I’m working with a client who has a great voice – you know – the kind of voice where everyone says “You have a great voice – you should record audio books!” He’s in the legal profession and yes – his voice has a natural – what used to be called a “radio-fry” quality to it. And so he started working with me because he likes to read out loud and he has a great voice.
Well OK. We started on fiction of course. That’s where many people who have been told they have a great voice want to start. But for most of his adult life, whenever he read fiction out loud, he was reading to his kids. So it didn’t matter if I asked him to read Dr. Seuss or Stephen King, his association with “Fiction as a Child’s Realm” was just really strong. The range of pitches would become extreme and forced, the rate of the narrative would slow down, and suddenly I was two years old and sucking my thumb.
We worked with an actor’s approach – Who/What/Where/When/Why are you telling this story? Sensory imagery: see/hear/taste/feel/smell the story. But no matter the choices he made in his head, the audience was still under 12. What to do?
We went on the ACX site and looked for a male, middle-aged adult, non-fiction audition. He chose a narrative set in the Civil War, and suddenly – maybe because the story is “real”, he could tell it with authority and expression. We worked to give the factual text a POV, some drama, an escalating sense of narrative action – and hey – he started to sound like a Narrator.
Now, I know plenty of professional narrators who will not touch non-fiction material. The challenges of bringing it to life are just too daunting….all those pesky facts and dates and place names and God help us – scientific terms! The need that so many non-fiction authors have to cram their sentences full of historical research and scientific asides, which, for a narrator, can be tricky to voice and difficult to “breathe through”. I know from two non-fiction texts I voiced last year as a way to learn editing – that the experience was really a trial by fire. You can know that, at the end of it, you have survived, and learned much along the way. And if you have found the pace and flow of this narrative and managed to bring it to life… you have accomplished a great deal against significant odds.
All that said – I have a fondness for a true story. And apparently, among narrators, non-fiction has a reputation for being difficult to voice. A producer called me recently and asked if I would be interested in narrating a non-fiction book written by a particular politician campaigning for office. He asked primarily because he knew that I have a background in training and development, and maybe therefore, some “street cred” in the non-fiction realm.
It has a reputation as a different planet – nonfiction. But with many similar elements to the more imagined world of fiction: the energy and thrust of a story may be more of a challenge to find, but it is there – lurking under those pesky facts. My client and I worked on what facts to “throw away” – to de=emphasize in favor of the more active notes in a narrative. He’s progressing. So he may have a future in non-fiction narration once he retires from the legal profession….should he so choose.
What’s your preference – non-fiction or fiction? And why?
