The Fear and Loathing of Audiobook Narration

I’ve just completed my fourth fiction audiobook, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned,” for Listen2aBook. It is my eleventh audiobook overall; with one exception, my previous books, all non-fiction, were produced by BeeAudio. The exception was an ACX-produced audiobook for a self-publishing novelist. Eleven audiobooks is a very modest count for sure, but not bad for an older (67) retiree who spent the first 45 years in the labor force as a photojournalist, writer, editor, press secretary, and speechwriter. Somewhere in there was time spent voicing local radio commercials and narrating government public relations videos (think a 12-part series titled “Abraham Lincoln, a 150-Year Anniversary”).  And, for the past eight years, I’ve been a volunteer audio news narrator for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, and an audio-textbook reader for Learning Ally. Between those two organizations, I add about 200 on-mic-hours per year to my home recording studio schedule.

When I retired three years ago, a colleague of mine suggested I consider audiobook narration as a productive way to ease into my golden years, and he connected me with someone in the industry who took a chance on the recommendation and opened the door to an audition. Three months later, on Christmas Eve, 2013, I got a text message offering me my first audiobook job, “The Faiths of the Founding Fathers,” by David Holmes. 

Over the next two years, I recorded six more non-fiction titles. In 2014, I received my home studio certification from BeeAudio to record, edit, and master audiobooks. That certification opened a very different door for me, one that led to a great deal of fear and loathing as I ventured into the world of total control over what comes out of my studio. It also led me to Mike Vendetti of Listen2aBook, in 2015, and to Steven Jay Cohen, my producer at L2aB, who helped me discover the myriad audio possibilities of public domain books.

To review, public domain books are novels, short stories, children’s books, etc., whose copyrights have expired; their authors are long-gone, and their publishing houses and/or estates no longer have a legal hold on the material. As a very rough rule of thumb, books published prior to 1923, under U.S. copyright law, are in the public domain. Exceptions abound, and it’s always wise to use a sources like Project Gutenberg or goodreads to verify a book’s status in the public domain. In June of 2016, Steven Jay Cohen hosted a YouTube discussion about selecting public domain books, and it’s worth the watch to get a good idea about what titles work for audiobook narrators. 

 Two paragraphs ago, I used the words fear and loathing in relation to audiobook production. The truth of the matter is, for me at least, the freedom to select and record complex books like Owen Wister’s “The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains,” or the first two F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and Damned,” puts tremendous pressure on me to “get it right” as I interpret “right.” There is great performance latitude inherent in narrating any significant work of fiction. Multiple characters enter and exit only to reenter years later. Protagonists age and change in voice and morph in attitudes about themselves and toward other characters. Antagonists rise out of the muck and their voices alternate between cool and terrifying. Women are bold, men cower, children are wise, rubes are actually clever.

Discomfiting stereotypes abound in many public domain books—in the books of the late 1800s and early 1900s, society’s views of foreigners, southerners, blacks, the poor, and the lower strata of humanity were often unkind by today’s standards, and their depictions in the books of 1916, for example, lead to awkward moments in the enlightened 2016 recording studio.

In Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned” there is a Japanese houseboy named Tanalahaka, Tana, for short. In one scene, Tana is speaking to the book’s hero, Anthony Patch, about his idea to invent a new kind of typewriter:

“I been think—typewutta—has, oh, many many many many thing. Oh many many many many.”

“Many keys. I see.”

“No-o? Yes—key. Many many many many lettah. Like so a-b-c.”

 “Yes, you’re right.”

“Wait. I tell.” He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: “I been think—many words—end same. Like i-n-g.”

“You bet. A whole raft of them.”

“So—I make—typewutta—quick. Not so many lettah…”

There is no other way to narrate Tana but to totally immerse oneself in Fitzgerald’s 1922 jingoistic, “splintered English” characterization of a sing-song Asian who is scripted unequivocally to say, “In my countree…all time—peoples—eat rice—because haven’t got. Cannot eat what no have got.”

And Tana is but one of more than 20 main characters and an additional dozen or so supporting cast who come and go throughout the audiobook’s 15 hours of action taking place over ten years of storyline. So, how does a narrator choose which voices to work with…if any voices are chosen at all?

My first long public domain audiobook for Listen2aBook, Owen Wister’s “The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains,” presented me with my first narration style options: straight read; minor inflections to differentiate key characters; or full out multi-character voices. I read the book twice, noting carefully (writing them down) each character and his or her speech patterns as defined by the author. I practiced each voice, seeing if I was up to the task of giving life to the words of a gentle cowboy from the Southeast, a young girl from Vermont, a beloved western judge, a mean-spirited, gruff talking bad guy, various side-kicks, young children, and a lovely and wise great-aunt from New England. I recorded each character half a dozen times or more, making individual audio tracks using PreSonus’ Studio One digital audio workstation (DAW), and listening back to see if I was even close to making them believable characters. 

Keep in mind, I’m a 67-year-old white guy with a baritone voice edged by a soft Virginia accent that can deepen to reflect many years of growing up in the South. Tuning that voice to respectfully mimic a 20-year-old schoolmarm from New England, while, in the same paragraph offering her the hero’s drawling sweet nothings from the back of his horse does take a bit of courage and probably a lot of chutzpa. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, that I’d had some stage experience, most recently as the wise-cracking New York gangster Nicely Nicely Johnson in the community theater production of “Guys and Dolls.”
I applied that same pre-performance rigor to the next three books for Listen2aBook, one of which, Kenneth Grahame’s fun, “The Reluctant Dragon,” had me giving the eponymous dragon the voice of W.C. Fields!

