ABSTRACT
This chapter forensically investigates a wide resource of advice and instruction from books on the best methods of plotting dramatic storytelling in the sound medium only. Is one plot line with a heavy focus necessary to maintain the attention of listeners because of the everyday competition presented to the other senses? Can the auditory imagination cope with second, third, and fourth plots. Is there a correlation and demand of specific plotting in sound drama to linear frame and duration? Should the sophistication and potential of plotting be pushed to the very limits like theatre and film and indeed prose literature? Rather than regard the listener as a handicapped and disabled sensorium, should not the writer pitch the ambition and tolerance of the audience to an equal degree? This chapter includes discussion of Tom Stoppard’s radio play Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), and the author argues that outstanding plotting in the long form is achieved by Caryl Phillips in his Giles Cooper award-winning play The Wasted Years (1984), his first play for radio.
