Accent on narration

So I'm working with my teacher Pat Fraley via one of his excellent home study courses, and the last piece of "homework" had me recording an excerpt, all narration, involving a dog stolen (or rescued) out of the back of a pickup truck. I got in the studio, recorded the piece, did a tiny bit of editing to cut my couple of takes and silence down to a single useful track, and sent it off.

Pat, as always, sent back some kind and helpful remarks, but one of them was particularly interesting: he observed that it sounded as though I kept wanting to fall into an accent of some kind for the narration (happily for me, I just barely avoided doing that). I laughed when I read that, because I realized he was exactly right... I guess something about the whole pickup-truck-and-stolen-dog setup just put my voice into a particular cadence that was way too close to a Southern accent. But the funny part is that the reason that was an issue didn't quite sink in until today.

I had thought to myself, "Oh, sure. I probably shouldn't go into an accent because it'd be distracting from the story, from the narrative technique I'm trying to practice in this lesson."

Um... no. Finishing up my day at the office today, and thinking about writing this post as I listened to the next lesson in the course, it hit me like a wet fish: "No, you idiot, you don't want to use an accent because the narrator isn't one of the characters."

Granted, you want your narration to have some connection to the characters, some "tude", as Pat says. But the narrator in a third-person narrative is far more likely to be you, telling the story, than to be someone actually in the story.

Guess that's why he makes the big bucks...