Other points of view in your podcast

The Homecoming podcast tells the story without voice over narration, internal monologues, or first person perspective. Here are some examples of short fictional podcasts that use other methods to tell the story.

1. Limetown, episode 1. This podcast uses radio announcements, emergency phone calls, on-site news reports,  and voice over narration to tell the story.

2. The Truth: a story about an election, using campaign speeches and news stories.

3. "Miracle on the L Train"from The Truth: short piece with internal monologue. Takes place on the train. Uses subway announcement and chatter of others in the train and sound effects. 4. "Sleep Some More" from The Truth: story about a roommate who won't shut up. Sounds come from the unending chatter of the roommate and the internal monologue of the narrator.

Another example of constructing dialogue effectively

Though this is meant to assist in creating good dialogue for films, much of the content here makes sense for best practices in writing conversations between two or more people--and gives some samples of what not to do.


 

Good dialogue in Homecoming

This dialogue is from season 1, episode 3 of Homecoming. If you skip to 13:07, you'll get an example of Heidi and Walter speaking about their imaginary road trip.


This conversation does a few things at once:

 1. It illustrates their attraction to one another.

 2. It skims around this attraction; neither one of them are ready to admit it (notice how they are talking about staying in a hotel together, but they skip right over that part).

 3. It allows us to see why Heidi might later try to keep Walter in the program.

 4. It illuminates both characters; Walter as having a lively imagination, and Heidi as never really being close to anyone.

 5. It gives us hope that they may some day be together.

 6. It creates conflict. As a therapist, Heidi should not be attracted to her clients, as her job is to help them and the boundaries should be clear. However, previous conversations have shown us that they get along well, and that Walter is a very decent guy. We feel Heidi's desire for him, but we also feel how she has to struggle to keep the relationship professional, but not revealing too much of herself or giving in to this pretend moment.

7. It's funny and entertaining and it seems real.
 

Best movie dialogue of all time

We'll revisit this later when we start talking about dialogue in movies, but these clips might also be useful for your podcast script.