My guest blogger today is Mara Purl , author of the Milford Haven series, which started out as a radio show. She is making a stop today at the Blood Red Pencil on her national blog tour for What the Heart Knows . The traditional relationship between narrative fiction and screenplay is that book comes first, film comes second, as an adaptation of a popular novel. For me, however, this process occurred in reverse order. First, I created a radio drama. Second, I started adapting my scripts into narrative fiction. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived near its famous Farmer’s Market, a rambling collection of tented stalls selling everything from fifty varieties of fresh fruit juice to ethnic foods from thirty cultures. Of course, it had an espresso stand that served the most extraordinary latte in the city: the brew strong and bitter; the milk frothed almost to the consistency of cream; the cup thick and white, preferably with a small chip in the saucer, near the square cube ...

Writing for the radio, in some ways, is very similar to writing for the page, but there are also integral ways that writing a radio script is very different. Let’s start with the way that a good radio play, for example, is similar to a good short story. 1. Short stories and radio plays need strong, compelling characters that the audience cares about. 2. Active verbs make the writing more interesting in both short stories and radio plays. 3. A good short story, like a radio play, starts right in the action. There is no meandering around, going on about back story or the setting in too much detail. The writer must hook the audience straight away; in radio even more so since one turn of the dial and the story is gone. 4. Telling the audience what to think and feel will kill a radio script just as quickly as it kills a short story. Let the audience be active in the story. 5. A good radio drama like a good short story is ‘lean and mean’. Get to the conflict quickly; introduce the protagonis...