I am ever curious about what going in the art of voice narration, and as soon as my narrator, Heather Jane Hogan, completed her beautifully evocative work on our newest project, Overdue I asked her for a glimpse of what it took her to come up with the voices.
This is what she wrote:
Narrating one of Uvi’s books is always a treat! I find her writing fits well with my narrative style; her characters are relatable (Ash’s mother is my personal favorite), and her turn of phrase will often catch me off-guard in the most delightful way.
There are a few new characters in this book, and new characters equals new voices! One in particular stands out. She has a more raspy sound than our Ash, and in one scene, Ms. Raspy needed to pretend she was Ash! I decided to adopt an “Ash” sound, but put a little more tension in my voice to make her sound like Ash, but obviously not her. I think Uvi liked the outcome, and I hope you do, too!
Another challenge for me is always dialect. I always want to be SO GOOD at the dialect that I sound natural. It hurts my ears when I hear someone speak with an obviously phony dialect the same way it hurts to hear a discordant note in music; its all I can think about. So when giving a voice to someone with a dialect, and especially one I’m not natural with, I try to focus on their character, so to speak, in hope the listener will forgive any technical errors if I give them something else to consider In this way, my delivery is more important than my accent.
For this book, British and Russian were my main hurdles. My British is fair, tho I don’t think I’ll fool any Englishman. My Russian… is new. I like to use The Dialect Archive for all my dialect needs, and I also use YouTube, where there is a treasure trove of amateur videos on how to sound… like just about anything. In the book, there is more than 1 Russian character, and my challenge there was to make them sound different from each other, which was tough because my Russian is so new that I don’t know how to be flexible with it just yet and had to rely more on their character (as I mentioned above) to help tell them apart for a listener.
That being said, I hope you enjoy Uvi’s latest installment of the Ash Suspense Thrillers!
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