The Wild and Woolly World of Making an Audiobook

There's a mountain of decisions to be made at every turn when recording a novel. Unless you're a trained actor there's the challenge of oral storytelling, sustained over several sessions or days, like a minstrel. The goal is to work the voice in such a way as to hold the listener's interest. Never mind the practicalities of the cost and the time it takes to finish the thing, a few months ultmately. There's an impetus for doing so: audiobooks are the fastest-growing and most popular form of "reading" these days.

For me the idea of closing myself in a soundproof room, donning the headphones, and simply reading for hours didn't come without reservations. I'd never done anything like it before, and it didn't help that I hated my voice. I fantasized about asking the sound technician and owner of Stepbridge Studios here in Santa Fe, Edgard Rivera, to alter it; until I realized it wouldn't be me. Things were complicated too by the fact that I couldn't record all day like most authors, because at the time I was recovering from cancer treatments and didn't have the energy. Edgard was gracious in keeping our sessions relatively short, as long as my strength held out. 

One fact of recording a book is it's not the seamless thing I fantasized it to be. There are goofs, or there were for me, a lot of them. Misreadings and misrepresentations, which means there can be many dozens of takes in the recording phase alone. There are ambient noises that intrude too, even in a soundproof room; if a plane flies low or thunder rumbles nearby you have to break off for a time. There are also technical glitches. At one point, for example, a mysterious sound kept cropping up. Neither Edgard nor I could figure where it was coming from, until he realized it was my seat cushion, and all my gesticulating atop it, which the sensitive equipment captured. Once removed, the noise vanished. Later in the process there are voiceovers to record in order to correct mistakes you missed in editing. It becomes clear that what will be a seamless body someday starts life as Frankenstein's monster, cadged from many, many parts and sutured together. 

A major decision to be made relates to the author's overall vision for the thing. Will it be read straight, with one voice? Or will characters emerge and be discernible by vocal inflections? Or yet again maybe you'll go for the big time, enact a digital one-man play. I knew instinctively I didn't have the chops for the latter, and I worried a straight narration in a novel where not all dialogue is attributed might be confusing; so I went with option two. 

That presented challenges enough. It's one thing to have a history of acting the class clown, imitating people as I did in my youth, and another thing to bring alive adult voices that had been "speaking" in my head for the whole writing process, over several years, but which were never before outed verbally. Again it presents a world of decisions, leading to decision exhaustion; a lot of rehearsing too. Edgard warned that if you practice too much you can blow your voice out, and the whole process would need to come to a halt, potentially for weeks. I came close to doing that, so I learned not to overdo it. 

Voicing can be a sensitive art in some ways, and the goal for me was to do it respectfully. For example I grew up in a northern industrial town, Cleveland, Ohio, where the novel is set and where people for the most part speak a northern dialect. The city was also the economic powerhouse for the state, so it was a regonal magnet for job-seekers. Many flocked there from the south in particular, though not necessarily the South, except for African Americans who famously arrived there and to other northern cities during the great migration; it's one of the themes of the book. 

I have a close connection to those accents. In my early teens, for example, I worked in the municipal park system of our suburb, where many of the older employees were from points south. It was the same with the factory I worked in, but especially in a nondenom church I attended for a time. I met and got to know many people from Appalachia in particular, a region that runs from Mississippi to New York and that includes parts of southern and eastern Ohio; nearby western Pennsylvania as well. Appalachian dialects were part and parcel of my life; they are also spoken by characters in The Lede. It's not true southern but southern-ish. A hybrid, like all accents. 

Because Appalachian was such a part of my world I wanted to represent it alongside the variety of northern accents common among the characters, which is yet another challenge: It's one thing to have voices swirl around your head in some fuzzy fashion while writing, and another thing to make voice commitments in order to bring specific characters to life. In that way the process allows you to discover your work in a whole new way. It adds vocal flesh to what were only fantasms of sorts. 

Those decisions were the hardest to make, but there were other challenges too, including pacing. Too slow and the work drags; too fast and it's impossible to follow, especially in the case of a novel like The Lede which people tell me tends to the denser side. It became clear that the pace would need to be modulated situationally, according to narrative action, but that overall it should be measured, and thoughtful. It took Edgard, a model of zen patience, and me, a minute to arrive on the same page in that regard; that done and the process sailed along. 

There's so much to learn and overcome in the process. It dawned on me after finishing, for one, that I'll never publish another novel without first reading the thing aloud from beginning to end, in character; that the best thing to do is actually try the work out on the human voice in advance. No doubt it would have shortened the time it took to write The Lede, but especially to record it. As for things to overcome, it might require future audiobooks to get over the brief shiver I felt, every time Edgard announced, "We're rolling."

An audiobook is a labor of love given the likelihood of not recovering what goes into it. As an exercise it also promises the learning of new skills for writing and reading both. Dare I say I even got over the cringe of hearing my own voice, of accepting it on some level. The goal ultimately is to create a world; to bring a novel to life; to edify and hopefully move an audience. You can only hope you've come anywhere close.