A Narrator’s Quick Fix Guide to Improving Performance - Part 1: The Ballpark

"I've found when I don't live in the moment, it doesn't work out for me.”

R.A. Dickey: Pitcher, New York Mets

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes--ah, that is where the art resides!”

-Arthur Schnabel, composer & pianist (1882 - 1951)  

(Kindly sent to me by Kathe Mazur)

Like all creative artists, storytellers intuitively sense when they’re in the moment, between the notes, or in the zone. Palpably centered, as if on a copasetic high, their performance clicks along powerfully, confidently. They are, as I’d describe it, in The Ballpark.

Conversely, when their performance cylinders sputter, they’re out of it, unhinged, as if their groove has been derailed. Unable to get on track, they are frustrated by the irrefutable awareness that they’re performing outside of themselves and just can’t find their way into the ballpark.

Every creative person’s DNA is susceptible to a kind of bedeviling performance irritation that inexplicably subverts their best intentions. It happens. The vexation for storytellers is exacerbated by their particularized fact of life: Unlike most performers who, when they misstep, can rely on a director to identify their errant choices, then collaboratively guide them through the turnstile and back in the ballpark, today’s narrators are increasingly on their own - home alone or in front of an aesthetically non-reactive engineer.

Perhaps, as our lifetime’s future nears, narrators will be able to summon an advisory voice merely by flicking the feedback lever: “Computer! You think I made Marla selfish enough?” Or, “Okay, okay, my Russian accent’s not working, but can you just, ya know, mention it once and be more encouraging!” 

For now, if narrators desire another ‘ear,’ more than likely it’ll be their own. And that current reality is the progenitor of this quick fix guide to improving performance, or accessing The Ballpark.

The obvious and most detrimental ill resulting from this director-less new normal is CDS: Critique Deprivation Syndrome. With no trustworthy third party to consult, it is, at best, difficult to address creative concerns in a way that serves the author’s intent. Perhaps more troubling: Without corrective guidance narrators rely on unchallenged performance habits that, aesthetically speaking, may be the moral equivalent of self-inflicted wounds. Or worse: When these performance habits (egregiously favoring vocal acuity rather than the text as the primary acting vehicle, for example) aren’t interrogated by an outside source, they come to be viewed as not just acceptable but preferable, even valued. And why not. If there’s no authoritative party to suggest an alternative, these vocal habits calcify and become the mojo standard, as if they’re deified performance commandments to be aspired to. And finally, there’s always the most understandable reality, divined from the publisher, that insistently blocks reevaluation: “Hey, you’re hired, get it done, got a problem you figure it out, do a good job and you’ll get another book.”

Given the new normal, do narrators merely do their best, and willingly (or unwittingly) accept the concomitant risk of codifying habit merely because it’s unchallenged? Or are there alternate feedback possibilities - albeit less immediately recognizable - that are accessible when working solo? I think the latter.

My experience as a director, storytelling coach and teacher, suggests to me that there are at least two directors present during every recording session: The text (the following post’s focus) and you, the narrator (object of the third post and where I’ll detail a variety of ‘how to,’ ‘quick fix’ performance techniques called Emotional Connectors, whose purpose is to rapidly place performance where it belongs, the ballpark).

Because the ballpark is the narrator’s destination point - where the text and you are headed to, where listeners await, huddled beside their ‘money’s worth’ – it’s important for me to decode the metaphor with the hope of asserting its aesthetic authenticity.

THE BALLPARK

Metaphorically, storytellers pass through the ballpark’s turnstile, where they organically work and where ‘indicated,’ non-organic narration propels hasty egress. Readers (sorry Aunt Mary) disseminate syntax - rhythmically, mechanically expelling words they may know but do not feel - often blissfully unaware they’re outside the ballpark and looking in.

The ballpark is a sentience zone that tightly embraces text, actor and listener as they actively engage one another in the moment, as if their interaction was just conceived and in a perpetual state of happening to them right now.

The ballpark is that Zen-like, dissonant free zone actors inhabit when the story they’re telling occurs from the point of view of whom or what they’re talking about. It is the performance locale narrators are directing themselves towards when they intuitively get that their performance is off site.

The ballpark is a communion, really, between text (the author’s words), narrator (the text’s voice), and listener (whose emotional connection to the words is the sole responsibility of the narrator).

SUBTEXT: Turnstile to The Ballpark

Narrators enter the ballpark through the subtext. When they inhabit it, the welcoming turnstile moves frictionless, as if on its own, needing no external (vocal) push.

