Kato McNickle writes plays, has directed short films, and teaches people how stories are put together. Asked how a podcaster might train their ear, McNickle answers the way they would in playwriting, where the same question comes up: listen to the thing you love in two layers, and learn to tell them apart.

“The next thing you need to do is start defining the difference between: okay, I was in love with what it had to say, versus how did it bring me through and get me to understand what it had to say. […] The thing you can learn to do better is the structure. The content is something that you’re drawn to, and people are drawn to it or they’re not drawn to it. But that mechanical part is the part you really can start to look at.”

The first half of that addresses a real problem. Most of us are carried by what a show says. We finish an episode we loved knowing that we loved it, and knowing nothing about how it worked on us. McNickle says that in their classes, newcomers do the same: they respond to the content and cannot yet see the structure underneath. McNickle’s exercise breaks the spell. Take something you admire, lift its structure, and put your own material on it. Their own example is a version of Cinderella built on the structure of Star Wars, which they decided to write after noticing that Cinderella also has an older figure who gives her magic, and a heroine who talks to animals. As McNickle puts it, “I’m not stealing a story, but I am lifting the engine.”

McNickle’s second half, that content is simply given, does not survive their own next piece of advice.

A few minutes later they turn to length, as part of how a story carries a listener through time. An episode should run as long as it needs, McNickle says, without too much that is extra, and the tell for the extra is hearing yourself think “oh, they said that already,” or wondering why you are still listening to this part. But “they said that already” is not a judgment about the engine. You can only hear repetition if you are tracking what was said. Cutting it is a decision about content, and McNickle is teaching it as plainly learnable as anything else in the lesson.

The Cinderella example has the same seam. The transfer worked because they saw something in the material, a mentor and gifts of magic and a heroine at ease with animals. That is what let McNickle find a Star Wars story inside it, with Cinderella in Luke Skywalker’s place. Choosing which story to hang on which engine, and seeing that it would hold, is not structure, and it is not a given either. It is a content judgment, and it gets better with practice, just as McNickle says the structure work does.

Their sentence runs two different things together under one word. “The content is something that you’re drawn to” is about attraction, and on attraction McNickle is right. Nobody can be taught what fascinates them, and nobody can make a listener be drawn. But content as it reaches a listener’s ear is not attraction. It is what you chose to say about the thing that draws you, what you cut, and which angle you took into it. Those parts are made, and made things can be done better or worse.

So the division that holds is between what draws you and everything you do about it. Structure is one of the things you do about it. Selection is another, and McNickle’s own lesson was already teaching it.

For a podcaster using McNickle’s exercise, that adds one step. When you take apart a show you admire, find the engine first. Then ask the question the structure-and-content split leaves out: what did this host decide not to say, and why this material instead of all the other material they could have used? That question can be learned too, and it may be what separates a show running on a borrowed engine from a show that is actually yours.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Listening with Kato McNickle,” published September 23, 2021.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.