I could see the tower.
I could see the plains and forests, spreading out across the nighttime countryside. In that tower, at its summit in the open air, I could see Dr. Cornelius giving a secret, midnight history lesson to his captivated student, the titular hero of the story: Prince Caspian.
I distinctly remember sitting in my computer chair, perhaps eleven-years-old, as I played the first CD of the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre dramatization of Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, listening through cheap plastic headphones. That radio play was produced in 2000.
I remember wanting to get up early that morning because I really wanted to listen to it again.
Radio drama is invisible. That’s what makes it so powerful: The radio dramatist can tell a story about anything, perhaps more than anything. A haunted house, an enchanted wood, and deep space are all fair game. Radio drama’s invisibility granted it an infinite canvas in the 1930s long before the internet did so for all media in the 2000s. No character and no setting is beyond its power to render, because it is all in your head. This is what should make radio drama particularly attractive to fantasy and sci-fi writers. It’s a dream come true: A broadcast medium with no effects budget where character and intellect are important aesthetic values.
Radio drama has no practical limits in terms of what it can depict, with its invisible, imaginative content being free of all the budgetary constraints of its cousins in visual media.
When I say that radio drama is “invisible,” what I simply mean is that it has no visual component, with the story taking place entirely within a listener’s mind. With no pressure to design realistic sets, and no obligation to cast the most handsome actors or the most beautiful actresses, radio drama gives the writer unparalleled freedom over the type of story he can tell.
A screenplay meant to be turned into a film would have to be carefully limited in how it constructs a story. The visual nature of film makes it necessary for screenwriters to restrain themselves when writing stories taking place in exotic, fantastical locations which give nightmares to the cost-conscious studio executive. A play written for the stage faces similar limitations. It’s no good trying to write a play featuring a pitched battle between powerful armies with thousands of men on each side. Such a spectacle would be absurd if put on the stage.
But radio? In radio, where the mind is the stage, where the imagination supplies all the color and pizazz an individual listener cares to supply, the floodgates of the fantastic are flung wide open. Radio’s invisibility gives the writer the freedom to go totally bananas (to a point) with location, effects, and casting choices. Sound drama is thus a brilliant medium for horror, fantasy, and science-fiction.
Scott McCloud’s writings about the “infinite canvas” which the internet gave to comic books are a useful way to understand the possibilities of sound drama. McCloud maintained that the internet’s infinite canvas allows for the creation of comics (webcomics) of any length and of any type of content.
I argue, similarly, that radio has always had an infinite canvas. Or perhaps, more accurately, an infinite stage. Radio’s infinite stage, its invisible stage, makes possible the casting of any character, whether that character is person, place, thing, or idea. And it makes possible the depiction of any location, whether that location is a person, place, thing, or idea.
Long before the dawn of the internet, the radio’s infinite stage was still a very small stage. The people on the stage could be as big as you wished, but how many of them were allowed to be on the stage in one sitting was another matter.
But the real infinite canvas of the internet does away with even those limitations. Radio drama was always capable of telling stories about anything. Content was always, in principle, a wide open field. But the internet allows sound drama to change how it tells stories. Practically, this could mean giving a single, continuous radio drama a much longer runtime, thus giving more room in the story for complex character development, more elaborate plots, and room for a wider cast of characters.
The only thing hindering mass experimentation with such concepts was the matter of production costs. The internet democratized distribution, but it did not democratize production values. The democratization of production values is what AI is doing now, both in audio drama and elsewhere. The democratization of both distribution and production values now means, quite simply, that the tools and raw materials are now available for anyone to make their own audio drama.
Martin Esslin wrote in his essay “The Mind as a Stage” concerning radio: “And as imagined pictures may be more beautiful and powerful than actual ones, the absence of the visual component in this form of drama may well be a considerable asset.”
Esslin’s understated observation says, in so many words, that radio’s nature as a medium which relies on the imagination means that the listener cannot be disappointed with how something looks. No special effects look weak, no actor looks miscast, and no set comes off as generic or implausible. That is because in radio, quite obviously, nothing “looks” anything.” It’s all invisible, taking place in the listener’s skull.
Radio has a dramatically low demand for a satisfying visual experience. Insofar as there is a visual experience in radio, it is purely subjective: the radio dramatist and sound engineer only have to give a convincing rendering of what an imaginary scenario sounds like. Film, TV, and the comic book all have to give a convincing render of what an imaginary scenario looks like. Radio has no such obligation.
Thus, the writer of speculative fiction should look at radio as the ultimate artistic playground. A fantasy writer can have his real, live characters and include sweeping landscapes and fierce battles. A science-fiction writer can bring characters to life through the simple magic of the spoken word, with deadly robots and massive starships at the ready. Horror is probably the best genre to work with in all of radio. When the audience must be asked to imagine what is going on, and when what they are imagining is totally invisible, the radio writer penning a horror story is able to give his audience a much bigger fright by asking them to constantly imagine and anticipate it, with the awful climax being just that much more dreadful.
I believe it is my personal mission to enliven old, worn-out genres like fantasy, science-fiction, and in-between categories like space opera by writing stories in those genres exclusively for radio, and at an epic scale. Part of the reason I started producing original radio plays using AI at all was because I was so thoroughly fed-up by the sameness, homogeneity, and thorough lack of innovation and originality in the world of contemporary fantasy literature. Thanks to AI tools, I am able to write and produce all of my own stories, stories which are accessible and can be shared thanks to the fact that audio drama is a broadcast medium.
And no bored scold of an editor can stop me.
The main takeaway from this chapter is that radio’s invisibility gives it freedom. Radio’s invisibility gives freedom to the writers and dramatists who work within it. This freedom given by invisibility creates limits, but it breaks apart so many others. The biggest objection to radio drama is that you can’t see anything. There’s nothing to look at.
But the biggest strength of radio is that, if you like to use your imagination (just as most young children do), the lack of an objective visual element is totally irrelevant. The pictures are there, in your head. And because the pictures are in your head, where your imagination is the canvas on which radio paints, this means only one thing. Most of the time, radio drama is only as boring as you are.
Recall my words from my chapter on Speech. Radio works best on the excitable. Good radio drama is exciting to a person who is exciting.
Levi Sweeney is an indie radio producer from Seattle, Washington, and a digital marketing student at Bellevue College. His debut radio play (sound movie?), Son of Yi, Son of Pangu, is available now on YouTube.