It's Story Time (Part III)

This is the third part of my five part series involving story telling, the mediums of story telling and the reasons why I love them.

Why I love radio...
First off, when I say radio I'm talking about talk radio, not music radio. My only real experience with talk radio is National Public Radio (NPR) podcasts. Yes, back to the NPR I talk about so much. If you haven't read my past posts, I am absolutely in love with NPR podcasts.

I love talk radio because it's old school. Before television or movies there was radio. I actually just listened to a Radiolab episode completely devoted to the phenomenon of the radio adapted broadcast of "War of the Worlds". If you're not familiar with the story, "War of the Worlds" is originally a fictional novel about Martians coming down to earth and taking over the world. The radio program was adapted to seem like news broadcasts giving breaking news about activity on the surface of Mars and eventually the landing and take over of our little planet. Due to a series of events, people missed the disclaimer in the beginning telling listeners that the program was only an adaptation of a fictional story, so people started packing up there stuff and fleeing their homes in hopes to survive the Martian take over. So yes, I would have to say radio can as an unimaginable amount of influence maybe even more than its more visual counterparts.

So I have a pretty vivid imagination. I find myself listening to talk radio with vivid pictures in my head. Often, these images are more vivid than what I would probably see in a movie or on TV. It's an art for a radio host to describe a story in a way where you can feel like you're in the story. I was listening to a story about a boy and his friends breaking into an abandoned home in the middle of nowhere. I could see them breaking the window to open the latch. I could see the former owner's belongings old and dusty still sitting on tables and beds. I felt the eeriness leaking from the walls in this house purely from the words I heard coming out of a lips of a speaker on the other side of a microphone. I actually got shivers down my spine when the speaker said they never went into the basement because there was a couch propped up against the basement door as if to keep something from coming out and how one of the beds had some kind of dirt, poop or dried blood smeared all over it. Most NPR shows will add little sound effects to make things even more real in my mind. I actually had to stop listening to the old house story because I was driving home really late while listening. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty thoroughly freaked out. Even though the story itself isn't my story per se, the story I experience in my mind is unique to me. I was the director for this story and I presented it to an audience of one.

I don't want to repeat myself too often with my 'end of blog' suggestions but listen to NPR! It's awesome!