Intimate Storytelling for Podcasting: The 4 Key Elements

1. Introduction: What makes a story authentic or organic? It's that we're led from a place of curiosity. We have a question that we want answered. For instance, Espera is a recorded conversation between myself and the ex-lover on the eve of our break-up. My name is Sayre Quevedo. I'm an artist and producer working in audio, in podcasting. I've worked for National Public Radio as well as The New York Times. My work has been recognized by the International Documentary Association and The Third Coast International Audio Festival. Much of my work revolves around our most intimate relationships; friends, family, and romantic partners. Audio was one of the most intimate mediums that you can tell a story with, because it's happening literally and figuratively in your head. If it's real and it's engaging, then it has the power to take you from where you are in that moment and transport you to someone else's world. Espera is a recorded conversation between myself and an ex-lover on the eve of our break-up. Then there's The Return, which is the story of Javier Zamora, a poet and writer who returns to El Salvador for the first time in 20 years. That consists of audio diaries, interviews, recorded sound. Then there's The Quevedo, which is the story that we'll be using as sort of a framework to move throughout the lesson today. That's the story of basically me searching for my family that I've never met. I'll introduce you to the four elements that you need to put into practice in order to tell a true and moving personal story through audio. Those are time, trust, presence, and respect. I hope by watching this lesson, you'll come away feeling more confident about telling your own story but also with a set of tools that you can use again and again, no matter where you're at in a process, whether you're developing an idea, producing the story or sharing your work. 2. What Makes Story Authentic: So what makes a story feel authentic or organic? I should start by saying that you definitely can't fake this. It has to happen naturally within the work. I think that the most important place to begin is from a place of curiosity. You begin with a question that you're trying to answer, and the answer is the thing that drives you through. I also think that it's really, really important to have a documentary, an openness of the complexity that each of us has. Like real to life work affirms and recognizes that sometimes we act in ways that are a little contradictory to our desires, that are a little bit complicated or not expected. We need to be open to that in the work and actually express that in the work itself. Your story should have characters that are complex, just like you. Because these stories that we're telling are human stories, which means that they're multidimensional and they're not about good or bad. They're about all the stuff in between. Each of the elements that we're going to discuss today will help bring you a little bit closer to producing something that feels authentic and organic. So whether you have an idea or are developing a story right now, or you have none of this stuff, you can continuously come back to these points throughout the process in development, production, and sharing the work. Let's grab our laptops, our notebooks, whatever we need to follow along as we go through the elements of personal storytelling in audio. 3. Element 1: Time: All right, let's move into element 1, which is time. To start, I'm going to play a clip from my first feature-length documentary, which is called the Quevedos. It's a story that we're going to be returning to throughout the lesson, and it's one that's very, very personal. It's about my family and basically the journey to go and discover my family history, especially the story of my mom. I'm going to start now. This story doesn't really begin at a wedding; it begins four years ago on Mother's Day. My mom, Maria, picks me up from my job. I'm a part-time bus boy and part-time journalist at this point. The night before, she had called me and told me that she had some news. But she needed to tell me in person. I guess, I know how you and your brother want to know more about our family, and so I had this idea that maybe for Mother's Day, we could go to grandmother's grave. We could talk about her and get to know some more about her because I don't think I've told you very much about her. She's told me almost nothing about my grandma. I don't even know if she's dead or alive. The few details that I know are these. My mom's parents are both from El Salvador but they met in San Francisco, California in the 1960s. My grandmother's name was Alicia. My grandfather's name was Jose Ignacio. She was 17; he was 37. They got married and had my mom. Then one day, my mom left home and never went back. I never told you very much about her. Yeah, I even knew she was dead. Well, I thought she was dead. Yeah. That's what has been my working assumption because she was so sick when I left and I didn't think she would get better. My mom tells me that she asked her friend, Tim, who's a journalist, to look up information about my grandma and he's found something. He didn't find a grave. He didn't find a death certificate but he found this woman who lives in San Francisco. We don't know for sure if it's her or not. She would be 66 years old. She could be, could not be her, and I don't know. But anyway, there's no grave to go visit and talk about your grandmother because we haven't found it yet if it