Listening to Radio Drama and talking about writing and stuff
I listened to a BBC radio play which was on Drama of the Week written by Jessica Brown, it was called Lost or Stolen. It was a strange sort of love story and it was introduced by the author herself as being about being lost, unloved and misunderstood in a large city. It was set in London and the interesting part about it for me was that much of the dialogue was the inner voice of the two characters. What these people were thinking was quite different to what they said to each other and it highlighted the difficulties that people, especially young people have empathising with each other and understanding how other people think.
You can’t help but think about all those years ago when you were 16 yourself and when there been times when you are superconfident and feeling like the world is at your feet and then other days struggling to deal with other people. It can be a case of simply misunderstanding what somebody else is thinking or it could even be that somebody is saying one thing but thinking something else and just hoping that you get the gist of what they are trying to say.
The drama of the week from the BBC Radio Four is always pretty good and I certainly enjoyed this play. When I’m actually reading books I tend to read more male authors than female authors and this play was more a girls story, understandable considering it was written by a young woman. Reminded me of a another story I read about a girl that gave up talking after a traumatic incident. It was very much an early in the author’s career of being an author type of book. Even so it was still quite engaging, it must have been, because after reading the first part of the story I also read the second book.
I listen to a number of podcasts, not just drama from the BBC. I am quite keen on the Comedy Of The Week and I also listen to the Archers. On account of the fact that I am writing stories myself I’m aware of the fact that if you want to be an author you have to read an awful lot of books too. I am finding more and more that when I am reading I am thinking about how the plot has been structured. I can see where the author has given the reader an idea of what the protagonist wants and then thwarts his progress along the way as much as possible. It seems to be an author you also have to be a bit of a bastard to your characters and make them suffer.
Other podcasts that I listen to – I listen to a number of science-based podcasts such as science weekly, also from the BBC. There is the magazine podcast from Wired UK and one or two Apple Mac type of podcasts. I’m not too keen on the news-based weekly Apple podcasts because when there is no news, which is most of the time they just talk rumours and rubbish.
