Portrait of A Conflict

I’ve been listening to radio shows ever since I was in middle school. I like the format because it portraits a story in details, and yet still leave room for listeners to use their imagination to fill out the visuals.

For this audio story, I want to make a story about a conflict that is in my life. At the heart of every interesting story there is a conflict, big or small. And for every conflict there are different sides of the same event. Similar to the excerpt from They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky, it describes the same event from different people’s perspective. So I thought of recording my journey of understanding and resolving my own conflict as a story.

As a part of my understanding of conflicts in general, I did a 2 hours training on conflict resolution, where I learned about my conflict style and theories about conflicts. The specific model about conflict used was PIN model - as in Position, Interest, and Need.

As I was thinking about the process of planning the story, I watched an interview of Billie Eilish about her song writing process, where she explained her process. She would use drawing to map of the feelings she wants to express in her song. And use those drawings as a roadmap for her song writing to invoke those feelings.

I thought her way of mapping out the structure of the piece is very useful, so I used the classic narrative arc map to guide myself during editing.

My original plan was to keep this story around 15 minutes, but after editing a lot of material out it is hard to make it that short and complete.

Here is a link to the audio file.