exists and maybe this woman in San Francisco is her. The audio that you just heard was recorded when I was 19 years old and the story aired when I was 26, so that should give you a sense of how much time it took to tell this story. That's almost seven years between the initial recording and the final product. It's not a coincidence that I've chosen time as our first element because I think it's one of the most important. You need time for a lot of different reasons. Time is important for figuring out how and why you're going to tell a story. In this particular case, it was also really important for me to be sensitive to the fact that the story involved multiple people and involved the sensitive backgrounds and lived experiences of people who are going to be involved in the work. Developing relationships and developing trust with those folks is essentially tied with time because you need that time in order to build those relationships. You also need time to figure out what materials you're going to use and that can include interviews, archival sound and recordings like the one that you just heard. For instance, the Quevedos includes digitized VHS tapes. It includes interviews with my mom, both over the phone and in person. It includes recordings of us out in the world and also includes phone calls with family members and interviews with loved ones. The question of how and why to tell this particular story took me many years to figure out, and that's because we have to be really conscious of the fact that personal work has an impact on everyone who is involved in it, not just us. So in deciding to tell this story, I needed to figure out who's going to be involved in it, and what do I owe each of the people who are essentially collaborators in the work. I think you could think of my mom as a collaborator, my brother, and my other family members who we meet throughout the story. There's no rushing the process in making a personal documentary. It should take as long as it needs to take, and so I think it's especially important in the initial stages when you're developing an idea to be realistic about how much time you're really going to need to develop those relationships and figure out exactly what you need. By nature, personal documentaries are very personal, and so time also allows us a little bit of distance from what we're gathering in terms of material. In the case of the Quevedos, I had that recording from that trip with my mom at 19 years old. After several years, I was able to really listen to it and understand some of the dynamics at play as well as what was sort of unsaid in that conversation. That sort of insight, you can only gain by taking a little bit of time away from the material. Personal documentary is a commitment, and it's a commitment on multiple levels. On a personal level, you need to build a sense of trust with other people if they're involved in the work, and with my mom in particular, she needed time to open up about her own story. I took time several years to have conversations with her outside of interviews and outside of developing a story. Then on a more practical level, I needed time to figure out where am I going to get the resources to tell this story. Who's going to pay for me to travel if I need to travel? Where do I want this even be? Do I want it to be online? Is it just a story that I'm sharing with my friends and family? Do I want it to be in a podcast or on a radio station? These are all things that you'll consider later on, but I think it's worthwhile taking a moment to think about where is this thing going to end up because that will ultimately help you figure out what resources and what tools you need to tell it. To reiterate, we need time to figure out how and why to tell the story that we're telling. We need time to build relationships with people, including ourselves, I should mention. We need time to figure out what materials we need in order to tell that story the best way possible and we need time to think about what's the impact of the story on those involved, including ourselves. Lastly, we need time to figure out what resources we need. The next element that we're going to get to is, trust, and these two are intimately connected with each other. 4. Element 2: Trust: The next element that we're going to get into is trust. Before we go into that lesson, I'm going to play a clip from The Quevedos. I want to tell you about Alicia. About who she was, because she's the stranger in my family tree that I know best. I want to tell you about how Alicia and my mom used to dress up in matching outfits. How she used to make my mom play the song, Yesterday by The Beatles on her little portable record player over and over. How Alicia was once the queen of the parade at the Fiestas Agostinas in El Salvador. I'm going to tell you instead about how in 1973, Alicia suffered her first mental breakdown. My mom tells me that story one day over the phone. She was eight years old. I had a crush on this boy, which is why I think Rob Lowe is cute because he looks like Rob Lowe, this kid. I had a big crush on him. This kid was a neighbor. He went to their church. One weekend, their families took off together to Yosemite for a camping trip. My mom says that her mom, Alicia had issues for as long as she can remember, but they'd always been ignored or explained away. By issues, my mom means namely that Alicia heard voices. During the family camping trip, it became increasingly hard to ignore that fact. She was no longer being able to contain the fact