Writing scripts that make listeners feel something

There are tours that teach you things. And there are tours that make you feel something: a lump in the throat, a smile at a well-placed pun, a shiver of suspense. The difference almost always comes down to the script. Below are 15 script tips by master storyteller and VoiceMap publisher Tom Darbyshire.

Script fundamentals

1. Make it personal

Every publisher brings something different: a particular sense of humour, a neighbourhood they grew up in, a passion no one else shares. Lean into that. Your voice, your personality, your story are what make a tour yours. That's one thing AI can't replicate.

Shereen Habib uses this technique in her Bo-Kaap: The Village in the City tour:

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2. Talk about the people, not the place

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 individuals, not groups. Fundraising experts call it the identifiable victim effect: you raise more money with the story of one starving child than with statistics about a million. The same principle applies to your script. Instead of telling the story of thousands who fought in a battle, tell the story of just one: the victor, the villain, or the victim.

Keep named characters to a minimum, ideally no more than two. Describe everyone else by their relationship to the named character: his executioner, her boss, their daughter. It keeps things simple for listeners who are also navigating a route.

Annie Sargeant does this in her Île de la Cité: Where Paris Was Born tour. Trigger warning: graphic violence.

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3. Write screenplays, not encyclopaedia entries

Show, don't tell. Good storytelling activates the Theatre of the Mind. Vivid, specific language creates involuntary mental images. If you're told to picture an elephant in a pink tutu, riding a blue unicycle across a highwire, you can't help but see it.

Tom applies this in his Gilded Age Guide: Mansions of Fifth Avenue and Millionaire's Row tour:

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4. Avoid passive voice

Active verbs put the listener inside the action. Passive verbs describe a state of being without creating any visual. When you're writing about buildings and squares and statues, passive voice is a constant temptation, because buildings don't fall in love or start wars. People do.

That said, passive voice isn't always wrong. Sometimes the emotional impact is greater when the focus is on those being acted upon, so use it deliberately, not by default.

Christopher Burslem uses it to powerful effect in his Thailand's Road to Democracy tour, where the focus on those being acted upon earns its place:

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Storytelling techniques

5. Start with action

Don't open with description. Open at the moment something is happening. An art gallery is a silent room where things hang motionlessly on walls, but opening with the sound of spray cans puts the listener there at the moment of creation.

The best action to start with isn't always the first action chronologically. Murder mysteries start with the murder, then work backwards. And people love a mystery.

Tom opens this location in his upcoming East Village: A walk on the wild side along St Marks Place tour with action:

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6. Make an entrance — or an exit

When a tour is standing in front of a closed building, it's easy to describe what the listener can already see. Instead, ask them to imagine the story's characters arriving or departing, it gives them an action to anchor to.

Tom transports listeners to a street filled with carriages in his Gilded Age Guide tour, as famous Gilded Age personalities arrive and climb the steps:

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7. Give them something to get

Think about how a good joke works: set up a situation, build the drama, then deliver a surprising twist. The listener has a moment where their brain says Oh, I get it. Research shows that when you ask listeners' brains to do a little work in a way that rewards them, a switch flips and a memory gets created.

Tom's script for a café where people pay to hang out with cats is filled with cat puns.

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His script for the townhouse where Edgar Allen Poe wrote "The Raven" uses the poem's distinctive cadence.

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8. Put your listener in the moment

Shift into the present tense and tell the story as though it's unfolding right now, as the listener stands there.

Dan Sutherland-Weiser does this in his Baltimore's Little Italy: Where Every Stoop has a Story tour:

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9. Make your listener the principal character

Occasionally invite the listener to imagine they are the person at the heart of the story. Tom uses this no more than once per tour, but used sparingly, it can be the most memorable moment of the whole experience.

Tom tries it in his West Village Flappers, Beats, Freaks and Punks tour:

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10. Tell them a secret

Point out the details that everyone else misses. Take listeners down a hidden alley, or to something obscured by shrubbery, or into a speakeasy most people walk straight past. Make them feel like insiders. 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.

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Structure and craft

11. Break stories into chapters

Tom's framework for storytelling structure:

• The set-up
• The build-up
• The blow-up
• The up-shot

Or: chase your characters up a tree, throw rocks at them, then get them down, safely, or with a tragic fall. A single building with many lives, home to a Founding Father, then a famous author, then a communist spy, then an avant-garde theatre, can become its own string of short stories, each with its own arc.

12. Talk while you walk

The walking time between stops isn't dead air, but an opportunity. Use it to set the scene for what's coming, follow up on what was just left behind, or weave a thread through the whole 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.

This requires careful attention to word counts and repeated testing. Your editor will help you get the timing right.

13. Write tight

Tom writes his first drafts in Google Docs, not in Mapmaker. Once a draft is done, he sets himself a goal: cut it by 20%. Write. Rewrite. Trim. Trim again.

One practical rule: if they can see it, cut it. Don't describe the statue as a man on a horse, cast in bronze. They can see that. Tell them something they can't. And save longer stories for locations where there's somewhere to sit. If you're going to hold someone in one place for a long time, the story needs to earn it.

14. Use multiple voices

A single engaging voice can carry a great tour. But two voices break up the information and help listeners switch between story mode and navigation mode. Tom uses a separate voice for directions, different voices for historical characters (sometimes with a filter to create an archival feel), and interviews with real people from the neighbourhood.

For AI voices, his recommendation is counterintuitive: don't go straight to text-to-speech. Use a voice changer tool instead. Read the line yourself to get the delivery you want, then transform it into the character you need. The results are usually far more natural. You can also put out a call to other VoiceMap publishers and ask them to record voices for you on our forum.

For more on getting the best out of your recordings, see the recording process and Quiet! Mic! Action!.

15. Use the power of sound

Sound effects can be a time machine, transporting listeners to the moment your story took place. Music locates them in time and tells them what to feel: suspense, longing, triumph, despair. But this starts in the writing! Just as vivid language creates mental images, write in a way that calls out for sonic enhancement. If you can hear what a scene should sound like as you write it, write towards that.

VoiceMap's music locations feature lets you add a continuous audio backdrop, whether ambient sound, a period soundtrack, or anything else that puts the listener in the world of the story.

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These tips are drawn from Tom Darbyshire's presentation at VoiceMap's March 2026 publisher webinar. You can also read the full write-up on our blog.