My name is Keith Crawford (follow on twitter) and I’m director of Little Wonder Radio Plays (follow on twitter),
an anglophone production company based in Paris, France. We publish 10-20 minute long full-cast audio dramas, both new and classics, free to download or stream, every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month. This post is about what we do, how I got into it, and why writing radio play is a great thing for any writer to try – including you, if you enter our free competition from July.
But first, here is the latest radio play, written by yours truly and fresh from Soundcloud:
Back in 2014 my wife fell pregnant and I decided to quit my job lecturing law at Sciences Po, stay at home with the kids, and write fiction full time. One of the first things I did was enter the Atlantis Short Story Competition - I wrote about my experiences here.
That was tremendously encouraging. I wrote a novel, which is currently being read by publishers and agents (exciting!), but being at home with the kids all the time left me feeling a little out of touch. I needed to find a form of writing that would challenge me viscerally without crippling me practically. That was where radio plays came in.
Radio plays are a wonderful medium for people with more imagination than time or freedom. I can write about anything I want, spaceships or dragons or small walking trees living in people’s bloodstreams, without having to worry about budget or feasibility. My professional actors rehearse and record three new plays in an afternoon, instead of the months of rehearsal for a play or the complicated set up for film, and modern recording kit is excellent: see this behind-the-scenes preview we put up on YouTube last week for an example of us in action.
As well as recording classics, I set up a writers group to produce new scripts which we shared, improved together, and staged a public performance at Moving Parts (an anglophone theatre company in Paris)
– all six scripts are in post-production now and you can check out our release schedule for the year.
We’re also looking for new writers, as we expand and grow. That’s where you come in.
Little Wonder are running a short radio play competition that will be open from July12th-August 30th for entries of plays between 1600 and 2000 words long. The competition is free to enter, and all longlisted entries will receive feedback on their plays and a chance to review before submitting for the shortlist. Shortlisted plays will be performed and recorded live before the winner, in turn, gets the full cast audio treatment. For more information about the competition, check out here.
And to keep in touch with our project, subscribe to the website Little Wonder website or any of the social media platforms described here:
Atlantis was a big turning point for me: the first moment I started to believe I could really be a writer. If you’d like to have a crack at radio, whether you have experience or not, then why not try with us? Don’t want to write? Subscribe, listen, and give us feedback: we appreciate the audience!