No subtext, no ticket. Entry denied. Regardless of how beautifully the words are expressed, or how emphatically iterated or pronounced, whether they’re delicately lilted, joyfully fashioned, effusively modulated or spoken in streaming cadences whose tick-tock sing-song liberates each word from any resemblance to how people actually speak, when the object of the narrator’s attention is the words rather than the feeling, (you hate, AM, I know) the turnstile jams, the ballpark darkens, game over.

Simply argued, storytellers play the subtext (the feeling or emotional consequence embedded in the narrative’s every word). Storytellers connect that feeling to the listener. That’s the ballpark.

Aunt Mary (Oy!, am I going to hear it from her), who cannot resist speaking from the outside in – inorganically singing or swatting the words as if they required a vocal whack to wake up – reports feeling without locating feeling (hint AM, feeling is the turnstile). AM deprives listeners of the very experience they crave from the storyteller: An authentically performed journey beneath the author’s words where the emotional life that invigorates them oscillates.

NEXT POST: How To Gain Entry to The Ballpark

Earlier, I mentioned that two directors are on call 24/7 to every narrator whether or not they’re home alone, with an engineer, or even a director (yes, everyone needs help, including the helper). So the purpose of the next post and the following one is to describe specific performance techniques that are designed to organically actualize that turnstile so that it permits fast, alluring entry into the ballpark, the authentic performance ground that rewards honest creativity with a genuine, nuanced emotional connection between listener, author and narrator, the sort they all richly deserve.

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I’m grateful to John Florian for providing me the opportunity to participate in my first VoiceOverXtra webinar on Oct. 16^th.  

For info go to: http://bit.ly/PaulRubenAudiobookWebinar.

Since mid summer I’ve had the pleasure of working with Kate Udall, Caitlin Davies, John Keating, Pete Larkin, Xe Sands, David Pittu, Scott Brick and several authors, including Chris Elliot, Tony Danza and Andrew McCarthy, along with participants in my San Francisco, Atlanta and New York narrator’s workshops. And finally, my first day (Nov. 9^th) as an MFA candidate in Spalding University’s low residency (meaning I’ll mostly be working from home) fiction writing program nears. And I’m counting on Tavia Gilbert’s inspirational accomplishments to keep me focused.

WHEN ‘BAD’ BOOKS HAPPEN TO ‘GOOD’ NARRATORS

  

An award-winning narrator and friend emailed me last week and recounted a distressing conversation he recently had with some of his colleagues concerning the plethora of crummy books they must endure narrating while hoping a literary (or at least semi-literate) story will mercifully come their way, at least once in a blue moon. Speaking for everyone, he confided that continually investing their talents in poorly written, hastily produced, and/or gratuitously smutty books hamstrings their creative purpose, leaves them disgruntled, aesthetically disfigured and regularly muttering: “Why should I care? How can I do my best work in these circumstances?"

Exploring rich characters and mining the subtext is what all storytellers aspire to, in theory, my friend suggested. But reality finds narrators mostly asked to record terrible books, “...riddled with clichés, cheap metaphors, and too often an overwhelming lack of subtext.”

To be fair, he suggested that, yes, narrating bad books is commensurate with his occupation’s mandate: Record what you’re handed. “The truth is,” he added, “that we all take jobs from time to time for the paycheck, and not the love of the material. We have bills to pay, and much as we'd love to stand on artistic principle, we…can't always pick and choose.”

His email concluded with a request for any insight I might have, specifically regarding how to emotionally navigate what he described as “real turkeys” in a way that maintains his integrity as a storyteller and, as he suggested, his artistic principles.

Though no coherent answers or insights immediately come to mind, I do suspect that all creative people, including narrators, suffer a kind of psychic damage - personally and professionally - when they engage in non-creative work they deem, at the very least, diminishing and aesthetically meaningless. Assuming my characterization accurately reflects narrators’ concerns, I think there’s value in unpacking this particularly unsettling dilemma.

The Bad Book/Good Narrator Conundrum.

