One of VoiceMap’s top performing publishers, Tom Darbyshire, shared his tips for how to tell a story at our March webinar.
Tom spent decades as an advertising creative director, helping many of the world’s most famous brands tell their stories – in everything from radio spots to Super Bowl commercials – and was even nominated for a Prime Time Emmy.
He’s also a passionate traveller, and for a decade before he started making audio walking tours he was sampling them, which gave him a clear sense of what he wanted to do differently. So far he’s created 19 TellBetter tours of New York City, with two more in production and a dozen more planned.
Below you’ll find the highlights and insights from the webinar, along with the full session recording.
The tour creation process has four steps – research, route planning, script, and production – but he focused entirely on the script. Because, as he puts it: “If your script is dull, your tour will be dull.”
Here are Tom’s 15 script tips, illustrated with examples from his own tours and a handful of standout locations from other VoiceMap publishers.
Tip 1: Make it personal.
Or, as Iain Manley, VoiceMap’s Founder and CEO, explored in our January webinar: make it “weirdly human.”
Every VoiceMap publisher brings something different – a particular sense of humour, a neighbourhood they grew up in, a passion or obsession no one else shares. That’s the thing to lean into. Tell your story. Your unique voice. Your personality. Of course, many VoiceMap publishers are creating tours about historical events from decades before they were even born. You can still tell these stories your way. That’s one thing AI can’t do.
Here’s a great example of personal storytelling from Shereen Habib’s Bo-Kaap: The Village in the City tour:
Tip 2: Talk about the people. Not the place.
You can take your listeners on a walk through a city filled with amazing art, architecture and history… and still bore them to death.
Tours go dull when they’re built on names, dates and facts. They come alive through personalities, relationships, emotions and drama. We’re wired to care about individual people, not groups. Fundraising experts call this “the identifiable victim effect,” and it’s why the story of one person always hits harder than a statistic about millions. So instead of talking about the thousands who fought in a battle or died of a plague, tell the story of just one. Who is your main character? The victor? The villain? Or the victim?
Here’s an example from Annie Sargeant’s Île de la Cité: Where Paris Was Born tour:
Trigger warning: the following clip contains graphic violence.
Annie also only mentions one name, that of the main character. This keeps it simple for the listener. Describe everyone else in your story by their relationship to the named character: “his teammates… his executioner… his boss… his daughter.” Try to keep it to no more than two named characters.
Tip 3: Write screenplays, not encyclopedia entries.
Another principle of good storytelling is: show, don’t tell. When you use vivid, specific language, it activates what’s known as Theatre of the Mind. Listeners can’t help but form mental images as they listen to your story. Picture an elephant in a pink tutu, riding a blue unicycle across a highwire. You can’t help but see it. Whenever possible, think about how to tell a human story that creates a little movie for the mind.
Here’s an example of Tom’s Gilded Age Guide: Mansions of Fifth Avenue and Millionaire’s Row tour:
Tip 4: Actively avoid passive voice.
Passive verbs describe a state of being without creating any visual. Active verbs put the listener inside the action, giving them something to see and hear.
When we talk about buildings and squares and statues, it’s hard not to use passive verbs. Buildings are not alive. Buildings don’t fall in love or start wars. People do – so make the story about the people. Does this mean you should never use passive voice? No.
Here’s a gripping exception from Christopher Burslem’s Thailand’s Road to Democracy tour, where the emotional impact is actually greater because the focus is on those being acted upon:
Tip 5: Start with action.
Start your story with a mental image that puts your listener there in the room where and when it happened. Tom uses this in the example of his upcoming East Village: A walk on the wild side along St Marks Place tour:
An art gallery is a silent room where stuff hangs motionlessly on walls. But opening with the sound of spray cans painting graffiti puts the listener there at the moment of creation.
Starting with action will often mean starting at the beginning – what screenwriters call the inciting event. But the best action to start with isn’t always the first action. Murder mysteries start with the murder, then spend the whole movie investigating the events that led up to it. And people love a mystery.
Tip 6: Make an entrance. (Or an exit.)
