Revisiting: Who Are You As a Storyteller?
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From PRX and Transom, this is Sound School with the backstory to great audio storytelling.

One day, a couple of years ago, I was sitting next to a radio reporter. We were just chatting, talking about punk rock as you do. And then it was time for a table read. She would read narration out loud and play quotes, like a dress rehearsal for a recording session. She started reading, and it was like she disappeared. Poof. Someone else entirely had taken over, someone very formal and proper.

Gone was the conversationalist replaced by an old school professor giving a lecture. I stopped her and I asked, where'd you go? And she said, I was trained this way. I was trained to write and present in this manner.

Now, I've encountered this many times. Someone will transform right in front of me. They speak naturally right before reading aloud, and then poof, they're sing-songy. They're modulating their voice unnaturally, or they will imitate the tone of their favorite host, and it just doesn't sound genuine. It's as though there's some rule that you're supposed to sound like someone other than yourself in front of the mic.

To make matters worse, that idea that you can't just be yourself often leads to flat writing, no drama, because then you can't really lean in and tell a story. So the reporter who became professorial, long story short, I said, well, look, let's go through and change up some of the writing so that it sounds more like you. I would ask her questions like, what would you say here? And more importantly, how would you say it?

After some time, what eventually emerged was a piece that sounded more like her. Something with flair, more drama, a story told by a storyteller. Which, of course, prompts a question. What is drama, and how do you write and tell a dramatic story? Rob? Hi, it's Robert. I put that question to Robert Krowich for an episode of Sound School back in 2012 when the show was called How Sound. How Sound?

I can be the two-syllable Robert and you can be the one-syllable. You can be Rob, I'll be Robert, unless you want to be Robert and I'll be Rob. The two-syllabled Robert retired as a host of Radiolab back in 2020, but I still think of him as the consummate radio dramatist. Robert's stories have it all. Conflict, tension, character development, plot twists, humor. When Robert comes on the radio, you know you're in for a ride.

Here's our conversation from 2012. I've never particularly wanted to be Robert. I would have much preferred to be a J name, any J name really, except probably Janet or something hard for a boy. But this is probably not what you wanted to talk about. No, this is the exact subject matter I wanted to talk to you about. Spot on. I once for a while became Malcolm. I don't quite know why. Malcolm isn't really a great name, but when I was in a kibbutz,

It took a while, but we eventually corralled the conversation toward what we planned to talk about, drama. Now, I should be clear here, in case you don't know who Robert is, he doesn't produce radio theater, though you might say his work is theatrical. No, Robert is a journalist, first and foremost. He tells true stories. He just relates the truth dramatically, rather than in a just-the-facts-man kind of approach. Robert's resume is long. I mean,

I mean, really long. He started at Pacifica covering Watergate. Then he moved on to NPR, then Network TV, ABC, CBS, PBS. These days, he's probably best known for Radiolab, a science program which he co-hosts with Jad Abramrod. And how exactly do you help an animal? This is an honest question. When it has to spend its entire life...

In a cage. Today on Radio Lab, zoos are our topic. I'm Jad Abumrad. Well, you know, I think I can take you to the very moment in modern zoo history when the balance kind of shifted. And who are you? I'm Robert Krolwich, and I love the zoo. Shortly, we'll listen to this story about gorilla cages from the Radio Lab program on zoos, but I think you'll find it useful to first hear what Robert has to say about drama in nonfiction stories.

The one thing he said during our conversation that has stayed with me is this. So the how you write is basically who you are. Robert would come up with something that profound. How you write is basically who you are. I've been mulling that over for days, and it finally made some sense to me when I phrased it as a question. Who am I as a storyteller?

What Robert is saying, at least I think this is what he's saying, if you want to add drama to your writing, tap into who you are as a storyteller. But look, I've gotten way ahead of myself. We're swimming in the deep end already. Let's back up. Can you just talk to me about drama in radio stories, why you think it's important? Yeah. Well, it's sort of like you have to ask yourself, well, what mood am I striking? Now, if...

