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...

(Why, yes, I) Want to be Starting Something...

So, this has been a long time coming. In point of fact, I've been meaning to start writing this blog since at least last August--but life, as always, has gotten in the way.

Folks who have only known me since, oh, let's say the early nineties, probably think of me as a software engineer. Hopefully a really good one, since I've made a pretty decent career of it, but that's about the extent of it. Folks who have known me a bit longer than that might remember that, in high school and college, I actually had a completely different set of plans for how my life was supposed to go.

I spent a lot of time training in musical theater, in dance (wasn't so great at that part), and voice--yeah, I sang a pretty mean aria for a while there. I had hoped to have some kind of career in performing, or failing that, at least in college-level music education. But, when I got married for the first time, I felt that I needed a steady income, and more or less gave up on those dreams to focus on software development.

(I feel compelled to add that those few who've known me since about the fourth grade will be aware that, in fact, computers and programming have also been one of my great loves... a fact that played no small part in that decision, and that has allowed me to succeed in this path)

So the last nineteen years have been good, in a lot of ways. I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But the last three years in particular have seen a lot of challenges, and I've been giving some serious thought to where I want my life to go from here.

About two years ago, I noticed a tweet from the prolific Neil Gaiman mentioning something called the Audiobook Creation Exchange, or ACX. It's a platform that allows authors and/or publishers to contract with individual narrators to produce recordings of their audiobooks. He linked to a blog by a man who had successfully started narrating books with some simple training, and I thought to myself, "Hey! I could totally do that!"

I kept the idea in the back of my mind, and as things at home and work became more and more stressful, I'd come back to ACX every so often. Finally, in June of last year, I decided to do more than just wonder. The original blog I'd read mentioned that this gentleman (whose name I can't recall now... sorry, my friend!) had gotten pointers and training from a fellow named Pat Fraley, who was--happily for me--based in the Los Angeles area. I sent an email to Pat, describing my situation, my hopes and dreams, and asking him for some advice.

As I now have the pleasure of knowing, Pat has to be one of the kindest, most genuine people you could ever hope to meet, and he responded with some encouragement and ideas for training that might be a good fit for me. To make an already-too-long story a tiny bit shorter, I've been able to attend several classes that Pat has held, and to learn from him and some other luminaries in the voice-over/audiobook worlds, and with a great audiobook demo "reel" under my belt, got my profile started on ACX.

I've been fortunate enough to land a contract to produce a book through the site, about which I'm very happy(and will doubtless be posting more soon). So a whole new chapter in my life is opening up--one where I have the opportunity to get back to being creative, to really performing and making art--and I frankly couldn't be more excited.

I hope to use this blog to document my journey, and to share large and small things about the process. If I'm able to pass on any useful information, or to inspire anyone else out there to take a step towards their dreams, then I'll count myself lucky indeed.