Quite often a tour is standing in front of a closed building. Adding a moment of arrival or departure — asking listeners to imagine the story’s characters coming or going — gives them an action to anchor to. In this example, from Tom’s Gilded Age Guide: Mansions of Fifth Avenue and Millionaire’s Row tour, instead of standing across the street from a mansion, listeners are transported to a street filled with carriages as famous Gilded Age personalities arrive and climb the steps:
Tip 7: Give them something to “get”.
Think about how a good joke works. You set up a situation, build the drama, then provide a surprising twist. The listener has this moment where their brain says: Oh, I get it. I see what you did there. And that makes them laugh.
Research shows that when you involve the listener – ask their brain to do just a bit of work in a way that rewards them – a switch flips and a memory gets created. They remember your message and feel positively about your tour.
In his Brooklyn Heights: Splendor and scandal in America’s First Suburb tour, Tom stops the listener outside a cat café in Brooklyn. Here, people pay to hang out with cats, so Tom filled the script with playful cat puns:
You can also engage someone’s brains with cleverness. On his Greenwich Village: Pride and Folk from Stonewall to MacDougal Street tour, listeners stop outside the house where Edgar Allen Poe lived in New York. Poe’s most famous poem, The Raven, has a very distinctive cadence. So Tom used that cadence to shape the script for this location:
Tip 8: Put your listener in the moment.
Sometimes you may want to shift into the present tense and tell the story as though the listener’s actually there as it happens, seeing it unfold before them.
Here’s an example from Dan Sutherland-Weiser’s Baltimore’s Little Italy: Where Every Stoop has a Story tour, where he does just that:
Tip 9: Make your listener the principal character.
Sometimes Tom not only shifts into present tense, he invites the listener to imagine they are the person at the heart of the story – as in this example from his West Village Flappers, Beats, Freaks and Punks tour:
This first-person trick can be quite powerful but Tom recommends not using it more than once in a tour.
Tip 10: Tell them a secret.
Point out the details that everyone misses. People love being let in on a secret. So take them down a hidden alley. Or into a speakeasy. Make them feel superior to all the other tourists who just walked right by it.
Derek Blyth’s tour of Ghent tells the story of a bar, where you have to surrender your shoe as collateral if you want to order a beer. Let listeners into the secrets that only locals know.
Tip 11: Break stories into chapters.
In screenwriting, they often talk about the stages of classic storytelling:
- The set-up.
- The build-up.
- The blow-up.
- The up-shot.
Or another version of the same formula:
- Chase your characters up a tree.
- Throw rocks at them.
- Get them down – either safely, or with a tragic fall.
Tom uses this formula when he tells the story of Chinatown Dragon Fighters, a New York firehouse, and their experience of September 11th in his tour The Lower East Side: Tenement tales of hardship, hope and humor:
In this example, Tom literally chased firemen up a building, then got them down. He used different music to cue the different chapters.
A single building that has had many lives – home to a Founding Father, then to a famous author, then to a communist spy, then to an avant-garde theatre – can become its own string of short stories, each with its own personality.
Tip 12: Talk while you walk.
The best tours on VoiceMap feel like a continuous entertainment experience. The walking time between stops is an opportunity — to set the scene for what’s coming, to follow up on what was just left behind, or to weave a thread that runs through the entire tour. A cliffhanger at the end of a stop can turn a walk into a page-turner. And silence, used deliberately, can be just as powerful — giving listeners a moment to absorb what they’ve heard before the next story begins.
Tom’s tour of Washington Square weaves the story of a famous murder and trial throughout, building it in the segments between stops. His tour of Brooklyn Heights tells the scandalous story of a famous abolitionist preacher, starting at one statue of him and ending at another.
This requires careful word counts. Repeated tests and adjustments. But VoiceMap editors – who review scripts for timing and word count – assist publishers with this.
Tip 13: Write tight.
Six-word stories are a useful writing exercise. Here’s one attributed to Hemingway: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” A tale of heartbreak in just six words.
Once Tom completes a first draft – which he does in Google Docs, not in MapMaker (VoiceMap’s publishing tool) – he runs a word count and compares it to his other tours for length. Then he gives himself a goal: cut the script by 20%. His one practical rule: If they can see it, cut it. Don’t tell them the statue is of a man on a horse, cast in bronze. They can see that. Tell them something they can’t see.