You're in a newscast and then you know the mood. The mood is urgent most of the time. This just happened. We've got to tell you it. So there's a certain athleticism that's involved. You just give them the facts. You give them the facts accurately. You get on, you get off, you get it right, and you go home. And that's a kind of classic newscast.

But now let's say that the problem that you want to talk about or the story you want to talk about is not urgent in that way. It's a feature. So it's going to have to create its own urgency and its own moods and its own colors. The way that has been done over time is that people tell stories and they tell the stories with a certain amount of drama invested.

They let their voices get loose and they inhabit the voices of the people that they're talking about. So they might even, you know, say, so then the policeman said to me, here's what we're going to do. He might just put a little theater into it. And that's as old as Hans Christian Andersen or really as old as Homer. That's the oldest kind of storytelling there is. So there's a distinction between, you know, newscasts and TV.

And the main distinction is that there is theater permitted and theater that's almost necessary. By theater, I don't mean that you would sound like an actor because in nonfiction, the thing that you have to remember all the time is that what you say must be believed. So you must be credible. You have to find the middle ground. So that's the business that I'm in. I'm trying to find...

Some way to tell you something that keeps you riveted but that you believe is true. And how do you do that? How do you try to incorporate drama in the stories you produce? Well, there's all kinds of ways. The easiest and simplest way is to just do it in a voice.

I think the people who invented the newscast, they thought, well, how should we want to sound omniscient? We want to sound like what we know we know and that we've checked it and so on. So what is the voice of that? And they came up, probably the British came up first, but the CBS version is, in Washington today, I am falling water, despotted, it's a tone. When you're telling a feature story, the one I noticed first was Charles Kuralt at CBS. He slowed down. He went into a bass tone.

And he also warmed it up. So he learned how to say the same words that the newscaster would say, but he learned how to say them as if he were by a campfire. Although these were true stories, he was using the storyteller's voice. And since then, I think all kinds of people have figured out ways. So Scott Simon, who might have a certain kind of baroqueness, he loves his language, but

But it belongs to him. That's his way of talking. And Jad has, Jad Abumrad, my partner here at Radiolab, he has his way of talking. And it's not so distant from what they actually sound like in their real lives. If you were to sit with Ira Glass at a diner, as I often do, then I'm hearing the voice that I actually hear on the radio almost uncannily the same.

So what you do, the first rule here is you start telling stories as if they're, you know, as if you are a storyteller. And you tell them in a voice that feels comfortable to you. And you give the voice the range that the story allows. So when the story is sad, so are you a little. When the story is happy, you share the joy. You sort of smile with your voice. And that's where it begins. That's the simplest way. And it's not easy.

Let's hear what Robert's talking about. Listen to his delivery in this piece about gorilla cages at zoos. Listen to how his voice propels the drama. And afterwards, Robert and I will perform a little dissection of the dramatic writing in this story. And how exactly do you help an animal? And this is an honest question. When it has to spend its entire life...

In a cage. Today on Radio Lab, zoos are our topic. I'm Jad Abumrad. Well, you know, I think I can take you to the very moment in modern zoo history when the balance kind of shifted. And who are you? I'm Robert Krolowicz, and I love the zoo. What about you? I don't know about the zoo. Kind of, meh. Icky. Why? I just, I want the animals to...

not be there in a cage. Be someplace, what, prettier, safer? Safer, prettier. I'd rather watch them on TV, frankly, and let them run around their own. Well, the guy, this is interesting, the guy who made the big move in modern zoo history. Hello.

Hello. That's him. Hello. His name is David Hancocks. We got him into a studio. And he's sort of a little bit like you. He was very ambivalent about zoos. I'd actually, for a while, toyed with the idea of, do I want to go and work in zoos and try to change them, or do I want to stay outside zoos and work to close them down? And I came to the conclusion that there's no way you're going to close zoos down.

The fascination of wanting to be close to wild animals cuts across every strata of society. You know, this is my case, by the way. I love being close to them. Anyway, David Hancock's decided if you can't beat him, you join him. And it was in the mid-1970s, and David was working actually as an architect. He was between jobs. When he got a call, a friend recommended him for a job at...

the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Yes, yes. And he gets hired. I was in an unusually fortunate situation in that just after I was hired and got there, the zoo director left. And so there was nobody to run the place, well, except for David. So he decided to take a look at the entire philosophy of the zoo and change everything, starting with the gorillas.