that she heard voices. She would openly respond to the voices sometimes. She would listen to their command and she would do stuff in response. At one point, the voices told her to leave the group and take my mom to the tent, where they just sat for hours and hours. She brushed my hair, talked to me, didn't make any sense. But I was used to it, so it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't unpleasant for me. She loved me. But the next day, the boy who looked like Rob Lowe and his family decided to leave. I remember at the time, maybe it was denial, but I didn't really connected with my mom. In the following night, Alicia woke my mom up. That time, she took me up to the woods and she left me there, because she wanted to be safe, she said. I don't remember being particularly worried or scared. I just remember trusting her. The next thing I remember is just lights and people coming out in finding me. The next thing I remember is waking up in the morning and things seemed different in some ways, with my dad seemed different. Everybody was really super stressed out. But they pretended nothing had happened. It's worth mentioning that our second element, trust is heavily reliant on the first element time. Why is that? Why do we need time to build trust? Well, a lot of what we're doing in personal documentary, actually happens outside of the recording process. In this particular case, the story that my mom told of her mom and her first mental breakdown, I didn't hear that story until several years after that first initial recording when I was 19 years old. That's because I needed to wait to build trust with my mom in order for her to feel safe sharing her story with me. So that meant having phone conversations about a lot of these stories and a lot of these moments in her life without the element of a recording device, or podcasts, or a story, or a documentary on the other end. You need time and trust so that folks feel comfortable sharing their stories with you, so they feel open to being vulnerable with you. Intimacy is earned. It's not an automatic thing that you get. I think taking into account the ways that people are sharing themselves with us can give us a really good idea of how we earn their trust and how we share their stories with others. The Quevedos, for instance, is a story whether was one-half of the ensemble of people in that story who I didn't know very well at all, and a lot of that trust-building happened before we actually went and recorded at the wedding, or before we met in person for the first time. We spoke over the phone, we had conversations about really minuscule things that never made their way into the story. But all the while, I was observing, reflecting, and interacting with those people so that I could understand where they were coming from when I finally sat down to have those harder conversations. If you are looking at your process and you're noticing that more often than not, you're recording versus not recording, I think it's worthwhile to interrogate that, and wonder, and think about whether or not it might be worthwhile to spend a little bit of time without the camera or the microphone on the people that you're documenting. Once you've established a trusting relationship with whoever you're documenting, whether it's yourself or someone else, I think you need to repeatedly do the next four things, which is observe, listen, interact, and reflect. I think we could paint that as almost like a cycle. The reason that I painted as a cycle is because this is something that you have to do again and again. You do it when you're beginning the process, and you're building that trust, and then you do it while you're recording, while you're interviewing, while you're editing. This is something that's really necessary because the personal documentary processes is so informed by your experience and by your perspective. You should be taking an inventory of what it is that you're observing and hearing in your conversations with others. Also how they make you feel, because if you're a character in the story, then the things that you notice are going to be really important for us in terms of how we view the story and what impression we're ending up being left with. I think you can do this internally. You can do this in your head. I think it's really important. I find it very helpful to take notes as things are happening. Even just small little things, like an observation, like noticing a look that my mom has on her face after she tells a certain story, or listening to the kinds of stories or the kinds of things that my uncle is saying to my mom. These aren't necessarily things that you need to act on in the moment, but they'll be really important when you get to the editing process because they'll inform how is that you frame the moments that you're choosing to share with others. Going back to this question of, what makes a story authentic or organic? It's that we're lead from a place of curiosity. We have a question that we want answered. I think this process of interacting, observing, listening, and then reflecting is going to happen naturally, hopefully. But it will take time, which is our first element, like these things won't all happen at once. But I think it's worthwhile to try to be intentional about how you do that and to just think about these things in a really clear way, regardless of whether you're recording or just having conversations in a casual way. If you're telling your own story, these things still apply. You can still interact, observe, and listen to yourself, and the things and ways that you express your own story. In fact, it may be actually even more pertinent in that way because there's not somebody else guiding you through that journey. I think if you can step back no matter where you are in the process and ask yourself, what am I interacting, observing, and reflecting on in this moment? You'll find in the later stages of the process that a lot of what you need to be laid out to tell the story is already there. 