From the Studio #1 - How songwriting helped me create the series "Queering Premodern Asia"
Writing podcast scripts is a bit like writing songs for me.
Episode 5: Gods, Sex and the Patriarchy came out on Sunday. This was an especially difficult episode for me to write because it required so much reading and cultural context to even begin to put together a set of stories to tell, let alone create an overall arc to frame them into a cohesive narrative.
Before I even started writing the first episode of the series, I had read or perused hundreds of academic articles, books, blogs, Wikipedia entries and more. To be honest, it was a little overwhelming at first. How on earth was I to condense all of that into a series? Luckily, I’m also a songwriter.
In songwriting, there’s a rule. One idea per song. I decided to apply the same principle to the series. One main point to drive home per episode. So I took a good hard look at all the bits and pieces I had collected over half a year and sussed out the common themes. I mapped out 9 episodes that way:
Queering Premodern Asia - episode list
1. In search of Prince Charming…and his King!
2. But where are the lesbians?
3. Fifty shades of gender
4. Love, marriage & their casual relationship
5. Gods, sex, and the patriarchy
6. The West: savior or demonizer?
7. Gender bender
8. For the record...
9. In search of the socially acceptable
There are many ways to write a song, and they’re all valid. Personally, I find the most efficient way to write one is to know what my chorus will be about. If I start with a killer title, my focus is clarified and my chorus becomes easy to write. Once I have a chorus, all the other parts have to support the chorus by establishing the narrative, giving additional background information, or placing the narrative in a larger context. How might I apply this to a podcast script?
Once I had the titles, I started categorizing all the research by tagging them with color-coded labels based on specific episode numbers. I’m also an engineer by training so a tagging system of sorts was inevitable :-) I would often do something similar when writing songs. I have several notes on my phones of song ideas, and whenever I have a new idea that fits with one of those titles, I will add it to that note.
But at the end of this process, I have a categorized mess of ideas. How can I best organize the various religions, creation myths, birth myths and the like in a way that doesn’t feel like a dizzying tour through a zoo? When I start working on a new episode, I almost always have too much and not enough at the same time. So then it’s time to distill the arc of the episode, using the title as a guide. This week, it was “Gods, sex, and the patriarchy”.
What am I trying to say with this episode?
How mythology/religion and societal gender norms and attitudes towards sex are co-constructed.
What are the common threads illustrating this in the stories collected so far?
- Creation myths coinciding with natural phenomena.
- Sex positive attitude + myths involving celebrating nudity/genitalia.
- Gender fluidity being desirable + hermaphrodite deities and legends.
- Royals claiming to be descendants of gods.
- The diverse interpretations of religious texts across time and space based on political zeitgeist of the time.
While there is so much more I could cover, I felt like one or two stories showcasing these main concepts would be broad enough to show the correlations. Just like in a song, the second verse needs to develop the idea instead of hammering the same one in again, I felt the script needed to just move on once each point was established. So I cut down some stories that were more of the same, and looked up more stories that could bring to life some of the sections that were still a bit dry.
Once the stories were narrowed down, it was time to tie it all together, with an intro, an outro, and a good flow between sections. This is similar to how I edit a song lyric once I have the first draft. Does each section lead to the next one seamlessly or are there weird leaps? I will usually take a break from writing the different sections before coming back and reading the whole thing with fresh eyes. I find it helps me zoom back out to the bigger picture.
The challenge of balancing the bird’s eye view of queerness in premodern Asia with individual stories that paint the scene for a listener has been one of the most exhilarating parts of creating the series as a writer.
Music update
I wrote lyrics for a new song and it made me choke up a little reading it out loud. That’s how you know you’ve got something that’s meaningful to you. It started as an exercise in a songwriting workshop I took for a few weeks. We were given a list of words and were told to come up with a 2-5 word phrase for as many as we could in a couple of minutes. Then we were to pick one and write a song about it. The word was dance. My phrase was “Dance As We Weep”.
The original idea that came to me is the need to be open to joy even during hard times because if we can do that, everything feels a little less painful. In my experience, life tends to be both horrible and amazing at the same time. Allowing others to be there to make bad jokes about it, distract us from it, or turn bad times into bittersweet memories is the best we can do as we do the work of existing in that painful moment.
When I sat down to write it, I actually mapped out three different versions that had slightly different messages. However, I did settle on the original idea. I’m still tightening the lyrics but I will share more about the song soon. I don’t always write this way, but I often do write lyrics first, then put music to it.
In the meantime, if it’s hot where you are right now and you’re in the mood for something uplifting and summery, “Au Soleil” might be a good one to check out and add to your playlists!
You can listen to 5. Gods, sex, and the patriarchy (Nuances: Our Asian Stories) anywhere you get podcasts, including here on the podcast tab!