They lived in awful cages. The gorillas were living in a small concrete building. It was a spare, empty concrete box with a glass window. The gorillas, of course, were bored and slowly going out of their mind. Occasionally, you'd find a gorilla who'd take his feces and smear it on the wall. Yes.

And they had nothing else to interact with. The only natural components in his life that he ever came into contact with would have been the food that he ate and the feces that he produced. So cages were the problem. The solution, he decided, well, he wanted to rip up the cages, yank them out completely, and replace them with

with something, a natural setting of some sort. But when he looked around for a model, no zoo in the world had gorillas in what you would call a natural setting. And he wasn't even sure

What is natural for, say, a gorilla? There was very, very little known about gorillas and their wild behavior. In fact, all the books said that gorillas don't climb. This was early in the 70s, remember, so David invited a person who did know. I heard about Diane Fossey. Diane Fossey's work was beginning to be

carried in National Geographic. You know Diane Fossey? Yeah, from that Sigourney Weaver movie she played. Before she was played by Sigourney Weaver, Diane Fossey was an actual person. She lived with a group of gorillas, wrote down everything she saw, their social interactions and all, and was the gorilla expert at that time. And I heard that she was coming to the U.S. and she agreed to come to Seattle and spend a couple of days with us.

We were trying to get images from her of the sort of environment we could create. And the breakthrough came after the couple of days she'd spent with us. I was driving her back to the airport. And I said, is there anything you've seen around here or anywhere in this part of the world that in any way resembles the sort of places where you've seen gorillas in the wild? And

She just pointed to this verge on the freeway. I don't know what a verge is. What's a verge? Oh, sorry. The landscape on the side of the freeway, the sloping, what would you call it? I would call it, if it were President Kennedy, I would call it a knoll. What do they call it? A knoll. Yes, a knoll. But I wouldn't call that because only President Kennedy gets that. I would call it the green stuff on the side of the road. Okay, yeah. It was a banked area. Yeah.

that had once been cleared, and then this verdant growth that you get in Seattle was springing back. And she said, that, right there, that's where I would expect to see, to be observing gorillas in the wild. So I dropped her at the airport, came back, and on the way back, illegally parked on the side of the freeway and took photographs, and then said, here, this is what Diane Fossey said we should be designing. So, as you could tell, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing, but they also didn't have a boss.

And within a few months, with help from a landscape architect... Hi, I'm Grant Jones from Seattle, Washington. They drew up a plan and out came the bulldozers.

Exactly. And we were creating huge mounds and hills about 10 or 15 feet high, some rocky cliffs along one side, a creek, trees, shrubs about 3 or 4 feet high, big herbs and vegetables and tangles of vines, undergrowth, lots of laurel bushes, hawthorn trees, big comfrey leaves that we planted that have long berries and pointed drip tips, tropical-like leaves, fast-growing pioneer plants. We just let it grow wild.

Now, nobody was watching you. And nobody was watching us. And that was the critical factor, I think, yes. Because if a traditional zoo director...

had seen or heard what we were doing, he would have stopped it. And why? Why would a traditional zookeeper have stopped this? Well, because they were worried about what would... Like, suppose you had been a gorilla and you'd spent your whole life living in a cage, in a concrete cage. Now I'm going to take you, little Jack, my baby gorilla, and stick him into a completely new place.

with sky and jagged things. I mean, I would be worried that you'd hurt yourself. In the zoo world generally, I think people were very nervous about it. That's Violet Sundy. She was the gorilla keeper at the Seattle Zoo. Yes, I was their primary keeper at that time, and the zoo was advised by a lot of zoo experts that it wouldn't work. I had zoo directors tell me it was stupid,

and it was unnecessary. That, you know, the gorillas would fall out of the trees and hurt themselves. If the gorillas climbed, they would fall and break their necks. Fall and break their bones or they'd get... They were putting their health at risk. Diseases. They would get sick because it wasn't a sterile environment where you could, you know, disinfect concrete. And that they'd get psychologically...

