David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box) how he pitched a story to NPR’s This American Life:
I had no experience writing to a time limit, only a word limit, so the draft was seven minutes over the allotted time. And while listeners around the table loved the concept, they were confused. The medical-mystery story was filled with detailed explanations of genetic tests and esoteric diseases. I had a tendency to pack magazine articles with scientific details I found fascinating. In print, the audience could slow down, or reread. In an audio story, as information whizzed by, my proclivity for the written version of “featuritis” was a fatal flaw. But This American Life had a process that fixed my weakness.
Just as with Pixar’s Braintrust meetings, the read-through listeners pointed out moments in the story that left them confused, but did not prescribe how to fix them. And just as at Pixar, Miki and I were required to address the problems but were left to our own ingenuity to decide how. We were given clear problem boundaries, not solutions.
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This cycle repeated several more times.
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Finally, we finished a read-through in which the new person had nothing to highlight. The system had titrated out confusion.
Only once that process was done did Ira Glass commence intense, hands-on editing. The listening sessions and iterations had been the “think slow”; now came “act fast.”
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In less than an hour, Ira and Miki corrected the volume of a few interview clips, picked from various takes of my narration, adjusted the entry points of background music, and finalized Ira’s introduction to the segment. And out the episode went. It was a beautiful example of “think slow, act fast.”
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In short order, the process made a first-time scriptwriter and narrator seem like a seasoned pro, and all without anyone ever telling me explicitly what to do. That, I think, is a special kind of freedom.