How did you first get into audiobook narration?

CC: I was doing commercial voiceover work, and I was a longtime actor. I had just moved from New York to L.A., and a friend of mine, Paul Boehmer, who had narrated quite a few books, got me an audition. I have to say, I didn’t even know really audiobooks existed, but when I went into that studio, I felt like, “Oh, this is where I belong.” I have been an avid reader all my life, I was a theater actress, I grew up in the theater, my father was a theater critic, and my mom was an actress and director. We didn’t have television when I was growing up, so I read constantly. My whole idea of story and storytelling was really based so much in literature, even more than in plays. So when I sat down to narrate a book it just made so much sense to me. Like “Oh, this is just getting to act a story,” so I felt this instant connection to it.

Inset photo by Razi Wilson

I think most actors see it as an extension of their other work. But for whatever reason, for me it just became the primary focus—and at a certain point a couple of years ago I just decided that I wasn’t really going to do much else in terms of either voiceover work or acting, because I just .. I actually really thought, after a couple of years of doing it, that if I wanted to be really great at it, then I needed to make it my focus. So I started listening to people who I thought were really skilled or who I had read about, like Barbara Rosenblat, and Lorna Raver, and I started listening to them to try to hear what was it that made their narration so strong. And Bahni Turpin, who I directed on her very first audiobook, she’s such a natural storyteller and I learned a lot from listening to different narrators and working with different narrators. MT: Initially I was a voiceover actor, I worked a lot in cartoons and animation and commercials and things like that, and my agent called and said, have you ever done an audiobook? They were auditioning for a Star Wars audiobook, and I was really pumped about that because I’m a huge Star Wars fan. … They gave me a couple pages of the book, and I read through them and prepared as best I could, and went in and they liked me enough to hire me, and it was my first audiobook ever. So Kevin Thomsen, who’s an amazing audiobook director, was able to help coach me through and show me the ropes, and that was the beginning of what I think has been over forty books now. I think frankly the reason I got that initial [Star Wars narration job] is that I really worked hard on trying to mimic those voices, or at least the spirit of those voices, as best I could, and just as a fan that’s what I would want to hear if I were listening to a book, I would want to feel connected to the films and those characters as we’ve heard them before. It’s a challenge because I feel the pressure of wanting to live up to those performances, you know? I guess what I love about it is that I get to do so many different characters. In anything else, you’re limited by your physical type, or you just get to play one character in a show. When you do this, it really is like putting on a one-man play. I get nervous about it, because I want it to be good, but it’s very rewarding when it all comes together. It’s so fun to play all those different characters, to get to do all those different aspects, it’s really exciting.

How do you prepare to narrate a book?

MT: I’ll get the script, and hopefully I’ll have a week, two weeks, to read it  ahead of time and kind of prepare it, so I’ll read through the script and make notes. Any time a character has dialogue, I’ll make note of that and write that person’s name down. After I’ve read through the whole book I’ll go back and read some of those lines and try out different voices and figure out what should this character sound like, and what does the author say they sound like? So I go back and do that and record those on my iPhone, and then we go to the studio.

Inset photo by Ben Rountree

CC: At this point, I’ve read a lot of books. My preparation process is much easier than it used to be. The first thing I do is read the book and I try to gather clues from the author about the pace, the tone, who the characters are, what world are we in? Is it a big bright world, is it a small interior world, is it a teenage world with drugs or is it the dissolution of a marriage? I worked recently on When Breath Becomes Air, and I just read a small part of it, which is the author’s life afterward -- he’s a neurosurgeon from Bedford who dies of cancer, and the last thing he does in his life is write this book about his journey through his illness. His wife writes the afterword, which is about what happens after he dies. It’s very very emotional, so my thought in preparing for something like that is okay, my job is to back off of this because it’s so emotional that if I get overwhelmed with emotion while I’m narrating it, then I’m going to rob the listener of the experience. So I try to hear those kinds of things when I’m preparing it, so I can make decisions about what I need to do in the studio. One of the things I don’t do that some people do is that I don’t read the book out loud before I narrate it. I generally, unless it’s an accent that I need to work on, I generally don’t read things out loud, because I think some of the fun is what happens in the studio that’s unexpected. That’s not rehearsed. So much of it is in the discovery process.

How do you approach creating characters and voices?

