Talking of Books: A Look At Audio

Zoë Sharp

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about writing fiction was to read the words aloud. Reading your own work really helps you to pinpoint those clunky bits of narrative or dialogue, or those descriptive scenes that go on for just a bit too long.

Better yet, I’ve found, is to get somebody else to read your work back to you. After all, you as the author know how the rhythm of the story should run and where the emphasis should go for maximum dramatic effect.

"Listen very carefully. I will say this only once..."

But, if those clues are not present in the way the words are presented on the page, then your reader is never going to be able to reproduce that same rhythm in their head. I’ve always believed that more than the subject matter, the characters or the plot, it’s the individual voice of the writer that turns casual readers into continuing fans.

When you pick up a book by an author unknown to you, before you’ve finished the first paragraph—often even the opening sentence—you just know if you like the sound of that writer’s voice. I had this with the first Robert B Parker novel I picked up, the first Ken Bruen and the first Lee Child. More recently, I happened across the Wyatt Storme series by WL Ripley. They all have such a distinctive style that flicks a switch inside my head. Something in the back of my mind goes, “Yes!” and I have to read on.

I confess I have this same feeling when I start to listen to an audiobook by a particular narrator. There are some books by authors I love, but I simply can’t stand the way the narrator sounds. And vice versa, some narrators are so good, I’d listen to them read from their shopping list if I got the chance.

Much as listening to Rowan Atkinson go through an imaginary school register is a riot, for some reason I’ve never found his Mr Bean character funny.

Lewis Hancock falls firmly into the category of narrators I could listen to all day. (I wonder if I could persuade him to record that Rowan Atkinson sketch…?) I know I’m not the only person who thinks so. I’ve listened to all kinds of books he’s read, some of which would not have been my usual choice. But with Lewis speaking the words to me, I am invariably glued to the story.

I was lucky enough to have Lewis as the narrator for THE BLOOD WHISPERER and he made a wonderful job of it. I have to confess, though, that the extract they chose for Amazon UK sample is taken from the one mildly kinky sex scene in the book, which I’m not sure is entirely representative. I swear I can hear the smile in Lewis’s voice as he’s reading it.

Last week, I spent a day in Manchester at Greenbank Studios in Sale, listening to Lewis record part of DANCING ON THE GRAVE, which came out in print and digital formats last year. The audio edition will be out very soon from Oakhill.

Lewis spends a lot of time before he gets to the recording stage prepping a print-out of the manuscript. He adds his own punctuation so he’s not taken by surprise by convoluted sentence construction—although I do try not to include too much of that.

Lewis Hancock, in an uncharacteristic serious moment.

He also checks pronunciation of unfamiliar places and names, and chooses suitable voices for the different characters if they’re not specified in the text. (And there’s nothing worse, he reckons, than mentally rehearsing one accent for a character, only to find out near the end of the story that they speak with another. Or—worse still—it not being mentioned until book two…)

The technician at the studio was Liam Wheatley. It was his job not only to handle the actual recording of the narrative, but to monitor the quality of the sound and check for errors.

Liam Wheatley at the flight deck.

Watching Liam work was amazing. Originally from a screenwriting background, he’s been working for Greenbank since 2014 and can actually read the waveform of the audio track. So, if there was unexpected background noise, or Lewis tripped up on a sentence, he was able to instantly pinpoint the location. He’d take the cursor back to partway through the last clean section, which he’d play to Lewis in the sound booth next door, cutting back to recording just before the error so Lewis could pick up the narrative again. And he did it in less time than it’s just taken me to explain the process.

This means that Lewis feels able to stop and go back if there’s a piece he’s just read that he’s not happy with, without worrying about slowing the job down too much.

Liam also follows the text on screen, and pays enough attention to point out the occasional missed or transposed word. Sadly, not everybody takes such care over the text.

