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So it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. I know I’d set the personal goal of posting to my blog every week, but sometimes life happens offline, too.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month talking shop, being critiqued by and critiquing and picking the brains of 3 very talented women. We met in LA at Pat Fraley’s Audiobook workshop. We all have the goal of doing regular work in the audiobook industry. The four of us have entered Scott Brick’s contest to highlight a new audiobook narrator and throw some work her way, and it would be wonderful if any or all of us make it to the top 25, or better. We know the top 25 will be announced online and I’d love to see some familiar names on that list when it comes out.
Through this process, I feel like I’ve been able to apply a lot of skills that I have and things I’ve been taught and after some practice to find my groove it’s become a comfortable thing for me. In college, I earned bachelor’s degrees in both English lit/writing/editing and in Psychology. Working in radio has not directly required the use of either of these, however they’ve been useful and helpful, especially in copywriting and also in adjusting to and understanding how to work with so many different personality types. Working on audiobook material feels like a homecoming of sorts. I can use the skill my parents have always said was unique and well-developed and underutilized in my regular work: my character voices.
Through narrative pieces, I can pull from the characteristics of many people I’ve met, standalone characters I’ve built, dialects I’ve heard, accents and ways of speaking from my travels and living in 3 vastly different parts of the country. I can also use my literary skills honed from reading classics and assigned pieces in college to make sure I’m really understanding the author’s intent and any allusions there may be to other stories or archetypes. The way of looking at people that I’ve learned through psych studies is more empathetic than I think I’d be without it. It’s helped me see a lady who cuts me off in traffic as someone who might be in a hurry to help a friend in trouble, instead of just thinking she’s some idiot who can’t drive and needs to have her license revoked* (*blog friendly version of my non-empathetic thoughts.) That comes in handy when “good” characters do “bad” things, or an “unlikeable” character is the protagonist.
Audiobooks seem to be the one place where my years in radio and voicework as well as my education all actually come together. It’s been a really good exercise to put a lot of effort and get a lot of feedback in this part of the voiceover world. I’m in the process of editing down a piece that I’ve read (one of my favorite short stories) that I eventually plan to offer on my site as a free download. There’s always so much to do, so many goals to tick off the list, and then you look and somehow it’s July already. I hope to get more blog posts in, but if I am absent for longer than a week then I may have more interesting things to write about when I return.