to think about that question

and I want you to write it down.

Once you've written down that question,

I want you to look at the episode art for this show.

That little tiny picture that shows up.

Look at that picture.

That is a picture of a person.

I want you to write down who this person is.

Now that doesn't mean I want you to do a reverse image search and actually figure out who this person is.

What it means is, I want you to decide who this person is.

I want you to write a basically a rough character sketch of this person.

What they do, what they're like, what is their life like.

write all of that down

and then

after you've done all that

i want you to go back to that question that you've been asking yourself lately that thing that you can't get out of your head

and i want you to take that question

and i want you to ask this person that you've created.

I want you to ask them that question.

Ask them that question

and then write down their response.

What do they have to say about it?

Let them go off for a while.

Really answer the question in depth from the voice of this person that you've created.

Now, if you want, after you do that, you can write your response.

And you can write their response again.

You can take it as long as you want to take it.

But once you have reached a stopping point with this particular exercise, congratulations, you have now written an audio drama.

You can stop here if you want.

You're done.

But that's the basic idea.

There's something in your head.

Something you can't get out of your head.

So you create fictional characters to talk about it.

Because they're outside you.

And they have perspectives that you don't.

And maybe they'll know something that you won't.

i know that sounds weird because they're all in your head

but it's a fantastic way

to remove yourself from the question and let someone else do it for a while

i do it all the time it's a great thing to do once you're done if you would like to uh share your work um I'll leave a link to the Midnight Burger Discord and that'll be good for about one week.

You can join and you can drop any of the writing that you'd like to share with the quote-unquote class.

You can put it in the writing channel.

It's called the Writing is Hard channel.

People share their work in there all the time.

And it's a very supportive place.

It's a very safe place to show off your stuff.

So please feel free and drop it there.

So I hope this will be useful.

I hope that all of us will get something out of it.

For me, it's a little bit scary and it's a little bit weird because I don't really talk about my process all that much in depth.

I'll talk about it here and there, but I've never really gone this deep before.

And I'm going to learn things along with you.

And I'll learn things about myself.

And I'll learn, you know, oh, yeah, that is how I do that.

It'll be

an adventure for all of us.

So, happy writing.

You know where to find me if you have any questions.

So I will see you next time for another lecture and another homework assignment.

All right.

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