But what about the fear and loathing I mentioned earlier? Well, as I immersed myself in each audiobook narration—particularly the long and character-complex “The Beautiful and Damned”-- I would suddenly find myself doubting everything about my efforts: Was I silly or reckless to try to give life to so many characters; was my approach to interpreting Fitzgerald legitimate; would my engineering be up to the task; would it pass muster with my producer? And, finally, was this going to be a book anyone would listen to?

In the end, when it comes to the universe of public domain books, the narrator must give himself or herself full latitude to play however many roles he or she wants to try. But, once you start down that road, don’t look back. Stay true to every character you create, stick with them, grow into them, adapt with them. Many of my characters started out with voices they didn’t end up with. Age, circumstances, emotions all modified their speech patterns, tones, and deliveries. Men’s voices thicken with age, women’s voices mellow and sometimes downshift half-an-octave or so over the time period of a long novel. The spirited tenor-toned boy who goes off to the trenches of World War I, may come back a dusty-throated, coughing baritone.  With respect to fearing misinterpretation of the author’s intent, you have to do a little sleuthing, and exercise some common sense coupled with historical sense. For the Fitzgerald books, I researched Fitzgerald and developed useful information about his writing methods, his reasons for naming certain characters, his worldview about the times in which he wrote, and, of course, his own personal demons. When you know about the author, and you explore the period of his or her book, you begin to think like the author, and your narration takes on a more credible tone.

It’s very important to understand the time period of a given book before you begin narration. There will be terms and pronunciations familiar to the people of that era that are either subtly, or quite different 100 years later. A young college man of 1915 who is described by an author as gay and light hearted, is probably not gay in the 2016 sense, and a narrator should not make the mistake of misinterpreting that characteristic without the author’s specific permission as written. (Nor should a narrator presume any nuances of voice for a gay character written in the 21st century. Listen to the author.) The same is true of people of color. If the author specifically writes a 1915 black man saying, “Yassuh, I’ze gwin do it,” then the narrator has permission to try to achieve that slow drawling effect. But, if the author has a 1915 black man saying, “Yes sir, I’m going to do it,” the narrator must not presume anything other than the tone or quality of the voice of a man saying those words. 

In instances like these, think of the author as the director of the story, giving you, the narrator, specific cues about each character’s speech. Read carefully; every adjective and adverb in the sentences surrounding a quoted text constitute your direction for each character you play. Fitzgerald left me no choice at all when it came to narrating the Japanese Tana’s voice.

The loathing I’ve hinted at begins with the mastering process. Adobe Audition CC is my DAW of choice when it comes to assembling, proofing, editing, and mastering the audiobook tracks I created in Studio One. It is in Audition that I hear my voice across the broad expanse of a one-hour or longer file, and I usually loathe what I hear during the first pass. It’s not the breaths, or plosives, or throat clicks, or dry mouth pops, or lip snaps that bother me; those are the most easily remedied artifacts of the recording process. It is, frankly, me that I don’t like. And it is that “me” that I have to corral and temper and come to terms with before I can do any useful work on an audiobook. Many of my voice artist friends and colleagues express the same loathing, the same, “I hate how I sound” grumbling that accompanies their recording sessions.

You’re there with your headphones on, your voice coming through oh-so-clearly, and you say to yourself, “Is this what everyone hears?” No, it’s not. What you’re hearing is the self-critical you, the worrier you, the doubtful you who wonders in the dark of the night, alone in your studio, “How is it that everyone tells me I have a great voice when I sound like this?” You listen to a few minutes of you and wonder if your producer is going to can the whole thing, if it was a mistake to sign up for this book, if you’ve screwed up. You imagine that your producer, Steven Jay Cohen at Listen2aBook, will gently counsel you to find another hobby, and you believe to a certainty that Audible will never put another audiobook of yours into their catalogue.

Let me assure you that none of the above fears reflects reality. You’re fine. You are just playing a headgame on yourself, and it’s completely normal. Chalk it up to how creative people think. I’m a relatively well-published photographer, yet I often think my work is mediocre. I’ve been a successful writer for years, and still I imagine that the next piece I write will fail. And, I’m an audiobook narrator with a small list of books on Audible, and I still can’t help but go through the yips and doubts that stalk me when I begin the final leg of creating my audiobooks. 

Here’s my unsolicited advice: Separate the voice in your head from the voice on the audio track. They are not the same. Get into the story you’ve just recorded; put yourself into the book and picture the characters you just played, the plot you just twisted, the journey you just accomplished. As you make your edits, think about the pacing, the pauses, the hurried moments. Did you get them right? Tighten the track here, open it up there. Is the heroine really sobbing, or just sniffling? Is that a tense moment, or does it fall a bit flat? Where once the author was your director, you are now the story’s conductor, the mouse your baton, moving things along and interweaving dialogue and exposition to keep your listeners eager for more. Forget how you think you sound…cast the doubts aside…go for the whole darn story! Of course your producer will love it, of course Audible will post it. Whew.

Now to the last question: Is this a book anyone will listen to? I think we all ask this one, but we also know the answer is that we cannot know the answer. I’ve gotten to the stage in life where I think I’ve learned to put some questions out of my hands. All those of us who are narrators—particularly those of us still relatively new to the marketplace of audiobook production—have to focus on what we can control, and do our level best with the skillset we’ve got. My skillset does not include audiobook market prognostication, so I don’t waste mental energy worrying about it. What I do know is that I record certain books because I like the subject matter and I enjoy the challenge of translating the written word into a credible spoken word product. Once one of my books goes out, I’ll do my best to flog it around social media, but I refuse to obsess over the book’s likeability. Of course, I would like one of those Sally Fields’ moments when I can say, “They like me, they really like me!” but that’s not why I took up audiobook narration. I do it because I love it. And when I remind myself of that simple fact, the fear and loathing subsides, and the fun takes over.