MT: Sometimes the books will take those [Star Wars] characters into situations that they normally aren’t in in a two-hour film, you know? Like there are scenes, or types of scenes, that these characters would be in that are not just the typical fight in space, or “Come on, let’s get to the ship!”  so that can be a challenge also. Like, how would this character -- I have a point of reference for the scenes that are typical for the films, but when it’s a different type of scene or a different emotion, or a different layer, then I really have to use my imagination and figure out “How would this sound here, in this particular circumstance?” It’s fun! It’s exciting. But there’s definitely a self-imposed pressure that I put on myself, because I really want this to be good and hope it lives up to it. I definitely come in with my ideas, and obviously the authors will lay down a lot of groundwork in their description of the character and the dialogue and what’s going on there, so the bulk of the work is done by the author and I’m just trying to embody what the author is describing. My director Kevin Thomsen will a lot of times describe it as an orchestra, like the ways that all the different instruments in the orchestra will work together. You can’t have an orchestra that’s all trumpet or all violin. You need all the different instruments. So sometimes one of the main characters has a certain sound, or a certain type, so another character -- if you were casting them in a film, it might be the same type of actor, but it’d be subtle enough on film to tell the difference. But in an audiobook, when all you have is what you’re listening to, you might make a different choice based on that. To flesh out the whole production and make this character distinct, we’re going to make a choice that will make this character sound different enough. So I come in with my idea, and I’d say eight or nine times out of ten, Kevin and I are on the same wavelength and he’ll say, “Yeah, that’s a great choice.” And then every once in a while, he’s like, “No. Do not do that.” [Laughs] And his instincts are pretty spot-on -- sometimes I can want to get really out there and play up the alien nature of a creature or something, and sometimes just from an audio production standpoint you have to think about, is the listener actually going to be able to understand if I’m using that much of an effect on my voice, that much of a dialect or that much of a creature-y, gurgly sound? Is it going to be annoying to listen to, things like that? He can kind of bring me back to -- to the planet, or to ground. CC: [Large casts of characters are] definitely tricky. That’s when I use substitution exercises. I will assign names in my head -- I’m getting ready to do this book called Portrait of a Conspiracy and it’s about the Italian Renaissance, it takes place in Florence. It’s really fun because it’s about the murder of Giovanni di Medici, which is a subject that I was kind of fascinated by when I was a student, and I actually lived in Florence. So there are all these women who are part of this group of artists in the book. There are six or seven of them. I was working on it last night, thinking “So who are these different people going to be?” Based on what the author has written about each one, I’ll choose an actress or an artist or someone I know to be that character. Each one of those people will speak slightly differently, move differently, and if I can see that in my head then hopefully it will come out in my voice. I’m doing a book right now called The Fall of Butterflies and a character is a very, very cynical sixteen-year-old girl, and my daughter is sixteen and her best friend is kind of a cynical girl, and I kind of try not to have it be her -- but every time I speak, I hear her in my head! And I’m having fun with it, but again, I’m just going to have to trust that I’m making a choice and people will either love it or not. Not everyone works that way, people use different tools that work for them, I would never say that my way is the right way, it’s just what works for me most of the time. But that just holds the characters in my head. It keeps them vivid in my head so that when I come back to it from one day to the next, I know who they are and I can hook right into them. And I make character notes. If an author gives you clues about a character, like that this woman was older and she was lumbering, you know. Or she was tall and skinny with a squeaky voice. Because then, the author has given it to you so that’s the direction you need to go. In the case of this Italian book that I’m getting ready to do, okay, so I need to know who all these women are, and what do they look like. I love Renaissance art, so I look at pictures of some of the frescoes of those particular people, because they’re based on historical figures. I love doing that. If I’m narrating a book and it’s a place that I’ve never been or have never seen, I always gather visual images so I have a visual reference point to place them.

What makes someone a good audiobook narrator?

CC: It’s a multiplicity of things. First of all there’s the technical skill of being able to arc a story, to know where you are, where the story’s going to go, and where you need to start to get to where you need to go. There’s just the technical -- looking at the whole picture of it, and then there’s the craft of using language in a certain way to enhance the story. For me a huge piece of narrating is tone. What is the author’s tone? What are the characters’ intentions in the story, what do the characters want from each other? What is the struggle of the story? What is the prose style? One of the books that I narrated recently that I absolutely loved is a book called A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball, and it’s a really quiet story, where there’s so much internal action in the prose through the characters. So you have to look for those things, and then what do you as a narrator do with that? I was actually just having this conversation with someone the other day. A big thing for me is getting out of the way of the story, and that’s part of the craft of narrating. Ideally for me, as the storyteller I’m invisible to the story, because what I want to have happen is for the story and the characters to be the primary thing, so that people aren’t thinking about the narrator. They’re seeing the images. There is this wonderful director, John Runnette, he’s the father of Sean Runnette, who is a great narrator and storyteller. He once said something when I was working with him that has stuck with me all these years. He said, “You have to see through the words to the thing itself,” and I always go back to that. So what you’re doing as the narrator is you’re seeking images. For me, when the narrating is going well, I think of that time that I spent in the studio and all I see in my mind’s eye is where I was -- not where I was physically in the studio, but where I was in the story. The story becomes so vivid in my imagination that I’m not reading words, I’m reading images. I don’t know if that makes any sense! MT: To some extent, it’s subjective. There’s different styles out there, and different people prefer different things. I guess for me, I really enjoy it when the narrator is a great storyteller, and the narrator treats the dialogue almost like a radio play or a play. There are some narrators that want to make sure that you don’t distract too much from the words, the prose, the text of the book, so they deliberately almost do a flatter or more subtle read, so that the listener can do more of the imagining. If you were reading [a text edition], you would just see the words on the page, and you wouldn’t have inflections and sound effects and dialects and all that stuff. Your mind would be doing all that work. So they feel that their job as a narrator is to try to keep that true to the spirit of the book, and let the listener do more of the creativity. I’m just more of the opinion that if I’m listening to this thing, ENTERTAIN ME! [Laughs] If I want to read the book, I’ll read the book. If I want to listen to it, then I want to enjoy that medium for all it’s worth. So I enjoy it when the narrator is performing it, the way you’d do a one-man play. I see the validity of both [approaches], but my personal taste is the other way.

