When Ira Glass introduces a radio story, it's hard to stop listening. Will Rogers and I decided to x-ray that uncanny knack Glass has for duct-taping us to every story This American Life presents.

I’ve been trying to finish Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for a year and a half now, and can only get through one chapter before I have to set it down. It takes a month or so before I have the energy to pick it up again. These kinds of stories take tremendous effort to absorb, and yet these are important stories and we should know them.

But how do we convince our listeners to listen to stories that yield an immediate jolt of sorrow and shame?

While some stories are easy to read aloud, the typical written story undergoes some key changes when it’s adapted for the ear. I thought it could be an interesting exercise to compare two stories by the same author, one written and another spoken, and to examine how each is composed to better suit its medium.

It may seem obvious, but one thing you can do in audio that you can’t do in print is use recorded sound. My friend Brett Ascarelli, reporter for Radio Sweden, is great at using field recordings to transport her listeners to new and dangerous places.

Anthropologist Wade Davis is hands down one of the greatest storytellers of our time. For a bullet train introduction to his repertoire, I recommend his 2010 lecture at the Long Now Foundation. This is a lecture, not a story. But it’s a great lecture precisely because it’s full of great stories.

Terry Gross has a way of probing her interviewee about their apparent contradictions. Once identifying a difficult point, she does not stop after a single question, but tends to push the point, then push it again. Somehow, her persistent jabs do not come across as attacks. How is this possible?

Here’s how the sonic spotlight works: take away the extra sounds (or music) when your speaker says something important. Then when your weighty moment has passed, bring it back up. Easy, potent.

Deciding not to have a narrator presents a puzzle-like challenge that for some producers can be fun. And it can be liberating for your characters, who will speak for themselves.

Sometimes when I’m reading, I take a moment in the middle of a paragraph to think about the text. Sometimes I’ll even read a good paragraph twice. It’s like my brain needs a moment to organize and process the information it’s acquiring. But when we listen to a spoken story, we can’t necessarily take that pause when we need it.

You can organize a story by the space in which it took place, rather than by the order in which it unfolded in time. Careful, though. When space becomes the supporting structure of your story, you’re unlikely to end up with a traditional narrative arc. And if you don’t have that, then you might have to find something else to keep your listener’s attention.

There are certain stories that make me ache. Stories, usually, about a person’s pain, and their ability to accept, endure, or overcome that pain. Sometimes my whole body will flush and I’ll cry. It’s not necessarily sadness, but the entire spectrum of emotions visiting me at once. A good story of this kind hits me like a lightning bolt. Hence the ache afterwards.