He takes just as much trouble over post-production. The system he uses, Pro Tools, marks all the pick-up points so Liam can go back later to close up any extended pauses. He also removes any page-turning noises, mouth clicks or breaths. Having listened to THE BLOOD WHISPERER, as well as other recordings done by this partnership, I can vouch for the quality of Liam’s work.

Spending the day watching Lewis and Liam work was illuminating. Here are just a few of the notes I took during it:

• Try to pick names that are easy to pronounce quickly, unlike Frederickson, Blenkinship, and Sibson.
• Quick swaps between characters with very different accents can be very tricky.
• Exciting bits flowed better. It seemed easier with some impetus behind the words.
• It’s very hard when using a Geordie (Newcastle) accent, to have a character say angrily, “With all due respect, sir!” and not have him come out sounding Scottish.
• The words "bull bars" can sound remarkably like "ball bars", which conjures up entirely the wrong image!
• It would make life much easier for the narrator if you invented a character who spoke with a stutter or a lot of phlegm in his voice…

So, my question this week is, do you listen to audiobooks more now than you used to? Do you follow certain authors or certain narrators particularly? What irritates you about an audiobook recording? What do you like best about them?

My thanks to Lewis and to Liam for their patience and forbearing. I tried not to stick my oar in too often, guys!

If you’re looking to have an audio recording made of your work, it would be well worth talking to Liam at Greenbank Studios. Contact him at GreenbankLiam@gmail.com.

This week’s Word of the Week is vicissitude, meaning a passing from one state to another, an alternation, mutation or change, usually for the worse. It comes from the Latin vicis meaning change.

Upcoming Events:

March 8-10

CRIME & PUBLISHMENT—The Mill Forge, Gretna

Workshops on Getting Your Action Scenes Right

Caro Ramsay is also teaching at this event—Breaking Bones For Fun

May 9-12

CRIMEFEST INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION CONVENTION—Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, Bristol

Friday, May 10, 13:40-14:30

Contemporary Issues: Reflecting How We Live

Candy Denman, Paul Gitsham, Cara Hunter, Amanda Robson, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Saturday, May 11, 11:20-12:10

Ten Year Stretch: The CrimeFest Short Story Anthology

Peter Guttridge, Caro Ramsay, Zoë Sharp, Michael Stanley (Stan Trollip), Kate Ellis (Participating Moderator)

Sunday, May 12, 09:30-10:20

The Indie Alternative

Beate Boeker, Adam Croft, Barry Faulkner, Lynn Florkiewicz, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Getting From There to Here

Zoë Sharp

Zoë Sharp in natural habitat

I blame Jeff and Stan. They ambushed me in the bar at Bouchercon last month. One minute we were recounting our favourite Flanders and Swann songs, with much juvenile giggling, and the next I’d been talked into joining this illustrious little gang. I’m still not entirely sure how we got from there to here.

I don’t even drink.

But, here I am, nervously smoothing down my hair and straightening my Sunday-best frock, trying to remember my lines and hoping not to be met with, at best, a blank-faced stony silence.

And it occurred to me that I really ought to introduce myself properly to my new bloggers and bloggees. So here goes.

I took a weird path into the writing game. Is there a normal one? I wasn’t a noted student, opted out of mainstream education at the age of twelve and did correspondence courses until I was legally old enough to go out and get a job. The local authority sent me to see a careers advisor when I was fifteen or so. I told him I was interested in writing. He said, “We’ll put you down for clerical.”

I’d already written my first novel by then. It still sits, unpublished, in a folder in the attic. A children’s story, but no fledgling Harry Potter. My father threatens every now and again to dig it out and see if it will fly on eBay. I have it well hidden.

A few years later I ended up at my local newspaper, selling display advertising — the ads in the front half of the paper, rather than the classifieds. A soulless job if ever there was one. Everybody suspects that half the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they don’t know which half so they resent spending any of it. I lasted six months of impossible targets and nail-biting deadlines and picked up a temporary heart murmur for my pains. Towards the end, my manager — knowing I wouldn’t stay past the probationary period — asked the editor if there was any chance the editorial side would take me on. I’d already written advertorial copy and he knew that’s where my interest lay. The editor turned him down flat. “No qualifications.” They fired me.

