Interpreting The Text - Part One of Find Your Voice Audiobook Performance Course
This 4.5 hour course is a deep dive into text analysis for audiobook narration. It gives tools for deep insight and profound understanding that can be applied to every book and the characters within it. Get inside your characters' heads so you can make them more distinct and real. Make the story come to life by understanding its core and what your listener needs to know at any given moment. You can't make choices about character voices, tone, pacing, or anything else in your narration until you understand why you're making those choices. Learn to mine the text for clues to make more impactful and informed choices that will help your narration sing.
This class is suitable for narrators of all levels; even the most experienced narrators may not be aware of how to actively use some of these skills (or if you're subconsciously doing it, being more purposeful about it can take your narration to new heights).
The second part of the full Find Your Voice Audiobook Performance Course covers crafting unique performances by finding your authentic connection to the text and silencing your inner critic so you can find freedom and playfulness in your narration. It's recommended to take both parts, but you can also take them individually. The full course is also available in the course downloads section of this site.
Testimonials
"The course provided actionable information and was directly applicable to my current and future projects. Thanks for sharing your beautifully practical and effective way of analyzing text, Emily. I am a better narrator for it!"- Sarah Brands, audiobook narrator"So just wanted to say that after session three of the class I feel like it finally clicked for me!! I was preparing an audition and found myself asking relevant questions and really deepening my connection to the text! So exciting. Thanks Emily, what a unique and amazing insight into approaching this work."- Anna Caputo, audiobook narrator"I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you for a great class! I enjoyed part 1 of interpreting the text. I'm newer to the narrating world and so far have only narrated non-fiction but would really love to get into fiction. I found it really helpful to know what to look for and how to mine the text for helpful nuggets on how to bring the book to life. I'm looking forward to part 2 and learning how to use everything we talked about and put it into action! I think this is going to give me the confidence to really get into those characters and dive into the world of fiction!"
- Cassie Huff, audiobook narrator
What's Included?
In this 4 hour 24 minute course, we'll address:
- Building a profound understanding of your characters to give them specificity and depth
- A universal framework for deep understanding of every story
- Recognizing what each moment in a story's purpose is and the important parts that the listener must know
- Getting to the core of the story and your characters
- Interpreting a story objectively and subjectively and why you need to have both types of understanding
- Tools to avoid judging a story or making choices that aren't serving the author's truth
- Using archetypes as a jumping off point for building authentic characters
- The difference between building main or major supporting characters and small minor characters
- How each genre should affect your text analysis and narration style
- How to use syntax and punctuation to create characters
- And much more
At the end of the course, each participant will have the opportunity to submit a recorded sample up to five minutes in length for a performance evaluation which will provide you with notes and pointers on ways to improve your performance, with a particular focus on applying the text analysis skills learned in the course.