In my experience, virtually all creative artists (sorry Aunt Mary, you’re free to take a break) identify with their aesthetic, as if it were a vital organ. Additionally, they possess a moral compass that conflates their self-worth and integrity with the quality of their work and its artistic merit. Said prosaically, creative types ain’t in it for the bucks. Not that they’d turn good money down, but it’s the aesthetic reward (located perhaps in a momentary connection to a transcendent, higher calling) that fuels their desire to perform. All the creative people I know, including storytellers, axiomatically co-mingle their feelings about ‘the work’ with feelings about ‘themselves.’ It is this co-mingling of feeling that, at least in part, propels storytellers to reflexively recoil at yet another “turkey book.” It is this co-mingling of feeling that represents the heartbeat of what I’ll call: The Bad Book/Good Narrator Conundrum.

How then does the storyteller/artist, who I’ll argue will be fortunate to record one good book for every 50 turkeys, address this distressing fact of artistic life?

My initial response is to deconstruct this Bad Book/Good Narrator Conundrum by suggesting: There’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ book without a ‘good’ narrator. (I’ll explain further shortly). Then, in an effort to wed critique to solution, I’ll propose an aesthetic antidote, a storyteller bromide, or a conundrum cure, as in: Take two of these before starting a “turkey book” and you’ll get through the next six hours. 

‘BAD’ book/‘GOOD’ narrator

Let’s begin with a particularized lens through which we can define ‘bad’ book/‘good’ narrator. That lens is: Me!

As producer/director of more than 500 audio books, believe me, I know from ‘bad’ narrative. I confess truthfully and categorically to having guffawed, cried and agonized over what publishers call books but to me are income generating commodities – little more than page after page of stupefying, banal, gratuitous manure.

And there you have my definition of a ‘bad’ (turkey) book - income generating commodity - and thus, the definition. Do I mean that I am the arbiter of what’s good and bad, literary vs. crapola? Yes. But who am I to say what’s ‘bad?’ Precisely! I’ll explain: I am an educated (MA degree), middle-class (income well above the national average), white (majority race), Jewish and irreligious (not an oxymoron) male who lives in the bluest of blue states. Ask me to recommend a book, I’ll suggest one by J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth or Jhumpa Lahiri. I possess a literary aesthetic that easily permits me to instantly conjure a ‘bad’ book/‘good’ book binary.

Uh, hold on there, one could argue. What if I wasn’t who I am? Suppose I was less educated, barely graduated high school, and my primary reading experience was the headline banner on Fox News. What if I never heard of Proust, or Roth, or Joyce, much less Henry James? Suppose all I ever wanted in a book was sexual titillation, and bullet riddled bodies graphically spewing gooey pools of crimson blood? Drop Joyce Carol Oates in front of me and I am not only uninterested but suspicious of you: What the hell is this? Probably some lesbo, lefty crap. But a thriller that exposes threateningly accented, towel-headed evil doers for the world dominators they are! That’s something I can relate to. Hell yeah, that’s a ‘good’ book.

Hoping to avoid the clichés and cheap metaphors that plague the books narrators are complaining about, I’ll reductively summarize my proposition: While you can’t tell a ‘bad’ book by its cover, you can tell one by the ‘bad’ person who reads (or listens) to it. In other words, what’s a bad book to me (to the person I am) may be reprehensible precisely because it’s so appealing to people I am contemptuous of, or frightened of, people who definitely don’t share my values and aesthetic. A fast paced, gratuitously violent beach read may be someone’s definition of ‘good,’ but to me, it’s meaningless drivel: “Bad book! Bad book. Yuk! Get away. You gross me out!”

In effect, I am suggesting that an important measure of an audio book’s ‘badness’ (or ‘goodness’) is narrators’ very understanding of themselves as well as their listeners’ understanding of themselves. Additionally, once the good/bad line is drawn, there may be a non-rational tendency to absolutize, to reify what this abstract line represents: Those who stand on the opposite side are not me or people like me and I should regard them suspiciously and contemptuously.

THE ‘GOOD’ NARRATOR’S PECULIAR CHALLENGE

Is it fair to suggest that virtually all audio book narrators are highly educated, at least when compared to the national average? Culturally and politically similar? I’ll bet, yes. Certainly narrators represent a geographical cross section of America, otherwise they are a rather homogenous lot. And this speaks directly to the way I understand ‘good’ narrator. Not good, as in, talented. Not good as in, nice guy/gal. But aesthetically good, and perched high above the bumpkin masses.

Since most narrators are literate, educated, culturally and politically similar, they are driven by an aesthetic vision of themselves that is anathema to those who would listen to, not to mention enjoy and actually prefer, the ‘bad’ books they’re compelled to narrate.

