Welcome back to the Creative Studio where we conduct podcasting experiments. This is the fourth episode in our series on narrative podcasting. If you haven’t listened to the previous episodes, you can visit CreativeStudio.Academy or subscribe to the podcast to get those episodes.

My name is Joshua Rivers and I am your host on this extraordinary journey into the world of narrative podcasting. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not an expert. I’ve been learning these things along with you.

This episode is a continuation through the podcasting workflow and is kind of a part 2 to last week’s episode where we talked about planning your narrative podcast. This week we will take those plans and begin to make actual preparations. We’ll be getting things set in place so we will be ready to record.

In a previous episode, we heard from Jessica Abel, the author of the book “Out on the Wire” and the host of the associated podcast. She shared some things about planning and creating the narrative arc. We won’t rehash those things now, but she helps us take the next step.

7 you have a character who's going to be at the center of the story, you want to think about what are these stages that they've gone through, and the change that you want to depict in your narrative, right?

8 you figure out when the turning points are, when do they go from one place to another place, where were their dilemmas, where were their decision-points, and then when you go to the person you want to ask them all kinds of questions about those decisions that they had to make, and about those moments of change, and how was it before, and how was it after. So your preparation is often figuring out the bare outlines of what this person's story is, and then deciding where do you want to delve in further.

4   In our case, we very specifically targeted certain individuals that we wanted for their knowledge-base and their experience in the industry.

Corey Coates joins us again. He is from Podfly, helping podcasters  with their podcast production. He also works with Jessica Rhodes in creating The Podcast Producers podcast.

It's tough because in a lot of cases you have folks that are the most boisterous, or the most vocal, the most prominent in some of the communities and Facebook groups, that may not necessarily be the ones who are bringing the best information,

We know, because I've been in podcasting for 10 years, Jessica'd been doing this for two, three years, as well, so we kind of got a sense of those, you pass kind of the sniff test, if you will, you can kind of tell when you talk to folks that they're either really legit, they know their stuff, and they're really making a contribution, or they're kind of jokers and they're coming in and they're just sort of marketing themselves and not really the skills that they may have acquired

Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting also does a lot of experimenting and testing of different things in the podcasting world. He chimes in on this as well.

9   Well for me, I've done it where I have chosen guests who had the background I was looking for,

So by doing that, I kind of knew that the information they were going to provide, I wasn't going to really have to sift through much, it should all fit the goal of the episode,

you have to...