My interview with Jenny Sparkling
What are the 3 best things about working on audio dramas?
Doing the research for the project was pretty great, because it was mainly reading fairy tales. I wanted to get the tone down as precisely as possible and draw on some of the weirder elements of these stories. There's so much inexplicable magic; things happening just because people wish for them, and with no thought toward explaining them.
We have a lot of ideas about what fairy tales are, and the more of them I read, the less they fit that mold as a whole. It's definitely a special interest thing -- autism has its advantages.
Actually writing it down was the most fun part, for sure. I had been toying with the modern fairy tale concept for a long time. My main focus was mapping out how more modern artifacts could have a place in a fairy tale’s structure. Okay, so the protagonist turns someone into a slug, because he used a homophobic slur. We move on, and she’s justified. She decides on a punishment for the CEO, and he’s punished. In the end, it was very, very cathartic. I've described it as a fairy tale for the frustrated millennial. Since I'm, y'know, a frustrated millennial, it was extremely satisfying to work on.
And after everything was wrapped up, getting feedback was pretty awesome -- yes, the fact that most of it has been positive is definitely a part of that. I’ve also received some critique that will help me going forward. Whether positive or negative, though, I don’t have a strong enough adjective for seeing people actually engaging with what I wrote. People tell you to write for yourself, and I try to write things that I would honestly want to read (like stories where lesbians get to be happy), but there’s a reason I’m not keeping my work in the vacuum of Google Drive.
What is your favorite thing about being a podcaster according to you?
The coolest thing is how easy it is to get your work out there in an “official” capacity. Even short stories involve much more complicated channels for formal recognition. Getting published in a magazine or anthology is a tricky process, on top of writing.
Making “The Girl Who Set Out to Seek a Living Wage” was a time-consuming process (I had zero experience with audio editing before this, and did it all myself -- everything but composing the music). But once I was ready, at least I was able to get it out there with as much authority as anyone could have.
How did you stumble into the world of podcasting?
I had to quit school for a while, for a combination of mental health and financial reasons. This definitely gave me way too much time to sit and think about what I wanted to do. Nothing has had a bigger positive impact on my life than stories, and I decided that I wanted to tell my own. So that was the biggest catalyst for all of this. I wanted to create something, but I didn’t have any specific ideas.
I found some cool projects like The Bright Sessions and Wolf 359 while Welcome to Night Vale was on hiatus, and I needed to scratch the itch. Although I knew I wanted to write, I’d mainly been thinking about novels up until that point. I didn’t grow up on audio drama or radio, so listening to these newer shows is really what got me interested in audio as a storytelling medium. It seemed like a pretty different, and potentially much wider, way to connect with an audience. Since many fairy tales as we know them now were once part of an oral tradition, I thought a new fairy tale would actually fit in well.
What was the first podcast you listened to?
Yup, Welcome to Night Vale. I started it when it was at its height on Tumblr, around 2014. It had been on my backburner for quite some time, and I finally decided to listen to two episodes a day while attempting an exercise routine. But, of course, I got too into it and end up ditching the elliptical and binging the show.
It’s the only podcast I stay consistently up-to-date with, and remains my favorite.
What is your writing process?
I usually jump right into a draft, without any kind of formal planning stage. It’s more like linework on a picture; it involves more notes of “[expand this later]” or “[real actual dialogue here]” than I should probably admit.
Sometimes, I need a few of these before I settle on a shape I like and begin to fill it out, but I do at least try to finish each draft so I have some idea of where I’m going for next time. Once the shape is down, it’s a matter of trimming, expanding, and smoothing over the rough patches until I reach the finished product. I also have a very thoughtful audience of early readers and listeners who have helped me work things out.
What was the inspiration for starting your podcast(s)?
Aside from the general desire to tell stories, “The Girl Who Set Out to Seek a Living Wage” was directly modeled off certain “original” Western European fairy tales.
My primary influence is the work of the Brothers Grimm - which definitely had a lot of editing done to them, and so, those quotation marks. They started writing down the Children’s and Household Tales, what we would call the Grimm Fairy Tales, to preserve an oral tradition. People listened to these stories, although presumably in more intimate settings than Stitcher, rather than reading them.
I can’t really say that I’m “going back” to that, however heavily I drew on it. It definitely helped me think about these older stories, though -- something that sticks out about fairy tales is their sense of justice. Frankly, a lot of it is not something we should be bringing into this century. Yet in a world of morally gray stories, I think it’s important to remember that good and evil exist, to a certain extent. Obviously, it’s important to be honest and complex, but there are actions that can help and actions that can hurt. If someone is hurting others, whether through malice or ignorance, that needs to be addressed. It should be condemned.
“The Girl Who Set Out to Seek a Living Wage” is a light-hearted fairy tale, with an evil, corporate CEO receiving justice from a heroic, autistic lesbian. Because sometimes we just need to call things what they are.
What do you like about audio drama as a medium?
I love how the performance can influence the writing. I’m not sure how equipped I am to comment on this in my own work so far, but I can say that sometimes my own voice came out more bitter and sarcastic than I was expecting. I was aiming to remain a “carefree storyteller” throughout. Oops? I let it stay, because it was honest and I liked it.
A friend read from a draft of my next planned project, and she sounded so much more ominous than I’d heard it in my head. It was almost sinister in places, and I loved it.
There’s something unavoidable, really concrete, about hearing words aloud, in a way that your (or at least my) internal voice isn’t. It makes audio drama a much more striking experience. I usually end up echoing various phrases after an episode of Welcome to Night Vale; the writing just sticks so well.
How does getting the script made into an actual audio drama work?
My big issue: the work that I thought was complete, wasn’t. I had it all written out, and just went at it. Then I would read something out loud and discover that my actual voice didn’t handle it nearly as smoothly as my internal voice did. It was something of an addendum to the writing process, where I had to make more last-minute adjustments than I’d expected.
I think the end result was a stronger work regardless of the medium, though. It really helped with cutting out some unnecessary pieces.
How do you go about getting others involved? Particularly if they’re far away?
I haven’t worked extensively with anyone else yet. Not formally. For the moment, a lot of my projects are more narration - centric to try to keep it as simple as possible on this front. I have quite a few people I’d like to work with, in varying ways. But right now, there are just a few friends that I’m seriously intending to coordinate with, and working with narration instead of a more dialogue - focused script makes it easier to keep the cast small.
Could you tell us a bit about the process to turn a script into a finished audio drama. Which part do you enjoy the most?
The writing was the part that took the longest. This is probably something that I’m going to need to train myself out of, but I like to have a work as complete as possible before I even think about recording. The big advantage of this is consistency; if I have to go back and change something to make a later point work, then it won’t contradict anything people have already heard. Even “The Girl Who Set Out to Seek a Living Wage” had changes made to the second episode that influenced what went on in the first, so I waited until the entire work was done to record.
The hardest part was definitely editing, particularly the music. I chose pieces that I thought would work, but they didn’t always, so I had to screen quite a few songs. Then I had to do the actual audio editing. All told, there wasn’t that much of it, but it was a process that required a lot of little adjustments and a lot of listening to the same few seconds over and over.
But honestly, my favorite part was posting it. There’s something exciting and dizzying and surreal about releasing what you’ve made and knowing that anyone whose interest you can catch is free to listen to it.