The aesthetic by-product of who I am vs. what I must narrate is: The Bad Book/Good Narrator Conundrum. So, how might good narrators respond more positively to these “turkey books” that mock their creative purpose, suck their performance juices bone dry and are deeply offensive to them?

 THE CONUNDRUM CURE

First, what qualifies me to prescribe an antidote to an aesthetic dilemma that, arguably, is profoundly troubling to narrators? I’ve already mentioned my “turkey book” experience. But I’ve also been fortunate to produce and direct aesthetically rewarding fiction and non-fiction as well. Since I regard myself as culturally/intellectually ‘good,’ I’d like to think that I share a common bond with anyone who’s narrated a “turkey book.” I can relate. And as I'm still directing, I still feel your pain.

It is impossible for me to even vaguely suggest to a storyteller how they should emotionally mediate a “turkey book,” or what the line is and where to draw it when considering, after having been made an offer, ‘how aesthetically low do I go.’ Providing a moral and psychological blueprint that leads to an answer far exceeds my pay grade.

But I am a creative type, I can relate to this conundrum that distresses narrators because I’m bombarded by it as a director, and I can introspectively question what confounds and troubles me. In that spirit, I’ve chosen to examine ‘good’ and ‘bad’ through this particular autobiographical lens. In doing so, my hope for storytellers is that they might revisit their fundamental aesthetic claims in a way that permits them to feel better about their professional choices and themselves as well. Finally, I hope that interrogating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ leads to other, perhaps far more illuminating ways, to address these concerns.

I have avoided prescriptive advice so far. No more.

“Audiofile Magazine features commentary from narrators whose audio books are highlighted in their monthly Editors Picks section. A narrator – as sublime a storyteller as I know – whose Earphone Award winning audio book was recently recognized in that section sent me his contribution:

"Occasionally I’m given a book that’s either so beautifully crafted, or so wonderfully observed, or that I connect with so deeply, that recording it is pure joy.The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving  is all three. Benjamin, the protagonist, is so sweetly damaged, and his coming to terms with a tragedy of which he was the principle architect is so believably wrought, that while prepping the manuscript (a process too often more about vocal choices and vocabulary lists than about emotional investment) I was reduced to tears repeatedly. Both a pleasure and a privilege to perform.”

            -Jeff Woodman

For me, Jeff Woodman imagines a worldview that soothes this Bad Book/Good Narrator Conundrum’s aesthetic heart, and stimulates me to rethink the relationship between who I am and the work I do, feeling okay about myself along the way.

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I am happy that my September weekly and October weekend, New York narrator’s workshops are full. Additionally, I’m looking forward to conducting my first workshop in San Francisco this September.

To Prep Or Not to Prep? That Is The Question: but perhaps not the relevant one

Several weeks ago the proposition - should narrators ‘prep’ their book before recording –  surprisingly (from my perspective) provoked a flurry of divergent opinions among a dozen or so Audio Book Crowd participants.

Why surprisingly? As a director/producer, I imagine querying a narrator soliciting employment:

“So, when you prep-”

 “Ya know, Paul, really, prep/schmep? C’mon, what’s the diff? Just, like, hire me, okay.”

 Really, I’d be thinking: Hire you? Ah, no thanks. But I will have the vegetable plate.

Grover Gardner (Studio Director for Blackstone Audio in Ashland, Oregon and an award winning narrator) spoke succinctly for me when he unequivocally urged narrators to ‘prep’ before entering the booth. I’d echo Grover’s instructive advice for what seems to me to be the obvious: There is an axiomatic relationship between preparation and confident storytelling.

If it’s fair to argue that prepping the book is a must (Is there really a downside to confidently knowing what you’re talking about in advance of saying it?) the emerging salient concern for narrators, and the thesis of this post, is: What exactly should the narrator be prepping? Additionally, what’s preppable, what isn’t and, importantly, what shouldn’t be prepped (because some prep may be hazardous to the listener’s experience).

M-W defines preparation as: “The action or process of making something ready for use…getting ready for some occasion.” Let’s localize this definition by determining how it applies to (cover your eyes, Aunt Mary) the narrator, or, to substitute my preferred nomenclature (an aesthetic, and more accurate and respectful characterization of this performance artist) the storyteller.

The Prepping Process:

Sort of like Spock’s mind meld, as storytellers read the book in advance their purpose is to emotionally engage the subtext so that when they enter the booth to record they can confidently tell the story because they’ve already been in touch with what’s coming emotionally. And the more confident the storyteller the more opportunity he or she has to accurately reveal the subtext’s emotional nuance.

