The beginnings

After leaving my corporate design job, I decided to have a closer listen to the voices inside me and stage a return to my performance roots - this time, as an audiobook narrator.

When I was a young actor, if you wanted to get into voice work you went to a professional studio, cut a CD, and snail-mailed it to agents with a SASE in hope of a response.

Due to a host of factors (including changes brought about by COVID) and continued evolutions in technology, voice artists now create top quality work out of home studios, auditions and casting are done online, and there are a lot of opportunities to gain experience and work one’s way up the ranks before ever setting foot in a traditional recording studio. The audiobook industry is both booming and rapidly evolving. I set out to try and join the fray.

The learning curve is steep.

For starters, you have to lean into your geek side. Recording in a home studio requires a pile of equipment, in a variety of qualities and price points, that forms a chain with many links capable of disrupting or enhancing the whole. To begin, the newbie needs a powerful computer, a microphone and the means to mount it, an audio interface, fancy headphones, a bouquet of special cables, sound editing software, and an isolated recording space that both minimizes outside noise and mitigates the sounds within. And of course you need the skill to use all these components, as well as to diagnose and fix problems. After several weeks of practicing, recording samples, getting professional feedback, and auditioning, I managed to get myself a book! And then I recorded it all in my new home studio and it was…a hot mess. I ended up having to tear down my booth, rebuild it, and record the book all over again. This is not a hang-out-in-the-trailer-and-wait-to-be-called kind of job. It’s hands on, complex, and technical.

The bones of the original booth after being torn down.

And none of that has anything to do with performance. What of those chops I think I have that led me to attempt this in the first place - my experience on stage telling stories and building characters, my love of language and literature?

Did I mention the learning curve is steep?

I might describe voice acting as the converse of stage acting. On stage, subtlety is constrained by the need to be seen and heard in the back row, a few or many meters away. A stage whisper, for example, is quite a loud thing that only simulates the quality of whispering - because if the actor was actually whispering or even speaking at a normal conversational volume, no one in the audience could hear anything she said. In the booth, by contrast, the space between your voice and your listener may be millimeters - you’re literally in their earbuds - and the intimacy of that changes everything. Now, when a character is yelling, what I’m doing isn’t a yell at all - it’s more the volume of a conversation you wouldn’t even be able to hear properly in, say, a crowded restaurant - but it simulates the quality of yelling. On one hand, this sense of closeness - the vocal equivalent of expressing a thought by raising an eyebrow (as in film) instead of throwing up one’s hands (on stage) - feels like a tremendous gift. I can actually whisper if I want to. On the other hand, many of my hacks and shortcuts don’t serve me anymore and I feel a bit like I’ve got 20 years of experience to relearn. But it’s exciting.

The other big difference between doing a play and narrating an audiobook? You play all the roles. Duet and multicast audiobooks exist, but much of the work is a single voice reading the entire story - like at bedtime when you were a kid. Suddenly I have to/get to do things I would never dream of in a theatre context - playing roles not just outside my age, body type, and appearance (because my audience can’t see me), but also outside my gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality - not because the listener can’t hear that I don’t quite fit the mold, but because I’m the sole performer. Audiobook narrators must switch seamlessly between character voices (and narration) in dialogue - one second I’m a beefy, military, white guy from Nebraska and in the next breath I’m a sexy, Black, female professor from New Orleans - and keep the listener immersed in the story.

Happily, all the traditional acting and character-building tools apply - but there is more to do, and less time to do it. If I were cast as Hamlet on stage I might have weeks or months to prepare. It would be my only role in the production. I would rehearse it for days or weeks under the guidance of a director and specialty coaches. My performance would last around three hours, and I would speak much but not all of that time. If Hamlet were a novel and I was the narrator, I might have a week to prepare, little to no rehearsal, and likely no direction. I would play all the parts from Ophelia to Polonius. And the finished audiobook would be me speaking for 8-12 hours. As the actor, I have to know what Hamlet wants and how he’s trying to get it, but I don’t have the luxury of thinking about what he ate for breakfast. Polonius is just gonna have to sound like my Uncle Ivan, and Fortinbras’ accent will not be the result of immersion in Norwegian, but more likely some quick YouTube-based study. It’s simultaneously a wild ride (How many dialects do I need for this story? Where is the clip that reminds me how I voiced that character in Chapter 3 that’s back in Chapter 25?) that requires versatility, and a marathon that requires endurance.

So hop on this crazy train and join me for the adventure! I’ll use this space to share the stories behind the stories I produce, and hopefully offer a peak into the exciting world of audiobook narration.

My home studio in its current form. Replete with fairy lights.