senior x Culminating Paper
The first few months of senior year, I was incredibly optimistic. I was prepared to have the best senior year ever had by anyone, anywhere. I was managing a café, starting fencing lessons and getting ready to squash my procrastination bug under a large boot of extra work. I also wanted to make time to do something creative and productive in order to become a better, more well-rounded person. When the time came to develop a project for Senior X, I knew I should pick something creative and fun, so I could look forward to working on it. Plus, doing something creative as a school project would fill my quota of self-improvement time I had put in my schedule in place of procrastination. It was a perfect idea.
Over the summer I had gotten very interested (that is, obsessed) with radio dramas. I decided nothing would be more interesting or compelling as writing and producing my own radio drama for my senior thesis work.
As usual, I glossed over all the potential difficulties of this project and decided to forge ahead with it. There would be a lot of writing involved – far more creative writing than I had ever finished by a deadline – but that didn’t matter, I reasoned. I would need to figure out how to write on a deadline when working as a travel writer or magazine editor or whatever else I might want to be. The deadlines would be no problem. After all, I had cut procrastination out of my schedule.
The radio drama project got a little more difficult to develop when it had to address a major issue in people’s lives. I chose to address the issues and representation of under-represented and oppressed people. It was a topic I was fairly invested in, since I could often clearly see its implications in everyday life. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to write an entertaining radio drama about representation, but I knew I would eventually think something up.
That mindset, however, of “I’ll eventually think something up,” was the way in which I had approached writing all my other stories. The stories that didn’t have deadlines attached and that sat unfinished, gathering dust. That mindset wasn’t going to work for this script. I didn’t have time to wait for “eventually.” I tried my hardest to write a script that could conceivably address my world issue, to no avail. The document titled “Radio Scripts” became a boneyard of useless fragments of dialogue that never went anywhere.
But, eventually, I did think something up. I kept coming back to a few fragments of dialogue among four friends in a writing club. I knew if I went further with this idea, the recording and production would be fairly low-maintenance, as high schoolers would just sit around and talk to each other. And they could talk about anything, if I could steer them in the right direction. I called the radio drama The Writers of Sunshine. Just four kids in a basement, talking and writing stories together. It would be simple, but all the attention would be on the dialogue and characters – just the way I wanted it.
The idea was good enough, so I started expanding the bits of dialogue into a pilot episode. It then quickly became obvious that it was pretty much impossible to steer fictional high schoolers into conversation about representation of under-represented and oppressed people. Maybe a single conversation, perhaps, but a whole series of episodes?
So, with my plot already somewhat developed, I switched my world issue. My four high schoolers, Harlow, Adrian, Skyler and David, would much rather discuss issues that were immediately relevant to them. I decided to focus on the issues my peers are facing in school and life. To understand the depth and breadth of these issues, I created a survey. What they were looking forward to? What were they most scared of? What did they want older generations to know about them? (See Appendix A)
My only wish with that survey is that I had advertised it a little more widely. I definitely didn’t get as many answers as I had hoped. The responses I did get, though, were incredibly deep and thought-provoking. Common themes emerged from the answers. The survey-takers worried about succeeding in high school and college. They worried about relationships and anxiety. Most of them looked forward to traveling the world and meeting new people. They were honest about their fears and hopes for the future, and I knew I would have to do my best to honor their honesty in my characters and script.
As I got further along with writing, though, it started getting harder to steer the characters’ conversation in the direction of the survey answers. They were starting to take on a life of their own and steering the conversation in whatever direction they pleased. Adrian, in particular, was turning out to be kind of an arrogant jerk. That was the most disappointing part, since it meant I couldn’t like him as much as I had when I started writing. I wrote and rewrote dialogue and settings, trying to make the lines funny, trying to make the characters likable. I finally finished a fragment of script that was good enough to record.
The first recording session went fairly well. Granted, I had my voice actors gather around my iPod microphone in a large, echoey room while our other friends talked around us, but I think it still went smoothly. The voice actors were actually more invested in the script than I thought they would be, and they demanded more information about their characters. I gave them the details that I had thought of, but I was starting to be bogged down in other responsibilities. I got a little sick every time I thought about having to write more radio scripts.
I can’t actually say how I went about those weeks of writers’ block and being generally depressed, because I don’t really remember. All I had was a crippling feeling of guilt because I hadn’t finished more of my work. And guilt because I couldn’t finish more of my work.
But as always, something (probably my self-hatred) shoved me rudely out of writer’s block and demotivation and I could think again. Words finally had meaning, and I quickly finished a whole first episode. Using what I had learned from the first recording session, I changed some of the dialogue so it would be easier for the voice actors to read in their own personalities.
