Scott Edward Smith didn’t choose audio. He was forced into it. A career writing for television, movies, and theater came to a halt when Covid shut down every stage and studio. The only channel left was sound.

So he took his one-person plays—stage productions with set dressing, lighting, physical presence—and turned them into audio dramas for a podcast called Intimate Fame. And something unexpected happened.

“As a writer, as a producer, and quite often as the director—taking material that is meant to be seen and being told you have to make this work audio, nobody’s going to see what you think, and having to transform—it wasn’t story. It was words. So that the words were more specific.”

The obvious reading is that this is about adaptation—a professional making the best of a bad situation. But Smith is describing something more fundamental. Stripping away the visual didn’t just change the format. It changed how he thinks about language itself. “I can look at the new stuff I’m writing and going, I didn’t used to write like this. I write like this because of Covid.”

This is worth examining for anyone who works in audio, not just audio dramatists. Most podcasters treat the audio-only format as a limitation—the thing you apologize for when you can’t do video, the reason you feel pressure to add visual elements, the gap between what you’re making and what the platforms seem to want. Audio is positioned as the lesser medium, the one that needs supplementing.

Smith’s experience suggests the opposite. The constraint didn’t weaken his craft. It sharpened it. When you can’t rely on a raised eyebrow, a gesture, a set piece to carry meaning, every word has to do more work. And that precision doesn’t disappear when you go back to visual media—it travels with you. Smith says the podcast world “made my voice better in terms of how I speak and how I narrate.” The limitation became the training ground.

There’s a parallel here for conversational podcasters who aren’t producing audio drama. When you record a conversation without video, you lose the visual cues that paper over vague language. You can’t gesture toward what you mean. You can’t let a facial expression finish a sentence. The words have to land on their own, and when they do, they land differently—more precisely, more intimately.

This is what podcasters miss when they treat audio as a deficiency. The intimacy of the medium isn’t a consolation prize for not having a camera. It’s a discipline. Listeners with earbuds on a morning commute are constructing the entire scene in their heads, and they’re doing it from your words alone. That’s not a limitation. That’s a relationship between speaker and listener that video can’t replicate, because video does the imagining for you.

Smith tracked his own evolution across three productions: Wallis Simpson was a full stage show adapted for audio, heavy with sound effects and ambient noise. Marilyn Monroe was written during the pandemic with audio in mind—more surgical, more deliberate. By James Dean, the production had been stripped to almost nothing: words and music, moving fast. Each iteration trusted the audience more. Each one proved that less scaffolding meant more presence.

The question for podcasters isn’t whether audio is enough. It’s whether we’ve actually explored what audio can do when we stop treating it as video’s understudy. The constraint isn’t the problem. It might be the thing we haven’t taken seriously enough.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Audio Drama with Scott Edward Smith,” published February 15, 2024.