Yes. A bold statement. But as the clock ticked down to the day that these five animals would walk from their iron cage through a door into this field...

It was a real open question at the time, what will happen? I think we were all somewhat nervous. Oh, we were nervous. Oh, sure. How will they react? What will they do? The truth is, nobody knew. And so after five years getting ready, after 16,000 square feet of guerrilla display area were prepared, finally...

It was time. On this sunny July, I think, as I remember, it was a July morning. I can't remember the exact year. I think it's 70s. Actually, I just looked it up. July 31st, 1979. We let them out.

Kiki was the first to come to that doorway and look out. Kiki was the dominant gorilla of this group. There were six gorillas. He was the star. Kiki was my favorite, I have to confess. He was so smart. And he was big. He was six feet tall, 460 pounds. Kiki came into view first. And of course, he's never seen anything remotely like this before. So here he is, this huge creature, standing at the doorway,

just looking at this unknown world. He stood in the doorway for many minutes and finally Kiki starts to slowly step forward. First a step, then another. And he went as far as a creek and sat down. And then he looked up. We noticed he looked up for a long time and we looked up also. Clouds were blowing by at fairly low altitude. Swallows flying overhead. There were crows in the trees.

There was a wind blowing, the trees were rustling, the grass was moving, you could see the hair on his face moving. He looked up for a long time and took all this in. And then he looked down into the water, and a little eddy there, and you could see that he was looking at his face in the water, which he'd never seen. And then he just starts looking all around, and then all of a sudden he sees us. Grant, Violet, and David and a few others were standing there,

behind some glass at an observation point. They were about a hundred yards away from the doorway. He came right up to the glass where we were. And they knew that Kiki had been a pretty angry gorilla before. And then he did something that we, in a million years, hoped he never would.

which was to reach down into the sand, screw his arm down deep into the sand, and he pulled out this big chunk of broken concrete about six, eight inches wide. And then he held it up over his head. We thought, "Oh, this is it. He's going to break the windows." We'd spent weeks raking and telling the contractor to remove all debris and begging them to check and recheck to look for such things as this piece of concrete. And there it was.

So Kiki held it over his head and sort of waved it around a little bit and looked with an angry look at us. And he just held it there. And then he just dropped it. He almost threw it down. He just sort of dropped it down. We all breathed a sigh of relief. And then he laid down on his back and his mate Nina came over and sat beside him and a little baby came over and laid on his chest and they just...

proceeded to enjoy themselves like we weren't there. It was magic. It was just... It was magic. They looked like different animals. Totally different animals. It felt like we were seeing a gorilla in the wild. Needless to say, we all cried after he came over. I didn't cry, no, but...

I had a lump in my throat. I felt like finally this is right. This is really what's right for them. I remember there was this strange feeling afterwards. It was almost like we'd been to a wedding where there was this mixture of happiness and sadness and I think more than anything else there was just a great sense of relief. We thought well when will he produce this angry behavior and pound on the glass and you know he never ever did it. The old Kiki never returned, never filled his body again.

From 2007, that's an excerpt from a Radiolab episode on zoos. Earlier on, Robert said that drama in storytelling is derived, in part, from the voice. Finally, I'm going to tell you

It was time. Well, there's also the writing, the word choice, and the information the producer chooses to focus on. Take the very opening of the gorilla cage story, for instance. For most of the Radiolab episode up to the start of that story, Robert and Jad focus on how badly animals were treated in zoos. We brutalized them, Jad says. And then Robert says, I think I can take you to the very moment in modern zoo history when the balance kind of shifted. Robert.

Robert is focusing on a turning point. Almost by definition, that's drama. So right out of the gate, Robert's framing the entire story as a dramatic plot point in the history of zoos. Robert also says this opening is like saying, whoa, check this out. That sentence means, I think I can take you to a place that you will remember forever.

That I think I can discover something with you or I can show you a brilliant bit of scenery. Will you come with me? Let me show you something really cool, which is a very ordinary and sensible invitation if you want to take someone somewhere. Let's go to Rome where they have incredibly high dome buildings. I've never seen anything like it.

