It's like being in a relationship ❤️🔥
Sayre Quevedo on documenting real intimacy
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The first piece of Sayre Quevedo’s I ever heard made me feel like I was eavesdropping.
Espera is a short doc that brings you inside a deeply personal conversation between Sayre and his ex-lover. It’s gorgeously textured and paced - you feel like you’re right there in the bedroom too.
This close intimacy – the sense of witnessing something profound between human beings – is present in all of Sayre’s multi-award-winning work. From his documentary feature The Quevedos, which chronicles his journey to untangle the story of his long-lost family, to Documenting a Death by Euthanasia.
Sayre is a documentary artist working across mediums (though he says sound is his first language), telling stories about identity and human relationships. He was formerly a producer for The Daily, as well as VICE News. He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts program and at NYU’s Journalism Masters program.
In this conversation we nerd out on story structure and how to interview for non-narrated pieces. We talk about trusting our audience, how listening should be communal, approaching stories without shame, and why loving audio is like being in a long-term relationship.
When I spoke to Sayre back in August, he was kind of stuck. He’d been trying to write the same episode of a new show for weeks. It’s a personal story that will be distributed by Futuro media next year. “I went to a gallery yesterday and like, ate a sandwich in the park and saw some friends. I thought if I took a break and came back to it, I would feel refreshed, but no… it’s just as hard as when I started,” he laughed. “That’s the process, I guess.”
I’m curious what you’re struggling with specifically. Is it a structure thing? What’s the roadblock?
I think it’s stylistic and structural, simultaneously. My particular style of work – the thing I’m really interested in doing – is making stories that feel akin to how I feel when I’m reading a book or watching a movie.
For this project I actually started [writing] in the middle. It’s a five-episode series - and I wrote episode two, then three, four, then five. And now I’m working on episode one. This is a bit unusual for me. I usually start at the beginning – I get that right first and then everything flows from there. That’s the advice I give my students. This time my instinct was to start in the middle. Because I wanted to know where I’m going before I did the first episode; I wanted to know what seeds I needed to plant.
But I want to set things up without being overly expositional or didactic. It’s so easy to explain at the audience, to do the classic “in order to understand this, we need to go back in time”. It’s such a crutch – sometimes a useful one – but one that I really, really hate and want to avoid.
So I’m sort of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to set it up in a way that feels in line with the tone of voice, style and pacing of the other episodes. That’s in line with the narrative I’m interested in creating. I mean, it’s a good challenge – but it is so, so challenging.
With this project, do you have a lot of freedom to lean into exactly the way you want the story to be told?
Totally, yeah. It’s funny, I have a palm-sized notebook dedicated to this project that I carry around with me in case I have an idea or hear something that feels important. In trying to write this first episode, I was flipping through the notebook to see if there’s anything relevant. I found this quote by Marlon James: “You have an inner creator and an inner critic, but you don’t need both at the same time. If you allow your inner critic too early into the creative process, you’re not creating, you’re correcting. Critics don’t create. I have to trust that my subconscious is a better writer than me.”
One of the main challenges with this kind of work is that we’re very aware – sometimes too aware – of the audience. These ideas of writing for the ear, and structuring so the audience will understand, are important. They’re carry-overs from public radio to some extent – that we need to be constantly signposting and making sure the listener is never lost. And I definitely don’t want people to start spacing out or to miss important information.
But also: it’s very hard to create from a place where you’re sitting in both the creator’s seat and the audience’s seat simultaneously. It’s really tough.
Some of those guiding principals of radio do seem more aligned with an editor mindset. Like sometimes I can feel myself trying to edit something before I’ve even written it. I don’t give myself enough time and space to just write.
That’s exactly what it is. I have an index card pinned up on my wall that says: “this is play”. I constantly forget to look at it! It’s there to remind me: you’re not supposed to be editing yourself. You’re supposed to be playing around. You’re supposed to be just trying stuff without worrying about whether it’s good – you can go and perfect it later.
I wanted to pick up on something you said before: that you want to create audio stories that make you feel the way you do when you’re reading a book or watching a movie. Can you say more about that?
With some of the books and films that I like the most, there’s a feeling that life is unfolding in front of you. The thing that I most want for my work is for that to be the experience of the audience: that things are unfolding naturally. Because that, to me, is what life feels like. At its best, our work is reflecting life back to the audience – reflecting the form and feeling of life.
And that’s where things like exposition become really complicated, because in life, we don’t get a lot of explanations for things. The dots don’t connect for us in the moment. Sometimes they happen way later. So where do we put that vital information for an audience? Or do we completely eschew that and risk losing people? I don’t know the answer!
Do you think that there’s more need for exposition in audio vs books and films… or a perceived need?
I think again it’s very tied to the sensibilities of radio, which is this idea that people might tune in at any moment and need to be caught up, or they might get in their cars halfway through the story. Some of those sensibilities definitely are projections from that format.
Audio is a different way of engaging too. When I’m reading a book, I can go back if I miss something. Like in 1000 Years of Solitude where all of these characters have a version of the same name. Obviously you can rewind in audio but I think the goal for a lot of us [makers] is that people won’t have to.
I would like us to be able to trust the audience enough. I would like to create things where I don’t have to explain everything, where the audience can work it out themselves, or maybe shrug and just go, ‘Okay, I don’t totally get how these people are related, or I don’t fully understand how this person feels, or some part of this is obscure for me, and that’s okay’. Or, even better: ‘maybe it adds to the experience of what I’m listening to’.
Tell me why you were drawn to audio as your storytelling medium.
My mother’s a poet. I grew up around writing and poetry. I attended an arts high school and studied writing. So much of my first exposure to storytelling in a sort of more formal sense was writing, but auditory as well because I was hearing people read their own work aloud. Given the history of my family, so much of my understanding of myself was also through stories – through being told things about my mother’s life from her perspective.
I’ve experimented with photography, film and other mediums. But I feel like audio and writing are my first languages. I’m learning these other languages, and I enjoy trying to speak in them. But if I want to tell a story well, if I want to be able to reach through different layers of meaning in the most useful way, then it’s going to be through sound and writing. Those are the languages that I grew up speaking with my mother and with others through my adolescence.