In the booth
This week I spent two afternoons in voice sessions, which is the best part of my job and the part I have least to do with.
We record at the studio, in a small dark room with a big window in one wall. In the control room sit the voice director, an engineer, and me, in a chair at the back with a script and a pencil and instructions to speak when spoken to. Through the window is the booth, padded and close and very quiet, and in it an actor with headphones, a music stand and a glass of water, reading lines I wrote at my desk months ago.
They don't read them in order. A session goes one character at a time, and the lines come in whatever order the script was built in, so an actor might do a man's death, then his greeting, then a line about the price of rope. They have no game to look at. They have a sentence, a note from me in brackets ("tired, a little rude"), and the director telling them what came just before. And from that, in two or three takes, they make a person.
I'm there to answer questions. How do you say this place name? Is he angry or only loud? Has she met this man before? Mostly nobody asks, and that's how it should be. The director knows what she wants, the actor knows what they're doing, and I'm the person at the back who knows how the story goes and keeps out of the way.
On Thursday they recorded the blacksmith. I wrote about him last summer: four lines, one of which I rewrote eleven times. The actor was older than I'd pictured, with a voice like a door that wants oil, and he read the first three almost as I'd heard them in my head. Then he got to the fourth, the short one, and did something I hadn't thought of. He stopped halfway, for no reason in the text, and finished it more quietly than he'd started, as if he'd changed his mind about saying it and said it anyway. The director turned around to look at me. I nodded. That was the take.
That line belongs to him now. I wrote six words, and he found the place in them where the man hesitates, and that hesitation is who the blacksmith is from here on. I couldn't take it back if I wanted to, and I don't. A line on a page is a set of instructions. It isn't a person until somebody breathes into it, and whoever does the breathing has earned their share.
When I started, I used to feel a small proprietary sting when a line went somewhere I hadn't sent it. That's mostly gone. Now it's the part I wait for: the moment an actor takes something of mine, turns it a quarter turn, and hands it back better than I made it.
What's something you made that somebody else finished?