Many people believe improvisation means making everything up on the spot. In reality, good improvisers in music and comedy rely on deep preparation and structure. They don't memorize lines; they learn the rules so they can discover the content in the moment.

Solo podcasting often falls into two extremes: reading a script robotically or rambling without a plan. The solution is to find the middle ground using "Landmarks." You need to know your starting point, your destination (the ending), and the key stops along the way. How you get between those landmarks is where your natural vocal energy shines.

In this micro-episode:

1. Why "winging it" usually leads to rambling tangents
2. The "Landmark" method for structuring unscripted content
3. How to balance prepared facts with spontaneous delivery

Support your business: Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.

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Improvising isn't just winging it. In music or in comedy, good improvisers are deeply prepared and

trained for the thing that they do. They know structure, they know the rules, they know their own personal

tendencies and brain wiring, and all of these skills are built over often thousands of hours of practice.

And there's a lot of money that's involved and tied up in that. Lots and lots of dollars as well.

But what we don't do in improv is memorize lines or memorize notes of music, which is what drew a whole lot of

us to the craft in the first place. We prepare and we train ourselves so anything can happen and we discover

the world of the thing that we're creating and the things that we want to say based on all of that learning.

And solo content can work the same way. There are a couple of different and common ways to

doing a solo show. You can script every word of it and then you can click record and read it out. Or you can do

none of that stuff. You can have no plan. You can just hit record and hope that you sort of get what you maybe

kind of thought you were before you started recording. And what happens? You might sound like you're

reading all those words or you might just ramble and go off on tangents for a while and not really know what to

say.

And neither of these things are great for podcasting. So a really good target is to sort of try to reach

somewhere in between those two things. You might want to prepare. You perhaps want to rehearse a little.

You don't want to necessarily read every single word. Or you want to get that practice to learn to read the

gist and kind of expect the unexpected when it happens. So more fully scripted but also some improvised

elements.

to that script. So you need to know your landmarks in your show, where to start, where you're going to end,

and maybe some points to hit along the way. And the overall structure of your show, perhaps the segments

that you're going to have. Like this is my host read ad, or this is the part where I'm going to do a call to

action. So you don't need to know the exact route. You don't need to know the specific words or the exact

sentences that you're going to use.

or maybe even the way that you're going to get from each landmark to the next landmark. But you can write down

some phrases, some facts, some figures, the odd sentence that you need to get correct like that CTA. But

tangents and exact wordings and phrasings, many of those will happen while you record. And that's where a

lot of your energy is going to come from, your vocal dynamics, or maybe you add an interesting story you just

remembered while you're recording.

that's totally on topic with what you're talking about. And all of those things is going to be what adds to

the quality of your podcast and makes it more like a human thinking and feeling their words rather than just

reading them out. So a very high level approach to this. You want to know your opening, like the first

sentence or the phrase that gets you going. This might be scripted because it's a launch point. It's a

pretty important one too. You definitely want to know what key points you're going to bring

up. You're going to want to have that topic too in the first place. These things represent what has to be in

the episode. So focus on what they are rather than the exact way that you're going to say them. You also

probably want to know your ending like your CTA might be near the ending. Know where you want to land in your

episode and what you want the people listening to it to walk away with. And trust that you know your topic

most likely well enough to find the words

while you record. I'm Jen DeHaan. This is the Credibility Minute. You can find more episodes and you can

also get in touch with me at stereoforest.com slash minute.