So, if  emotionally engaging the subtext is the process (which I’ll discuss further), what, ultimately, does the process seek to accomplish? My answer: Connecting the narrative’s emotionality to the listener. That’s the storyteller’s bottom line: evoking listeners’ willing suspension of disbelief so they can uninterruptedly be emotionally involved with the story as if it’s happening in real time.

The Process: defining, locating and actualizing the subtext

The storyteller understands subtext. Still, it always feels useful to briefly define it in advance of prescriptively suggesting where to locate subtext, and then how to ‘prep’ it.

The author’s words – the text - are not actable because their sole preoccupation is intellectual, that is, meaning. So, looking through a performance lens, a word or a sentence is not, itself, actable. The word becomes actable only when its subtext (its feeling, its emotional consequence) is construed. As storytellers prep the book, what they are actually doing is discovering and engaging the feeling and the emotional consequence that is embedded in every single one of the author’s words so they can confidently reveal those feelings during the recording.

Simply stated: Subtext is preppable. Text isn’t. Try, as a storyteller, to get a handle on how to say “She eats carrots” without first investigating their emotional intention. Impossible.

To be sure, it is important for storytellers to intellectually grasp the text, to literally get what’s going on in both fiction and non-fiction, to know who are the good guys, the bad guys, and to generally understand the intellectual issues the author may be posing and/or grappling with. But intellectual acuity is, from a performance point of view, the low hanging, tasteless fruit. Why? Because, as I’ve suggested, you can’t act intellect. At the risk of redundancy it’s important for the storyteller to remember that, strictly speaking, just because he understands the Civil War better than anyone doesn’t mean he can compellingly tell its story. Authors who read their own work are living examples of why, if they value storytelling, they’ll always leave their book to a storyteller.

If it’s fair to suggest that acting is largely intuitive, as narrators prep the book, they must intuitively focus their eyes, as if they are dual X-ray ovals, on the ‘feeling’ (subtext) buried inside the syntax. And feeling is buried there, under each and every word, oscillating unhappily, as if it were a lonely, fallow soul, anxiously waiting to be discovered and plucked from inside the (non-actable) syntax, so that it can intentionalize the words with its emotional consequence.

As their eyes pass over the narrative, it is every storyteller’s task to reflexively ask: What’s this character feeling (not thinking)? What are the emotional stakes? And then, as only an intuitive performer can, the storyteller must inhabit and engage that feeling with the sole purpose of vocally transferring it, as the author’s conduit, to the listener.

Until the subtext has been identified (happy, sad, morose, elated, etc.), engaged, and internalized, there is no opportunity to liberate that emotionality and then deliver feeling’s consequence to the listener.

Prep Hazard

Narrators who prep the book by underlining or highlighting or drawing curvy lines above words and phrases for the purpose of remembering to emphasize them may, albeit unintentionally, aesthetically compromise their best intentions, sometimes damagingly so. Why? Because emphasis that occurs non-organically (that is, when it’s not the result of in-the-moment sub textual revelation) is an emotional disconnector, the dead opposite of what the storyteller wants to create.

I would argue that narrators who are intent on engendering interest by vocally imposing emphasis or modulation, risk the unintended consequence of compromising their emotional connection to the listener. If severing willing suspension of disbelief, removing listeners from the narrative’s emotional consequence - as if it were occurring right now - is the outcome, all that’s necessary is to vocally Aunt Mary the words, that is, impose emphasis. Non-organic emphasis may catch the listener’s attention but only because he or she has disconnected emotionally in order to intellectually consider what should be felt.

Process, it seems to me, is meaningful when it dutifully serves its correctly understood outcome. If prep’s outcome is emotionally connecting the listener to the narrative, then, like Spock, the subtext meld should be the storyteller’s primary 'prep' objective while reading the book in advance of recording.

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Over the past month I’ve enjoyed working with Tony Danza, Andrew McCarthy and, on a separate multi-cast recording, a group of talented storytellers, including: Eliza Foss, Vinnie Penna, Carol Monda, Richard Ferrone, Cynthia Darlow, Emma Galvin and... more to come on the next post.

I’m also looking forward to upcoming narrator workshops in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta (www.tribecaaudio for details), to completing a non-fiction memoir (Hairpin Turn: Raising Myself Through My Son’s Teenage Years) and beginning a low-residence fiction MFA program (which will allow me to write at home while continuing to direct and produce audiobooks) in November.