OK, you ready?”
Yeah.
I was raised to be Generic.
Born that way.
But on the third day in the second quarter, I’m starting to think it’s not
who I really am.
The moods they don’t understand just yet.
Usually it’s to help sell things.
But sometimes you glimpse a person in that reflective surface,
who seems a little bit like you.
My name is Suzy Jackson, and I am a narrator of audiobooks.
Is that what we call ourselves?
I’m like, I don’t know — audio...
voiceover artist?
But we’re talking about audiobooks, so...
As I’m reading, any time a character pops up, I’ll underline their name.
She feels like a grandmother — I don’t have one, but
One trick that I’ll do, I’m trying to find if I have a place... Here.
Let’s say there’s a sentence that says “she whispered” at the end.
So I need to know that before I start.
So I’ll underline it while I’m preparing the book.
See, I’ll draw an arrow to it.
And so then I’ll catch it before I’m saying it.
It’s this weird mental trick of staying really present, but also kind of also reading
a little bit ahead.
After Dr. Snoot walks away, I fall into a daze until Kenneth hits me on the shoulder,
Rita and Adelaide bouncing next to him.
[GURGLING NOISE]
Did you hear... [laughs] so that’s what happens.
You’re like, and now my esophagus made some strange bubbling sound,
so we stop and pick up.
And he started hitting a vending machine and I realized — I knew him when I was five!
Before they made me an operator.
I wrote down the characters in the book, and I noted on my paper what I knew about them:
that Dr. Snoot was like a grandma, that Kenneth was nerdy, that Rita was always in control,
that Adelaide was feisty.
I felt like I knew the energy of it.
It says “Kilroy Was Here” underneath.
hours on end, like that stamina is more difficult than coming up with slight variation
of vocal quality to distinguish characters.
Whether I’m reading aloud to kids or whether I’m reading on my own, the experience has
changed a bit since I’ve been narrating.
You aren’t necessarily only going to be narrating the style or genre of books that you
yourself might choose to read on your own.
So I think there is something to just respecting
that story and respecting the audience for that story.
“Voice,” I tell the group again.
“The one thing that can never be generic.”
I don’t know if I’ve done alien voices, but I’ve done in the sci-fi world a lot
of creatures.
“Can you do a pizza order as a dragon?”
“I’ll take a large cheese with extra pepperoni.”
It’s so weird, it’s so weird what I do.
I'm frightened.