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Illuminating City Nights with Jacqui

Blog: Illuminating City Nights with Jacqui

from Pool team, 01.09.09

It’s not every day a story you have written is made into a radio drama. So when jacqui87’s story was chosen for the City Nights broadcast (on air this Saturday 2pm!), she came into the studio to hear her words in action. She blogged about the experience for us.

"Without the help of others Miss Pardy would not have happened. It was another woman at work who suggested to me that the banging we were hearing inside the locked room upstairs was not the wind, as I believed, but a person trapped inside. Our subsequent two-hour investigation/rescue would be the beginning of a story that niggled at me for months until the City Nights project came along. Incidentally, it did turn out to be the wind.

Drafting was an unusually quick process for me – a mere two and a half months to produce 1100 words. The last story I had successfully placed with a publisher took me nearly a year, on and off. But this time I had help. Posting drafts on the Pool website I got incredibly useful feedback from other users and later from Gretchen, the City Nights producer, who worked me through several revisions before the story was ready to record.

I always know when I meet a good editor because they make me work hard. Gretchen and I soon discovered my ideas about what was happening in the story’s narrative just weren’t communicating – a pretty major flaw. But what was interesting was that for Gretchen and other readers this didn’t seem to matter. What the story didn’t explain they simply filled in with their own ideas – which were just as valid. When editing we work for the story, not the writer. So though I did make my subtle narrative a little less subtle, I hope we also left some room for interpretation.

Listening in on the recording was another discovery: the pauses, the intonations and emphases on this particular phrase, that particular revealing moment. These were all turning points I had become deaf to during the writing – after five drafts it’s early to forget the significance of the first time the word ‘ghost’ is mentioned. After all, I already knew how the story would end.

So my revelation came when we took a pause from recording and the sound engineer cried out, “What’s going to happen?” This was the twist I never saw coming. I discovered I had written a ghost story."

Thanks Jacqui! We can't wait to hear it.

Image by Harriet Macdonald.

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