If I said, let's go to Rome, that other big city that's kind of smaller than the one we're in now in New York, that's not going to go with you. So that is a come hither sentence. The guy who made the big move in modern zoo history...

Hello. That's him. Hello. His name is David Hancock, so we got him into a studio. Robert helps build the drama in the way he frames the main character. Think back to David Hancock. He was the zoo director who came up with the idea to change gorilla cages. Robert portrays David as an unlikely zoo director. He was an architect, after all, and he became a zoo director practically by accident. He was between jobs when he got a call a friend recommended him for a job at...

at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Yes. Then he comes up with this radical idea for changing the cages. Other professionals think he's crazy, and he designs the cage based on a somewhat off-the-cuff remark from gorilla expert Diane Fossey. So, as you could tell, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

Framing David in this manner by driving home so many of the points that make him and the changes he's proposing as unlikely, surprising, almost fantastical, Robert builds the drama.

Now, I have to tell you, I thought for certain Robert would agree with me on this. It just seems obvious. He's setting listeners up. Robert's not lying. He's arranging and magnifying the facts for dramatic purposes. But Robert says no. That framing has less to do with drama and more to do with the facts. Because that's what we want. I mean, that's not a choice of mine. That's just a description. And, Robert says, this is just how he tells stories.

How you write is basically who you are. This is a reflection of personality. This is what it means to have a voice. If you ask Scott Simon anything about anything, he would come back to you and tell you a story in which the moral value of a character in the story would be very at the center of it. Is this a good person or a bad person? That's just how he addresses the world. Ted Koppel wants to know if you're lying or not.

Particularly if you're a powerful person and you're lying, he wants to get you, catch you in the lie and bring you down. With Charles Kuralt, it's very painterly. He just wants to give you a face and a scene. There's this man and his wife and his children and look at what he did, surrounded here by this oldest daughter and the youngest. And you get a scene.

So for me, it's like, you know, how did this happen? Like, what did you have to do to make X become Y? How did you do it seems to be my particular thing. Robert's writing voice, his storytelling style, comes through loud and clear in the buildup of tension in the story. Robert is a master at practically forcing you to wonder, what will happen next? It was a real open question at the time, what will happen? How exciting is it to go down a staircase?

you know that each step is the same size as the step before it and down you go. You might fall, you might break your stride, you might hit a step that's a different size than the others, but if I told you that each step would be like its predecessors, then that's... So it is essential, it seems to me, that there be something at risk. To me, what you do is you take the ordinary rhythms of life

and you look at them from an angle where the tension then is created, you create moments where people don't know what's going to happen next. If I had to put it into one phrase, people don't know what's going to happen next. A bad bit of journalism is where you know exactly what's going to happen next. First a step, then another. And he went as far as a creek and sat down. And then he looked up. We noticed he looked up for a long time and...

We looked up also and clouds were blowing by at fairly low altitude. I didn't time it, but you spend an inordinate amount of time, I'm not saying too much time, but an incredible amount of time milking that moment. There's no detail left out. And then he looked down into the water in a little eddy there and you could see that he was looking at his face in the water, which he'd never seen.

Why do you take so much time in that moment? And then he just starts looking all around, and then all of a sudden he sees us. Because that's the place where time stops. That's where the entire narrative gathers and waits, that we are waiting to see what her reaction will be. And we're looking with anxiety and an enormous amount of attention. The way I'm writing this is I'm now the scientist watching to see whether my experiment has worked.

I'm waiting for my result. So what happens to a person who's paying a lot of attention? You write everything down. But you could have left some of that out. I feel like you're waiting. Let's see what you're milking that moment. That's what it feels like you're doing. You're like, you know, I have the audience. You are in rapt attention. And I'm just going to hold it here because you want to know what happens next.

Maybe I am. I mean, to me, it actually feels a little bit more descriptive than tactical like that. But, you know, I'm sure, look, I'm a total attention-getting slut. I'm not going to pretend anything else. I mean, I will do whatever within reason and within truth to keep your attention. But in this case, I think it just felt natural to me to slow things down at a moment like that because, in effect, that's what really happens to everybody who's there at that time.