I'm the idiot clinging to the back ...

I looked at getting those qualifications. Seven years of study just to become a cub reporter. I gave it up. Instead I sold pensions, delivered yachts, taught people to ride horses, and did a few other things I probably shouldn’t talk about too much. During this period I acquired my first car — a broken-down Triumph Spitfire MkIV wearing more different colours of paint than Joseph’s coat, with a six-inch nail holding one of the front brake calipers in place. Not my first choice but the best I could get for the money. I rebuilt it, worked out how to make it go round corners, resprayed it Brooklands green. And started to write about it.

Before I knew it, I was writing for the classic car magazines. In 1988, with an arrogance that frankly shocks me now, on the basis of a couple of accepted articles I gave up my job — no loss there — and turned freelance full time. It was four years before one of my magazine editors asked me what qualifications I had. By that time I could tell them they’d been sending me cheques for four years. What more did they want?

The freelance market was good, the rates reasonable, so I expanded the scope of my work. An editor asked could I supply words and pictures? I borrowed a camera and gave it a try. My fiction writing ambitions went on the back burner, until something happened to revive them.

I was sent to see a bloke in south Wales to do an interview. But when I arrived it soon became clear that the car collection I was supposed to be featuring didn’t ... actually exist. And he looked kind of shifty when I didn’t turn up alone. The bloke made some sort of lame excuse and we left, annoyed at the wasted trip. It was only afterwards that I started to wonder what he had planned. I’d made an appointment, so he couldn’t claim he wasn’t expecting me. The only thing that had thrown him was that I hadn’t come alone. And what then?

Say no more.

A couple of years previously, Brit real estate agent Susie Lamplugh disappeared after going to show a prospective buyer round an empty house. She was never found. It struck a chord. Especially when, after that abortive interview, every time my picture appeared alongside a regular column I was writing in one of the classic car mags, I received death-threat letters. Professionally done, with the words cut out of newspaper like a ransom note. Telling me I was scum, telling me they knew where I lived and my days were numbered. The police never tracked down who’d actually sent them.

As for my reaction, I learned self-defence from a little black belt karate and kyushu jitsu instructor with a benevolent smile and steel fingers. I did not, as has been erroneously stated in the past, learn to shoot in order to protect myself. I could already shoot to competition standard.

 But I did start to write fiction again. Maybe it was a form of escape, of regaining control. Maybe it was a desire to create a world where the bad guys died screaming. I wanted a strong female lead who wouldn’t buckle when she was put under threat, and one day Charlie Fox turned up on the doorstep of my mind, fully formed, with an attitude and a motorbike, a traumatic past, a failed military career, friends who loved her. She said, “I’ve got a story to tell. You might want to write this down.” I didn’t argue.

The result was KILLER INSTINCT: Charlie Fox book one. To date, there have been another nine series books, a short story e-thology, plus a novella, and this summer my first standalone, THE BLOOD WHISPERER came out. Over the winter I'll be working on book-number-the-eleventh.

And, in one of those little tweaks of fate that so rarely happen, several years after I turned freelance I got a call from the publisher of the newspaper who’d sacked me, offering me the editorship of another paper in the same group. I let them take me out for a very nice lunch to discuss the position, then turned them down. Maybe I should have told them I simply wasn’t qualified ...

It’s been my habit to have a Word of the Week every time I blog. For this one I’m going for absquatulate, meaning to leave abruptly or quickly, or to flee. As opposed to levant, which means to run off without paying a debt, or abscond, to run in order to evade capture or justice, usually taking something or someone along with you. If your dog gallops out of the house and hot-foots it down the garden, he’s absquatulating. If he has the Sunday roast clamped in his jaws while he does so, he’s absconding.