Finally it was time to record the entire first episode. This time, I invited the voice actors to my carpeted and insulated attic bedroom for optimum recording conditions. They sat in a circle, reading their lines into my iPod microphone. There was no joking around. They were very, very serious. First they rehearsed, then they did it for real. I wasn’t used to seeing my friends be this business-like. A little nonplussed, I suggested that, if they’d like to, they could record it again to fix any mistakes they thought they might have made. They made serious noises at one another and told me they’d like to listen to the recording first so they would know exactly what they needed to fix.
I played the recording for them and they listened, just as seriously as ever. There was no laughter, no jokes about the mistakes they’d made. Once it was over, they turned back to their scripts and read their lines again.
The whole session was over in the forty minutes it took to go through the script four times. I had two recordings, finished quickly and responsibly. I was grateful that the voice actors were taking this so seriously and that they wanted it to be as professional as possible, but as they left, I couldn’t help but miss the recordings of outtakes and laughter that I might have been able to include in my finished project.
I resolved to make the next recording session more fun. This whole project was supposed to be creative and stress-free, after all. I was letting it become serious and professional, which wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t the way I had envisioned it. I had envisioned a project where my writing and the chemistry among my friends could work together to make something awesome – something really entertaining to listen to.
Now that the first episode was recorded, though, I had to start work on the second. Between writing and recording, I finally made an outline of where I wanted the story to go. This was difficult and annoying, because the only part of writing that I’m good at is putting words together. Developing characters? Developing plot? I could probably do that as well as... well, as a bad writer.
But part of why I’d picked a project like this was to get better at developing plots and characters. In the first episode, the characters had discussed the kinds of books they liked to read and write. In the next episode, they would read their stories to each other. For the next week or so after the first recording session, I wrote stories for each of the characters. Harlow wrote about a pirate adventure; Adrian wrote a slice-of-life circus story; David wrote a complicated story about a magical world and a harpie; Skyler wrote about vampires. Some of these stories I wrote more successfully than others. Adrian’s story turned out to be one of the best things I’d ever written, while Harlow’s remained a brief outline of chapters. I had tons of fun writing David’s story, but Skyler’s story didn’t turn out as nicely. Vampire books aren’t exactly my cup of tea.
Still, I finished the second episode in two writing binges. I swooped through with an editing pass and it was finished. In the nick of time, too: the fast-approaching AP Biology exam meant I could have a studying/recording party. And I would make sure it was a party. Fun would fill the attic to bursting.
Life, though, does not often listen to plans. The day before the recording session, high school angst subconsciously strained relationships among my voice actors. They came up to my attic the next day and informed me that they had to leave as soon as we were done recording.
David’s voice actor was late, again, so we sat around and talked about movies and music, staying away from more volatile topics. I passed around a highlighter for their scripts and they read quietly. The silence was kind of scary. Somehow I had transformed my laughing friends into serious, professional pod-people.
The script was much longer this time. Even the professional pod-people didn’t want to read through it four times. They practiced once, then read it officially. Then I had them re-record bits and pieces of the script that didn’t sound as good. This time, though, they actually laughed at their mistakes, and for a little while, high school angst was put aside.
The only problem with the recording session was that life hadn’t finished wrecking plans. The final recordings from that session have a background soundtrack of a dryer installation. It’s nice that I can dry my clothes now, but yet another recording session is in order. However, I look forward to making this one the most successful of them all.
Next on the agenda is planning for the display of my project and defense of the work that I’ve done. My voice actors professionally agreed to read a script live, and I plan to talk fairly extensively about the writing process, maybe, or just what I’ve learned.
My main goal for the next week is to write a really excellent third episode that I will give to my voice actors to rehearse many times before they read it out loud. I’m going to steer the characters’ conversation, like a high-end sports car, in the direction I want. They will talk about anxiety, relationships and the high school angst that real high schoolers wouldn’t even mention.
I’m planning a happy ending to the Great Radio Drama of Senior X, with an excellent product and happy voice actors who can laugh at their mistakes and then read their scripts perfectly in character. The third episode will be funny but insightful. It will honor the honesty in the survey responses I received. It will be a fitting final project for my high school career.
I will confess this project was probably the most challenging work I’ve ever done. But while another project might have been easier or taught me more about current world issues, it’s this project that held my interest and brought my passion for radio together with my concern for my peers into a creative product.
I titled my radio drama The Writers of Sunshine, because the town the characters live in is called Sunshine – but also because Harlow, Adrian, David and Skyler talk and write about things that aren’t exactly so sunshiney. Just like regular kids.
And that was my goal, really. To write a radio drama that captured real life and real people. Because, as Adrian so eloquently put it in the first episode, “people are just... kind of beautiful, I guess.” I wanted to capture how normal people talk about normal problems in their lives and how other normal people can help them.