5. Element 3: Presence: The next element presence again is deeply connected to our first two elements, and that's going to be a continuous theme throughout our conversation, our lesson here. Each element begets the next element, and so you can't have pleasantness within the work without trust and time. The next clip I'm going to play I think is a good example of what being present in the work can produce in terms of both interaction but also material, so I'll start that. We all agree that Sahara's wedding probably isn't the best place to stage a reunion. One day while I'm home, we were driving around and my brother Connor asked my mom if she's always known about Milton. She says yes. It's not that we didn't know we existed. It's that we just haven't seen each other in a long time. Why didn't you ever tell us that? I don't know. I mean, I don't feel I didn't not tell you. I just. You did not tell us. I mean, l wasn't trying to withhold information from you. You didn't honor, stop being a jerk seriously It wasn't an active part of my life. They're telling the same stories. What? You got to stop being a jerk seriously, it's not about you. [inaudible] I couldn't even hear what you just said. Separation. What? Connor, what are you saying? Nothing. I don't want to, never mind Am sorry, I did best so that I could come. When I'm talking about presentness, this clip that we just heard with my family, what you're hearing is an authentic interaction between myself, my brother, and my mom, part of that is because I'm in the moment I'm focused on what's happening in that conversation. I'm not focused on the recording itself, it's difficult but I do think that in order to create something that feels real, you almost need to forget that the microphone is there a little bit and you can't use it, I think that distances you from what's happening around you. You need to actually participate because you are a participant. If you're telling a story about yourself or about people that you know you are an active agent. You are shaping the way that that story unfolds and to distance yourself or pretend that that's not happening will come off as disingenuous. I think maybe a good note for us, is that to have the authentic moments, we ourselves need to be authentic while we're recording. When we're being present in recording, this is the moment where we start to think about how we're going to tell the story. Which conversations are we including? What scenes are we bringing people into an how do those shape the way that they'll end up perceiving the story that we're telling. Presence also includes some of what we talked about in our last element. Which is also observing and reflecting on what's happening around you. Taking note of the ways that people talk of moments in time that really stay with you. Oftentimes, at the end of the day, I'll just go back and quickly jot down. What are the moments from today? What are the conversations are lines that people have said that's still really stick with me? That will act as a guide as I go in and start editing. For example, in this scene that you just heard, I'm noticing my brother mumbling things behind me, I'm noticing that his way of interacting is a little bit more subdued. I'm also noticing even things in the background, the sound of the GPS going off. Throughout the story, we hear sounds of car scenes that are happening. I love the idea of including poetic element of direction, of feeling lost and the sense of direction. In this scene there's subtle hints of that layer throughout we hear the sound of the GPS telling her to turn left. We hear my mom deciding where she's going to park. Even though that stuff feels super inconsequential, when we pull out and move into the production process, we're going to want to think about things like that. We're going to want think about what are the poetic elements of the story that we want? What are the motifs that we're going to include? What is the symbolism that we're going to delicately tried to place in every single scene. Then also, what are we going to relay about the people who are in the story. My brother doesn't appear very often at all, but he does in this moment, do a lot of the legwork for a listener in asking questions that a listener might have. Why didn't you tell us about the about your brother? Why didn't you share this information with us? He also presents this other side of the story. Which is this sense of resentment that he feels towards my mom for not having shared that information. Remember what we were talking about around letting people be complex in our stories, it's completely possible for us to feel a sense of empathy for my mom and the losses that she's felt and also still feel anger at the same time, those things aren't separate elements that have to exist as one is good and one is bad. You can be both of those things. In fact, recognizing that one can feel both of those emotions at the same time is part of making people look human and feel human in a story. Presence happens when