How to Tell a Good Story on Your Podcast

The imaginative power of a podcast is a great way to take your audience on a journey in their own head. Step by step, you evoke mental images through storytelling, but what’s the best way to tell that story? Guest-blogger and radio DJ Sander de Heer is here to explain the nitty-gritty.

A good story is told in detail and with heartfelt emotion. Simply reciting a list of plain facts just doesn’t work as well. It’s about literally speaking to your listeners’ imagination, so be sure to describe what you’ve seen, smelled and felt instead of basically going through a sequence of events or summing up details, because that’s what sets storytelling apart from reading the news.

Like A Page-Turner

Listening to a good story on a podcast is like reading a book that’s hard to put down because you want to keep reading. While tragic, dramatic and intense stories about suicide, a terrorist attack or poverty aren’t equally relatable to for everyone, a relatable protagonist and striking details can really help your listeners to empathise with the main character. After all, almost everyone’s familiar with struggle and vulnerability.

Excitement and Sensation

You might have noticed that good books and good films don’t give away every last detail. Using cliffhangers and time-jumps, you can easily keep your audience reeled in, so don’t spoil things right away, play around with the timeline, and be sure to hark back to earlier moments every now and then.

Make a Promise

Listeners appreciate knowing what they can get out of your podcast beforehand, so be sure to include a promise every episode. Whether you’re running an educational podcast, a news-focussed podcast or a history podcast, you need to set a clear goal for each episode. During the intro, you’ll want to tell your audience what they can expect to learn when they stick around till the end. Touching on the ‘fear of missing out’ even works for fiction, but you might want to be a little less explicit and preface your stories with a mysterious line like: “In this episode, I’m going to tell you something I wish I’d never learned.” You get the idea.

What’s some of the best storytelling you’ve heard on a podcast? Let us know in the comments!

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