Novel Podcasts

After writing the first draft of Under My Skin, I asked a few friends to help me create a podcast of the first 2 chapters. I read the part of Eryn, the main character and had my friends read for others. The result was something between an audio book, readers theatre and an oldtime radio show.

Now, these friends of mine just happened to be members of my band as well, so we created a few tunes to serve as theme songs for each chapter. After recording the moody little tunes, I used some of the tracks throughout the chapter as a soundtrack of sorts - a throbbing heartbeat during an action scene, wind during a run in the woods. It was creative and fun.

While those chapters have since been revised with my current edit, I learned some really valuable lessons in changing how I viewed UMS. The shift from prose to script was enlightening. I learned where readers stumbled over lofty sections because I was too busy being a writer to use “real” language. I discovered key phrases I repeated that I never would have spotting in the written manuscript because I needed to HEAR them. There were action sequences entirely interrupted by narrative, killing tension and disengaging the reader.

My little podcast experiment was well worth the recording time. Ultimately I decided to revise UMS and so I removed the full podcasts from my Myspace page and just left a few samples. However, I’m tempted to try again once UMS is finalized.

I used Protools to record the audio/tunes – but then I had invested in the program for band recording. You could easily do something similar with Garageband – and jazz it up even more with their canned sound effects/music samples. Even if you just record yourself reading your WIP – I guarantee you’ll discover ways to tweak your writing and heighten impact.

You can listen to the samples on my pen name's Myspace page: myspace.com/judithgraves