Backstory and the impending apocalypse

We've all done things we regret. I know I'm making a gross generalization here, but I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has at least one, if not hundreds of moments in the past that you wish had gone a bit differently. I'm even willing to go out on a limb and say that for many of us, a large percentage of these moments happened before the age of 20. I know that for me, there are lots of things I wish I could hop in the Wayback Machine and go back and at least attempt to make a different choice. Still, many of the moments in my past shaped who I am today -- and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here in Chicago, writing a blog about writing a script for a podcast. And when I put it that way, perhaps I am not the only one who should be regretting those choices. My apologies, dear readers. But I digress...

Chances are you didn't make a choice at age 13 that could potentially impact the very balance of the universe and cause a future apocalypse. (But hey, I'm willing to be wrong. Hope you worked it out if you did - and if not, let us know. It would save us a lot of time trying to figure out which recording equipment to use if the world is going to end in a few days.)

Our main character on the other hand, did make a rather stupid choice when he was a teenager. He has only just become aware of how something as innocuous as writing his name in a place he probably shouldn't has unalterably changed the course of his life, and has the potential to impact millions of other lives. I won't give away too much here - but the story itself is about an ordinary guy who finds himself in an extraordinary situation, and has to come up with some pretty creative solutions to get himself out of a mess he didn't even know he created.

Herein lies one of our more difficult challenges: backstory. There's a lot of it. We have managed to construct a pretty complex plot - which, while admittedly I think it's pretty cool, is damn hard to reconstruct in a way that doesn't sound completely contrived and boring. I mention this because one of the motivations for embarking on this little project was listening to another audio drama podcast currently in production that does the whole backstory thing very, very badly. (Which Jason and I will both completely own as our own opinions, even though I won't name any names.) I remember saying in a very haughty and arrogant voice, "We could totally do a better job than they ever could." And thus, we got on this crazy rollercoaster ride.

And I have to admit, it's no small feat. I find it particularly challenging to tell a story that requires a bit of exposition to make sense, when my only storytelling tool is dialogue. I really don't want any of my characters to be in the middle of an action scene... for instance... a zombie attack... and suddenly stop to say, "You know, this reminds me of that time three years ago when..."

But oh, the danger looms. I actually relish the challenge however, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to hone my writing skills by working hard to make the dialogue count. The last thing I want to do is insult our listener's intelligence with unnecessary and unwieldy monologues about events that have only a passing relevance to the current scene. So far, I think we've managed to avoid the *insert name of bad podcast here* style of writing - but I can see how easy it would be to slip into that mode.

Just something to keep us on our toes.