Out on the Wire Episode 7.5: Workshop

12/14/15 • 36 min

Céline Keller is making an autobiographical audio story about how she turned her life upside-down in order to raise two wild baby boars on her father’s remote farm in Germany. It sounded good on paper, but now she’s stuck in the dark, German forest, literally!

So for our 7th workshop episode we’re actually DOING this week’s challenge with Céline, one of our Working Group participants. The challenge was to collaborate in a focus session to try to move your story forward. We workshop her story together to try and help her find her way out of the Forest by going back and re-examining what’s catching her attention, the scope of the story, and how she can reframe the story to include the best elements of what she was working on, with a new, more focused direction.

Previous Episode

Out on the Wire Episode 7: Dark Forest

The Dark Forest is where we go when we're deep in the writing process and lose our way. Overwhelming feelings of self-doubt, confusion, and inadequacy threaten to halt our stories’ progress. Sometimes, we forget why we started on the path in the first place. Luckily, many people have been here before, and they can help us find a way out. This week, we get very lost, and find our way back out again, thanks to Jad Abumrad, Jay Allison, Ira Glass, and more. Plus an interview with Kazu Kibuishi, creator of the graphic novel series Amulet.

Next Episode

Out on the Wire Episode 8: Your Baby's Ugly

Our stories are our babies, but not all babies are cute. This week, we figure out just how far we’ve still got to go when we take a finished draft of our own show and subject it to the cold scrutiny of an edit by Robert Smith and Jess Jiang of Planet Money. Our baby was kinda messed up, but he’s much prettier now.

Also: learn what makes Ira Glass mad, find out how editing is like biofeedback, and hear how Rob Rosenthal of the Transom Story Workshop and the HowSound podcast trains the next generation of expert producers and editors.