I’m reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. I found it part-way down a particularly deep rabbit hole when hunting for books that might sound good read aloud, barely louder than a whisper. Books that felt intimate, and human. Many books didn’t fulfill the promise, but this one did.
The book uses fragments of life, little vignettes, from the perspective of a single character—“the wife.” Chapter two opens with this delight:
I got a job checking facts at a science magazine. Fun facts, they called them. “The connected fibers in a human brain, extended, would wrap around the earth forty times.” Horrible, I wrote in the margin, but they put it through anyway.
I’m half-watching a movie as I write this, and it struck me how completely unnatural speech is in most movies, even very good ones. It doesn’t seem too strange when you’re watching it, but when you really try to put yourself in the character you can’t imagine ever speaking in the way that they do.
My favorite pieces of audio storytelling are those where the narrator sounds like they’re speaking normally, or normally enough that you don’t notice that they aren’t. I think it’s a difficult thing to do, actually. Truly normal speech would probably be uninteresting after a few minutes.
What does it take, to strike that balance? Hundreds of hours of practice, probably. Thousands even, and then tens of thousands. The Voice Memos app on my iPhone is slowly getting filled up with practice reads. I use the DJI Mic Mini 2, because I can use it just about anywhere.
Aneesah’s sleeping on the couch, and Cacio has tucked herself in the little nook behind her legs. It’s one of her favorite places. Big stretch now, loud sigh, and now she’s flopped her head over a knee.