you're recording, you're conscious of what's happening around you. You're interacting in a way that feels authentic, you're also taking into account what you're observing around you. This still exists and is still incredibly important even after you've stopped recording, when you're in the editing process, I'm talking about presence. What I'm talking about is being present as an editor, not being present as the person who was in that moment recording, but really pulling back and saying, what is the story that I'm trying to tell? What is the arc of the story? this is where the story starts to take shape and a lot of ways. The more that you do on the front end in the recording process, the easier the stuff in the editing process is going to end up being. For instance, let's say you're at the end of the editing process and you've already written down observations from your scene or a line or something that one of the folks that you've interviewed has said in that process, when you go back, you will need to be searching back and forth to figure out, What's important here? Because you've already started doing that while you are in the middle of the process of recording, that's not to say that you should be sitting down with a notepad in your hands scribbling away while things are happening around you. But I think building a routine into your day when you're producing. So for instance, I often ended my days by just writing down notes about what felt important, what it stuck with me from the day of recording. I ended up going back to those while I was editing and it ended up in forming a lot of the trajectory of the story, and that was a lot we're going to recap fast. Presence, it's something that exists in the recording process and in the editing process. What it means is acting authentically both as agent of the story, but also as someone who's helping craft the narrative, this is where we're thinking about scenes, this is where we're thinking about characters and material and texture. It's also where we're observing and taking notes for later. That's going to lead us into this very last bit that I think is maybe probably the most important element of all respect. 6. Element 4: Respect: Our fourth element is respect. Respect is connected to every single thing that we've gone through. In the way that you need time in order to build trust, and you need trust in order for there to be presence. All three of those elements are necessary for you to build a respectful relationship both to the work, and also between yourself and the folks that you're documenting. Before we go into this larger theme of respect, I want to make a clear distinction between empathy and humanity. Empathy is how things make you feel, and humanity is how you treat those around you. In the documentary making and especially in the personal storytelling process, I think it's incredibly important to be cognisant of the fact that the work can have an impact on people's lives. When I was making the Quevedos, I called up each person who was included in the story and I explained what the story was going to be about, what was included especially if it was pertinent to them, and asked them if they had any questions or anything that they wanted to talk over before it aired. That was an understanding that each person who's involved regardless of whether they're in the creative process or not, is a collaborator in the work. You need to be able to feel comfortable walking away from that situation and feeling like you really did right by those people. Getting into the element of respect, I think we should listen to just one last clip from the Quevedos that I feel really exemplifies what that can look like in storytelling. This is after I've had a very difficult conversation with my uncle and my cousins who I've just met. I learned about a series of abuses and traumas within the family, and I've now shared that story with my mom and she says this really interesting thing. My mom and brother meet me at the hotel where I'm staying the morning of the wedding. I feel guilty, mostly because I guess I had hoped to have something different to share with them. When I tell them everything I've learned about my uncle, my grandfather, the abuse, they're quiet. Then my mom says. Not surprised, it would be nice to be surprised. It'd be nice to be surprised and learn that he spent some time, made a commitment to breaking the cycle of violence, to parenting differently. I'm sad to hear that Milton couldn't figure that out too for his children. I'm sorry that they've had to endure that and I'm glad to connect with them. I hope that they'll break that cycle. I hope that they will be different to their children. That can hold that complexity that I don't think Milton is the most horrible person in the world. I can see that there's some part of him that's kind and good. But it is also not okay, and if you think your parent did a horrible job, your job is to do the opposite of what they did. I feel like after hearing about our family, I understood more why you left a little bit. Not that hanging out with Daisy and my cousins was terrible or hanging out with Milton was terrible or anything like that. Just more that hearing the background and the behaviors that seem to have followed our family for generations, it was a lot to take in. This isn't even my life, this isn't even people that I've been connected to for that long. So don't cry. Anyways, I feel like it helped me to understand you more and to understand why you did what you did. I'm