How much does the author work with the audiobook narrator?

CC: It really depends on the author. Ninety, ninety-five percent of the time the author gets to hear the voice of the narrator before they decide. They have a say in who gets to narrate their book. The publishers will submit samples of your voice or have you audition directly for the book. After that, I don’t usually have too much contact with the authors. Sometimes they’ll write some notes that they want you to read before you start narrating. I just did a fantasy book a bit ago that required invented language, so the author told us how to pronounce it, and she confessed “I’m making this up, because I wrote this, but I’m just inventing some of these pronunciations now.” But I don’t really have that much contact generally. The publishers will have contact with the authors, and the authors will sometimes say, “I really think it needs to be like this. I like the person’s voice, but can you have her make this adjustment?” So then you try to do that. I have had authors sometimes be in the studio. Like I said, Susan Patron was in the studio when we recorded her book, and that was a wonderful experience. Generally, they’re not there. And also I think it can be a little bumpy if they are there, because you know, they’re not always going to hear the characters that they have had in their head in exactly the same way that I’m going to voice them. For me, there’s nothing more rewarding than when you’ve finished the book and the author says “Oh, I’m so happy with what you did with my book!” You never want to ruin someone’s book! I always want to try to serve their intentions first. MT: I personally have generally no contact with the author, usually because of time constraints, and to generally streamline communication and not have too many cooks in the kitchen, I guess. So the author will generally communicate with Lucasfilm, and they have their story group that they work with, and most of the communication about pronunciation and things like that is done through them. Lucasfilm will communicate with the director, Kevin, and Kevin communicates with me. So there are definitely times when we have to check pronunciations with them, and Lucasfilm has this whole database of pronunciations from cartoons and movies and books, and so they try as best they can to keep all those pronunciations consistent throughout any video game, or book or cartoon or movie that’s been done.

What is the process of recording an audiobook like?

MT: We record the Star Wars ones at Merlin Studios, which is an amazing studio. … Most of the time it takes four to five days of ten a.m. to six at night. I take a lunch break, but it’s in the booth -- the box -- which is soundproof. They’re recording everything, and [the directors and engineer] will listen and every time I mispronounce a word, or flub something, or sometimes I’ll invert a sentence and, like Yoda, put the back half on the first half or whatever, they’ll say “Whoa, do that again.” There’s punch recording and straight recording. Punch recording is what Audible does a lot. That’s when you have to record straight through without making a mistake. If you make a mistake, they rewind the recording, hit go again, and you jump in right where you messed up and pick up where you left off. It saves a lot of time for editing, that’s why they do it, and they try to make it easier on the editors, but as a performer it’s challenging because you’re so focused on not tripping up your words that for me personally, it takes away from some of the performance. The way we do the Star Wars ones is within reason, I get as many takes as I want. Sometimes Kevin will be like, “Enough already! Just move on! You had it right four times ago!” But if I mess up, I can just read that line again, and the editors will take what we record and take a copy of the script, and Kevin and [Maddie? Matty?] will make notes on the script in some sort of code they’ve worked out, marks and hashes and things like that, and [indicate] “You should use the fifth take of this line,” or “We had to cut at this paragraph, so look for the cut here,” or something, so the editors will take that script and take the raw recording, and they’ll edit down my mistakes and my multiple takes, and just get an audio recording that matches the words on the page. Once that’s done, Paul does his matching and they have the Lucasfilm library of sound effects and music straight from Lucasfilm, and they mix all that stuff in, and if there’s a droid or an alien they might do some cool compressors on a voice I did to make it sound metallic, or if it’s a stormtrooper like it’s in a helmet or something, and they add all these musical stings.

Are there kinds of books that you particularly love narrating?

CC: Yeah. There definitely are. I sometimes wonder what this says about me as a person. But often that the books that I’m the most drawn to, that I lose myself the most, are books that are heartbreaking, like -- like beautiful prose where something really heartbreaking happens. And it doesn’t have to be a cataclysmic event, it can be a smaller event, but where the people are broken. You can see why I ask like, “What does that say about you?” But it’s not like “I love light comedy!” A book that I narrated last year called Life Drawing  by Robert Black is the story of a woman whose marriage is falling apart. It was so beautifully written and so heartbreaking, but there’s something about the profundity of that experience, that aching experience of “Well we have to fix ourselves,” that I am really drawn to. I read this Joyce Carol Oates this past year. At the end of the book there’s a chapter after her mother has died where she just lays all these clothes that her mother had made for her out on the bed, and the chapter is basically just a list of those clothes, but she’s such a gifted writer that it reads like a poem. Simple, not a huge event, but so in touch with the essence of who we are -- god, I’m going to sound like an idiot! -- but that’s the kind of stuff, stuff that tears you open, I guess. It’s that true catharsis that reminds us of what’s important, and our essential humanity.