Three days in a booth

Last week I spent three days in a recording studio in Minneapolis, on the near side of the glass, with a script I wrote and a voice actor.

They asked me not to name them, and I said yes before they'd finished asking. Marlowe's voice will be made from what they recorded. Not every line she'll ever say, read one by one: we couldn't afford that, and it isn't how she works. They read for three days, and from those hours comes a voice that can say things they never said. That's a strange thing to agree to. They agreed to it carefully, with a contract longer than our lease, and the one thing they asked for that wasn't in it was not to be the face of it. I understand. I'd want the same.

I wrote about two thousand lines for those sessions. Some are hers, from the cases. Most are there for the sound of them: questions, long sentences and short ones, numbers, street names, every kind of pause. The director I'd hired for the three days sat beside me and said "again, warmer" far more often than I would have dared to.

Here's what nobody warned me about. I've heard my lines read aloud for ten years, by actors much more famous than this one, and it always felt like hearing someone perform a thing I'd written. It was theirs, and that was fine. This wasn't. About an hour into the first morning, they read a small line I'd written at two in the morning a year ago, and I had to go out into the hallway. It didn't sound like a performance of her. It sounded like her, as if she'd been waiting for a voice and here it was.

On the third afternoon they finished the last page and sat for a minute in the booth with the headphones around their neck. Then they leaned in to the microphone and said, "Be good to her," and came out and shook my hand.

Owen thinks I'm being sentimental, and he's probably right. He also listened to the first test four times through, then went for a walk.

Have you ever heard something you made come back to you as someone?