All I have left to do is write a happy ending – both to The Writers of Sunshine and to my high school years. I was prepared to have an unbelievably amazing final year of high school and I did. It’s not over yet – I still have time to wrap up all the loose ends – but it’s winding down to a bittersweet close, like the end of a particularly good radio drama. The characters have become wiser and they speak as if it’s the end, but their story will keep going, whether or not someone is telling it.
Over the summer I had gotten very interested (that is, obsessed) with radio dramas. I decided nothing would be more interesting or compelling as writing and producing my own radio drama for my senior thesis work.
As usual, I glossed over all the potential difficulties of this project and decided to forge ahead with it. There would be a lot of writing involved – far more creative writing than I had ever finished by a deadline – but that didn’t matter, I reasoned. I would need to figure out how to write on a deadline when working as a travel writer or magazine editor or whatever else I might want to be. The deadlines would be no problem. After all, I had cut procrastination out of my schedule.
The radio drama project got a little more difficult to develop when it had to address a major issue in people’s lives. I chose to address the issues and representation of under-represented and oppressed people. It was a topic I was fairly invested in, since I could often clearly see its implications in everyday life. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to write an entertaining radio drama about representation, but I knew I would eventually think something up.
That mindset, however, of “I’ll eventually think something up,” was the way in which I had approached writing all my other stories. The stories that didn’t have deadlines attached and that sat unfinished, gathering dust. That mindset wasn’t going to work for this script. I didn’t have time to wait for “eventually.” I tried my hardest to write a script that could conceivably address my world issue, to no avail. The document titled “Radio Scripts” became a boneyard of useless fragments of dialogue that never went anywhere.
But, eventually, I did think something up. I kept coming back to a few fragments of dialogue among four friends in a writing club. I knew if I went further with this idea, the recording and production would be fairly low-maintenance, as high schoolers would just sit around and talk to each other. And they could talk about anything, if I could steer them in the right direction. I called the radio drama The Writers of Sunshine. Just four kids in a basement, talking and writing stories together. It would be simple, but all the attention would be on the dialogue and characters – just the way I wanted it.
The idea was good enough, so I started expanding the bits of dialogue into a pilot episode. It then quickly became obvious that it was pretty much impossible to steer fictional high schoolers into conversation about representation of under-represented and oppressed people. Maybe a single conversation, perhaps, but a whole series of episodes?
So, with my plot already somewhat developed, I switched my world issue. My four high schoolers, Harlow, Adrian, Skyler and David, would much rather discuss issues that were immediately relevant to them. I decided to focus on the issues my peers are facing in school and life. To understand the depth and breadth of these issues, I created a survey. What they were looking forward to? What were they most scared of? What did they want older generations to know about them? (See Appendix A)
My only wish with that survey is that I had advertised it a little more widely. I definitely didn’t get as many answers as I had hoped. The responses I did get, though, were incredibly deep and thought-provoking. Common themes emerged from the answers. The survey-takers worried about succeeding in high school and college. They worried about relationships and anxiety. Most of them looked forward to traveling the world and meeting new people. They were honest about their fears and hopes for the future, and I knew I would have to do my best to honor their honesty in my characters and script.
As I got further along with writing, though, it started getting harder to steer the characters’ conversation in the direction of the survey answers. They were starting to take on a life of their own and steering the conversation in whatever direction they pleased. Adrian, in particular, was turning out to be kind of an arrogant jerk. That was the most disappointing part, since it meant I couldn’t like him as much as I had when I started writing. I wrote and rewrote dialogue and settings, trying to make the lines funny, trying to make the characters likable. I finally finished a fragment of script that was good enough to record.
The first recording session went fairly well. Granted, I had my voice actors gather around my iPod microphone in a large, echoey room while our other friends talked around us, but I think it still went smoothly. The voice actors were actually more invested in the script than I thought they would be, and they demanded more information about their characters. I gave them the details that I had thought of, but I was starting to be bogged down in other responsibilities. I got a little sick every time I thought about having to write more radio scripts.
I can’t actually say how I went about those weeks of writers’ block and being generally depressed, because I don’t really remember. All I had was a crippling feeling of guilt because I hadn’t finished more of my work. And guilt because I couldn’t finish more of my work.
But as always, something (probably my self-hatred) shoved me rudely out of writer’s block and demotivation and I could think again. Words finally had meaning, and I quickly finished a whole first episode. Using what I had learned from the first recording session, I changed some of the dialogue so it would be easier for the voice actors to read in their own personalities.
Finally it was time to record the entire first episode. This time, I invited the voice actors to my carpeted and insulated attic bedroom for optimum recording conditions. They sat in a circle, reading their lines into my iPod microphone. There was no joking around. They were very, very serious. First they rehearsed, then they did it for real. I wasn’t used to seeing my friends be this business-like. A little nonplussed, I suggested that, if they’d like to, they could record it again to fix any mistakes they thought they might have made. They made serious noises at one another and told me they’d like to listen to the recording first so they would know exactly what they needed to fix.
