How Signposting Turns Confusion Into Curiosity
How Signposting Turns Confusion Into Curiosity
If you listen to many podcasts, you’ve likely grown accustomed to hearing someone speak before you know their name. It doesn’t distract you, because you know that in the next beat or two, the host will pop up in a voiceover to tell you who they are.
It’s Preet Bharara’s signature opening for his popular podcast. Every episode begins this way, with his opening, a teaser clip (identified in the transcript, but not in the audio version), and then Preet’s signpost of who was just speaking.
Listen to almost any story-based podcast, Snap Judgment, Criminal, Radiolab, and signposting will be the technique used to introduce new characters. It’s almost the perfect reverse of how we’d do it in academic writing or traditional nonfiction, front-loading the source attribution, then delivering a quotation, but somehow it feels more natural because it allows the reader to participate in discovery. Who is this person speaking? Just the right note of suspense before the host swoops in to rescue you.
I want to say a word about signposting today because I just finished a new memoir, River Selby’s Hotshot, which uses it masterfully. I’ll be interviewing Selby for my September episode of The Things Not Named, and I’ve been impressed by the book for many reasons, but because wildland firefighters speak a language unto themselves as impenetrable to the uninitiated as gearheads talking about engines, I expected more labored exposition. As I’ll explain presently, the reason the narrative moves effortlessly forward is because Selby uses this technique in much the way that a podcaster does.
Podcasters mean many things when they refer to signposting. According to Jennie Coppola, “Signposts are obvious transitions that tease a crucial bit of information, nudging your listeners to pay close attention to the next part of your episode. They can also recap previous moments of the episode.” If someone just shared a nugget that you know will gain meaning later on, you might add a voiceover saying Don’t forget Dan’s prophecy here. It will show up later on.
Karen Given offers as many as 14 reasons why you might insert a signpost. In her telling, signposts are “the way we let the listener know where in the story we are and where we're headed to next.”
Most of Given’s examples are more germane to radio storytelling than they are to literary memoir because we need more prompting and repetition to stick with an oral story. Alert your reader to the fact that you’ve reached the crux of your memoir, the big turning point you’ve been building toward all along, and you’ll kill the magic. In most of those cases, I say let the scene or the character or the nuance speak for itself.
But memoirists have to initiate readers into their worlds, make them feel like insiders who aren’t constantly wondering if they belong. Signposting is a sure way to do that.