But if you're asking, like, did I do it intentionally with a sort of chuckle because I'm going to keep you here, you buggers? Yeah, of course. Of course I did. But I don't know that that was the main motivation. The instinct to do it was to tell the truth in a tempo that seemed true. And the tempo would slow at that moment, I think. Yeah.

You know, this is really interesting because I went into this interview thinking you were going to say, yes, I wrote it that way on purpose in order to pump up the volume on the drama. These guys don't know what they're doing. The profession says they're crazy. They're inventing something entirely unknown, unseen before this. And the biggest, angriest gorilla steps out

and then picks up something concrete. And just about every time I've mentioned one of these things, if I've heard you correctly, you've said, well, no, actually, I was just reporting the truth. You know, I mean, you're not wrong. I mean, I'm aware of all the things you've said. It just doesn't seem to be my first awareness, I guess.

The word confession, I think, is very closer to my mind. I don't think I'm being coy or delusional or anything. In order for this to feel true to me, which is really important, and it comes through to the audience, I am actually choosing these beats and cadences and places to slow down and places to speed up because it feels to me like that's the truth of the moment.

And yes, I want to capture an audience's attention. Yes, I want to thrill you or entertain you or all those things. But mostly, I'm not doing it the way you described it. And what you're getting here is a confession from me about what it would feel like had I been there. There's that little bit of magic. I'm standing in for the people who have told me this story. I'm going to express it through them but in a way through me and others.

And this is my version. And I know that out of someone else's mind and mouth, it would come out different, as we've said, with, you know, Koppel or Simon or whomever. But out of me, this is my truth.

And there's the nugget I took away from talking to Robert. Yes, he's employing the tools of drama, but it's sort of subconscious. It's native to who he is as a storyteller. So the how you write is basically who you are.

So how do you figure out who you are as a storyteller? Well, one way is to listen to yourself. Notice how you tell stories to friends. What kinds of stories do you tell? How do you start? How do you keep people engaged? What details do you focus on? How do you create tension and drama? What I'll do is I will talk the story and then I will write down what I've said in my head. I am tracking myself.

And I have a very specific idea. I'm at a deuce, that's a table for two, a restaurant table for two, and it's a little crowded in this place, and I'm talking to somebody who's right across the table from me, and I want to tell her or him my story, and I have to make it a little bit more energetic and a little bit more, well...

not wordy. I want it to boil down so that sort of it's a highlight reel of writing. And that's the way I'm going to get and hold this person's attention. And I say it that way in my head, and then I basically transcribe myself. And so often to test what I've written down, I will actually speak it. So I'll think it, then I'll record it in my hand, I'll write it down, and then I'll say it. And if it doesn't sound like me talking in the way I want to talk, then I change it.

That's Robert Krowich, reporter, raconteur, and the former co-host of Radiolab from a conversation we had back in 2012.

Even though Robert retired from Radiolab, as I mentioned, he's still telling stories and asking Krolwichian questions about the curiosities of the world. Recently, I watched a piece he made for CBS Sunday Morning where he ponders why we say tick-tock for a clock sound instead of talk-tick. Uh-huh. See what I mean? Krolwichian.

Jay Allison, Transom's founder, said of Robert one time, "Back when everyone was having a lot of fun inventing public radio, Robert seemed to be having the most."

Transom has a collection of half a dozen early pieces from Robert, including one of my all-time faves, Ladies Who Terrorize Grocers. So this poor grocer, the door opens at 8 o'clock, and there's the ladies from the Bronx and the ladies from... Long Island, we were a mob scene. You did this repeatedly Saturday after... Every Saturday we set the alarm, we got up early and we went shopping. That was a disaster for us. That and Robert's manifesto, a kind of...

fusillade of radio sparks can be found at transom.org. The aforementioned Jay Allison reviews my scripts, so does Genevieve Sponsler at PRX. My thanks to both PRX and Transom for their support of Sound School, and thanks also to WCAI.