happy that you ran way, because you're an awesome parent and you'd help take care of us and you didn't give us that life or force us to be around that stuff. I do love you. I've always loved you guys so much. I wanted you to be happy and safe. Now I think my mom would have wanted that for you guys too, and she would have loved you guys. She would have thought you guys were the cutest. If she hadn't gotten sick, then she probably would have been the kind of old lady that wore high heels and put on makeup every day. She would have gone to all your plays. She's that kind of mom. Coincidentally enough, that's the kind of mom my mom is. Whether she realizes it or not, she became the family that she had never had, for me and my brother. She gave us the childhood she was never given. She protected us in the ways that she had never been protected. I think personal documentary is about extending compassion and complexity to everyone who's involved. I think that this particular moment in the story is a really nice example of the ways that we can extend that compassion to each other, both in the process and also outside of it. My mom says, "I can recognize that your uncle is a lot more than just the worst things that he's done." Then later on in the scripting I tell her that I understand that she's much more complex than this one act of running away. That there's so much more to that act than what's simply on the surface. That's a conclusion that you can only come to by going through this whole chart of elements that we've just talked about. Like taking the time to let these stories unfold, to have the conversations, gaining trust, and being trusted and trusting others to share parts of themselves that may not be exactly what you expect of them, and then having being present in those moments and really listening to people when they talk about what they've gone through or what things mean to them. When you take the time to get to know people and you extend trust and caring to them and you respect them, your audience can do the same. That's ultimately what all of us want when we tell our stories. Those are the four elements of personal documentary. We have time, time to think about the work that we're making, how and why we're making it, what we need to make it, and how it will impact those involved. We have trust, which is like building the relationships outside of the documentary process and to really get folks comfortable in sharing their complexities and their stories with us. Then we have presence both in the recording process and the editing process. Also presence in the actual quality of the work that you're making. Not just being present in the sense of interacting but also being present in noticing what's happening around you and picking up on that. Then respect. Treating those that we work with with humanity, empathy, and inviting those who listen to the work to do the same for both us and for those involved. This is a set of elements that I come back to again and again, no matter where I'm in the process. Because I sincerely think that you can't make a personal documentary without these elements inside of them, and it's important to constantly check with yourself whether these things are present. I invite you to re-watch this video as many times as you need to no matter where you are in the process of telling your story, whether you're just coming up with the idea or getting ready to share it. Because if you recognize these four elements in the work, that means that it's ready to put out into the world and for other people to listen to it. 7. Exercise: We're done with the four elements of personal documentary. Now we're going to apply them with an exercise that I like to call it the blanket fort exercise. I give this to students who are just getting into audio and need a little bit of practice doing interviews and asking questions that lead to stories. What you'll need is a blanket fort and somebody who you trust, maybe a family member or friend. What I want you to do is I want you to bring them into the blanket fort and ask them to tell you the story of how you met. The reason that we're going to do this particular prompt is because it invites someone to tell a story with details as opposed to just a one-sentence answer. I also encourage you to follow up with questions that add texture to the story. What was I wearing? What was your first impression of me? What was the weather like? Stuff like that. Then I want you to take that tape and I want you to stuff it away and not listen to it for a week. Then after a week, go and edit it, and upload it to our project gallery where I can give you feedback and we can talk more about the prompt. To have fun with it, don't forget the four elements of personal documentary and make sure to come back and add to the project gallery and share what you've made with all of the other people who have taken this class. 8. Final Thoughts: I'll be linking to some resources below, including my own work and work that I love, and I hope that you'll check it out. You can also find me on social media. My first and last name at literally all types of social media; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Maybe not Facebook. I want to thank you so much for sticking around and listening, and also wish you the best in whatever you decide to make. Personal documentary is super time - consuming. It takes a lot of energy, but if you continue to return to these four elements, I know that you'll make something amazing, and I can't wait to hear it.