What is a narrative podcast?

What is a narrative podcast? These three things:

Since podcasting is not even 20 years old, you won’t find an “official” definition out there — but we’ve come up with these three key criteria: a narrative podcast . . .

1. tells a story

2. follows a written script

3. includes careful audio editing and sound design

We cover each of these elements extensively in our course, and also provide writing exercises, templates, and exclusive discounts on audio editing and gear to help you practice!

So what makes narrative podcasting worth it?

As we talk about in the course FAQs, making any podcast can help you find, and embrace, your literal and figurative voice. And doing any sort of creative writing can help you make sense of the world, connect with others, understand your past, process old trauma, earn money, get famous, or touch on any of the myriad motivations for doing creative work (we get into this more in module 1 of the course, Why create?).

But after making 200 episodes of our narrative podcast Shelter in Place, we can say definitively that there is a special degree of pride, of self-awareness, and connection with others that only comes with making a high-quality scripted or story-based podcast. It’s a rigorous, painstaking, often-exhausting process — and we wouldn’t trade any of it!

That’s the love we have for this genre, and the conviction we bring to the podcasting curriculum for the course, and the enthusiasm we bring to our coaching sessions.