Story for
Podcasts

Story for Podcasts is for anyone working on a podcast idea, whether at the planning stage or in production, for all formats and genres, from history stories to celeb chats, news analysis to true-life crime to fiction.

The workshop is suitable if you:

• Want to shape up a podcast idea ready to pitch
• Have found it tough to get responses to your pitches and enquiries
• Know you need to get better at story structure
• Have your research and interviews in place, but are having problems pulling everything together
• Are at the edit stage and still storylining
• Would like to fine-tune your storytelling, and learn what to dial up and down
• Know something’s not working, but can’t work out what and why
• Can dedicate 2 days to the learning

This professional training allows you to:

• Develop or revise your understanding of the mechanics of successful storytelling for podcasts
• Master the key elements every podcast needs and recognise the blueprint underlying an effective story
• Understand the value of story in series-planning, pitching and producing continuing podcast series
• Become more familiar with the language and grammar of story
• Stress-test any podcast story idea
• Diagnose why a podcast isn’t working well, and simple ways to remedy common story issues
• Gain the confidence to apply the learning to your proposed or existing podcast

Zoom Workshop Day 1 – 10am – 4pm (UK time)

Morning

• A deep-dive look at the power of story shapes, the classic story engine and how this works in podcasts
• Focus on how podcast stories work over three and five acts, and how to wring out maximum engagement
• Creating drama and audience engagement using end-of-act turning points, midpoint, symmetry and series structure
• Empathy and emotional engagement – how to make your podcast more relatable, the key narrative questions to break a story, and knobs to dial up and down to make any podcast more effective
• Includes: short practical exercises, examples from successful podcasts, Q&As.

Afternoon

John splits participants into small groups to complete a fun practical story-creation exercise to test their narrative skills. At the end of the afternoon, John will offer feedback on each group’s story and draw conclusions.

Zoom Workshop Day 2 – 10am – 2pm (UK time)

Pitch your podcast idea or revised story plan to John Yorke for incisive feedback to help you hit the ground running.

Join our alumni – After your workshop, you can join our online alumni community where you’ll meet our growing network of past students. You’ll be able to.

• Rejoin your classmates in a private forum
• Continue to access an archived version of your workshop materials
• Meet alumni from other courses and share work for feedback
• Join discussions about writing, editing and the industry
• Attend live chats with guest writers and industry folk

Mentoring and one-to-one feedback – Our team offer mentoring, script reads and reports. We are happy to quote by job or script, or to arrange a longer mentoring scheme as you work on a specific story idea. We’ll create a package to suit you, so please email [email protected].