You just want to think of the mood and emotion, you want to make sure that the timing is appropriate, that you are giving people enough time to digest what just happened and then transition them emotionally into what is about to happen next so obviously music is a huge part of that and I can go into a little bit about music if you want. 

 

1

But in many cases as we know when we are editing and trying to construct this, you know life just doesn't always fall that way because this is largely unscripted material.  So we have to find a way to bridge from one to the other and in many cases what I would find, as I mentioned earlier, was that if I can't make a bridge between two components of audio, two spoke parts but I do want to put then close together, that is a good opportunity for a narrator to jump in.

2

The two tricks I can give right now are if you can get two pieces of audio to stitch together naturally without having to do any tricks, do that first and if you have to get some narration in there, put a little space, put a little music, give the narration and then narration and go back into it.

3

You know each time I need to go from one part to another I think about you know, how I want to connect to the thing that happened, you know raise a new question.  Like at the end of one section, you want to sort of raise a question that you are going to answer in the section following so there is that.  If you are using music, music is a good way to bridge parts like that.  But yeah, I mean you have cycles in a story, where you have hourglass, at least a long time ago it used to go by the 45 second rule that every 45 seconds you need to have a new little mini arc happening in the story.  I think anywhere between 45 seconds to 2 minutes of time in your story, you need to be raising a question, answering a question.  Starting into a new thing so you have like narration, you have a quote, you do some music, and you need to think about it in little arcs like that.

4

Well you got to give expectations for your audience.  In narrative podcasting, one of the keys that you have to.  One of the things that is great about narrative podcasting is you can be very creative.  But the one thing that you also got to do is make sure that you got a box to think out of.  Okay.  It is very important in narrative podcasting that you actually create a structure, a framework, a box, whatever you want to call it.  But you got to have a formula in place that your listener can expect, okay.

5

And what you do with that is just like I was telling you a story and you were like and then, so as soon as I tell my audience that I fell off the back of that gator and I knew that I was about to get bit, I actually go into the introduction, my normal, standard introduction that they can always expect.  So they are expecting the end of the story but it is just the beginning, I am just foreshadowing what is going to happen at the end of the episode and then all of a sudden my theme music kicks in, my normal standard introduction kicks in and then they are like oh we got to wait for the rest of the story, but what it does is it engages them to the point that, "Oh, okay, this is the formula, he gives us the teaser, we know he is going to finish the story later in the episode but we got to wait for it, so here is the music, here is the into, here is another part of the story and he will get back and tell us what happened on the back of that alligator as soon as he fell off."  And that is how you can weave it in and those are the kinds of transitions I am talking about.  You want to have a specific structure in mind for your narrative podcast always to go