I played the recording for them and they listened, just as seriously as ever. There was no laughter, no jokes about the mistakes they’d made. Once it was over, they turned back to their scripts and read their lines again.
The whole session was over in the forty minutes it took to go through the script four times. I had two recordings, finished quickly and responsibly. I was grateful that the voice actors were taking this so seriously and that they wanted it to be as professional as possible, but as they left, I couldn’t help but miss the recordings of outtakes and laughter that I might have been able to include in my finished project.
I resolved to make the next recording session more fun. This whole project was supposed to be creative and stress-free, after all. I was letting it become serious and professional, which wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t the way I had envisioned it. I had envisioned a project where my writing and the chemistry among my friends could work together to make something awesome – something really entertaining to listen to.
Now that the first episode was recorded, though, I had to start work on the second. Between writing and recording, I finally made an outline of where I wanted the story to go. This was difficult and annoying, because the only part of writing that I’m good at is putting words together. Developing characters? Developing plot? I could probably do that as well as... well, as a bad writer.
But part of why I’d picked a project like this was to get better at developing plots and characters. In the first episode, the characters had discussed the kinds of books they liked to read and write. In the next episode, they would read their stories to each other. For the next week or so after the first recording session, I wrote stories for each of the characters. Harlow wrote about a pirate adventure; Adrian wrote a slice-of-life circus story; David wrote a complicated story about a magical world and a harpie; Skyler wrote about vampires. Some of these stories I wrote more successfully than others. Adrian’s story turned out to be one of the best things I’d ever written, while Harlow’s remained a brief outline of chapters. I had tons of fun writing David’s story, but Skyler’s story didn’t turn out as nicely. Vampire books aren’t exactly my cup of tea.
Still, I finished the second episode in two writing binges. I swooped through with an editing pass and it was finished. In the nick of time, too: the fast-approaching AP Biology exam meant I could have a studying/recording party. And I would make sure it was a party. Fun would fill the attic to bursting.
Life, though, does not often listen to plans. The day before the recording session, high school angst subconsciously strained relationships among my voice actors. They came up to my attic the next day and informed me that they had to leave as soon as we were done recording.
David’s voice actor was late, again, so we sat around and talked about movies and music, staying away from more volatile topics. I passed around a highlighter for their scripts and they read quietly. The silence was kind of scary. Somehow I had transformed my laughing friends into serious, professional pod-people.
The script was much longer this time. Even the professional pod-people didn’t want to read through it four times. They practiced once, then read it officially. Then I had them re-record bits and pieces of the script that didn’t sound as good. This time, though, they actually laughed at their mistakes, and for a little while, high school angst was put aside.
The only problem with the recording session was that life hadn’t finished wrecking plans. The final recordings from that session have a background soundtrack of a dryer installation. It’s nice that I can dry my clothes now, but yet another recording session is in order. However, I look forward to making this one the most successful of them all.
Next on the agenda is planning for the display of my project and defense of the work that I’ve done. My voice actors professionally agreed to read a script live, and I plan to talk fairly extensively about the writing process, maybe, or just what I’ve learned.
My main goal for the next week is to write a really excellent third episode that I will give to my voice actors to rehearse many times before they read it out loud. I’m going to steer the characters’ conversation, like a high-end sports car, in the direction I want. They will talk about anxiety, relationships and the high school angst that real high schoolers wouldn’t even mention.
I’m planning a happy ending to the Great Radio Drama of Senior X, with an excellent product and happy voice actors who can laugh at their mistakes and then read their scripts perfectly in character. The third episode will be funny but insightful. It will honor the honesty in the survey responses I received. It will be a fitting final project for my high school career.
I will confess this project was probably the most challenging work I’ve ever done. But while another project might have been easier or taught me more about current world issues, it’s this project that held my interest and brought my passion for radio together with my concern for my peers into a creative product.
I titled my radio drama The Writers of Sunshine, because the town the characters live in is called Sunshine – but also because Harlow, Adrian, David and Skyler talk and write about things that aren’t exactly so sunshiney. Just like regular kids.
And that was my goal, really. To write a radio drama that captured real life and real people. Because, as Adrian so eloquently put it in the first episode, “people are just... kind of beautiful, I guess.” I wanted to capture how normal people talk about normal problems in their lives and how other normal people can help them.
All I have left to do is write a happy ending – both to The Writers of Sunshine and to my high school years. I was prepared to have an unbelievably amazing final year of high school and I did. It’s not over yet – I still have time to wrap up all the loose ends – but it’s winding down to a bittersweet close, like the end of a particularly good radio drama. The characters have become wiser and they speak as if it’s the end, but their story will keep going, whether or not someone is telling it.