Tom also saves longer stories for locations where there’s a place to sit. If you’re going to hold someone in one place for a long time, the story needs to earn it.
Tip 14: Use multiple voices.
There are many great tours on VoiceMap with nothing more than a single, engaging voice. But your favourite podcasts probably use at least two voices to break up the information and keep things snappy.
Tom does all the basic narration himself and uses a separate voice for directions – it helps listeners focus. He uses separate voices for quotes from historical characters, sometimes with a filter to make the recording sound archival. And sometimes he finds actual archival recordings (though you’ll want to research legal rights). Interviews are another option. Dan Sutherland-Weiser’s tour of Baltimore’s Little Italy features interviews with characters in the neighbourhood.
Tom now uses AI voice tool ElevenLabs. His recommendation: don’t default to the Text-to-Speech tool. Instead, try the voice changer tool – read the line yourself to get the delivery the way you want it, then change the recording into the character you want. The results are often much more natural.
You can also put out a call to other publishers and ask them to record voices for you on our forum.
Tip 15: Use the power of sound.
“Every time I hear sounds, I see pictures.” – David Lynch
“Sound is 50% of the moviegoing experience.” – George Lucas
With the power of sound, you’re no longer just a tour guide. You’re a tour guide who brings along a troupe of actors. A symphony orchestra. And a special effects team.
Sound effects, even simple ones, can be a time machine, transporting listeners to the moment when your story took place. Music not only locates the listener in time – it cues them what to feel. Suspense. Longing. Triumph. Despair.
And this isn’t just something that happens in production. It starts in the writing. Just as we want to write in a way that creates mental images, we need to write in a way that calls out for sonic enhancement.
Focus on the listener
When storytelling works – when you describe physical actions that create mental images in the theatre of the mind – you evoke involuntary physical reactions in the listener. They smile. They laugh. They get a lump in the throat, or a tear in their eye. Their hearts race. Their pulses pound. They get goosebumps.
Nothing is more encouraging than a listener who didn’t just learn something – they felt something.
Can audio tours be art?
The Oscars give awards for writing great scripts. For sound design. For editing. For narration. For music. For documentaries.
A great audio tour is a documentary, created from a script, with narration and editing – plus sound design and music. The Grammy Awards now have a category for podcasts. But making an audio tour is actually harder, with GPS and directions and word counts to get right.
Maybe you’re just trying to make some extra income with minimal effort. But Tom’s challenge is this: make something so entertaining, and fun, and moving, that people will take another of your tours, and another one, and drag their friends out to try it too.
Make something so artful that one day someone invites you to fly to LA and put on designer clothes and go up onstage and accept a little statue – and thank the academy, and your mother, and your VoiceMap editor for believing in you when no one else did – as the music swells and the audience stands and cheers.
That’s how you tell a story.
Tools for storytelling
Here are some of the tools Tom uses when crafting his audio tours:
Wikipedia – Tom’s go-to starting point for research, particularly the footnotes, which often point to richer, more detailed sources than the main entry. The facts are usually there in the main article, but the human drama is often buried in a footnote. For his Gilded Age tour, a Wikipedia entry on the Metropolitan Club led him to a source in the footnotes describing exactly how JP Morgan’s friend was denied membership – the detail that turned a dry encyclopedia entry into a story. He uses Wikipedia to find the thread worth pulling, then follows it to wherever the real story lives.
ElevenLabs – Tom recommends skipping the Text-to-Speech tool and use the voice changer instead. This allows you to read the line yourself to get the delivery right, then apply the character voice you want. The results are far more natural.
Envato – Tom’s primary source for sound effects and music, on a yearly subscription. He describes the sound effects library as so comprehensive there’s almost nothing you can’t find on there.
Epidemic Sound – Added alongside Envato when he found himself reusing the same music tracks. Also offers sound effects, and a tool that lets you strip individual stems from a piece of music, which makes it useful for removing vocals from a track before downloading.
Logic Pro – Tom uses Apple’s Logic Pro for all his mixing and editing. It’s the professional version of GarageBand and requires only a one-time purchase. He notes GarageBand would do the job, but Logic Pro offers enough extras to be worth the investment.
Both Envato Elements and Epidemic Sound are royalty-free – one subscription covers unlimited use for our purposes.
