Thursday, August 9, 2018

David Hewson--Tips on Successful Audio Books



DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've commented a good bit recently on how much I'm enjoying audio books these days, so I was really tickled when I got a notice that my friend David Hewson had a new book in his Nic Costa series available on Audible. But it's not just the audio versions of David's novels that are big hits--he's been enormously successful in writing works directly for audio, as you will see. I asked him to chat with us about that, and about the latest in the world of audio books. This is so fascinating! I've become more and more aware of how my own books are going to translate to audio, so I'm going to be saving David's tips for constant reference.

DAVID HEWSON:  So there I was in the grand surroundings of the New York Historical Society waiting to hear who’d won an Audie, the audiobook equivalent of an Oscar, for the best original work of 2017. Had to be The Handmaid’s Tale narrated by Claire Danes and Margaret Atwood, didn’t it? Or maybe Nevertheless, We Persisted, a timely tale for the Me-Too era with a huge cast of voices.

Well no, actually. It turned out to be me, with no small amount of help from my wonderful narrator/performer Richard Armitage who breathed life into a revisionist adaptation of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: A Novel. (Here's a sample.)


Rarely has my gob been so smacked as we say on this side of the pond. It sits on my mantelpiece now, an imposing and very heavy reminder of how Richard and I took one of the best-known tales in the world apart and retold it in a new and very different fashion. But here’s the odd thing. People, fellow writers even, still look at me askance when I say I love writing audio as much as novels. More so in some ways.

Why, they wonder? Don’t I know that stories come from books not a download from Audible?

Be still my beating heart… how wrong can you get? Audio isn’t just an important financial part of the publishing business these days – and unlike books growing very healthily in audience and money terms each year. Of more immediate interest to me as a writer, it’s at the heart of what we do. If you think that stories come from books you damn yourself as someone of a certain age. For a modern audience they’re as likely to come from a video game, a Netflix series or a movie.

Or, indeed, a tale skillfully told in your ear by a consummate actor like Richard. Because the aural storytelling tradition is where it all began. Remember that chap called Homer? He couldn’t write. He was probably blind for one thing. He recited or perhaps sang his stories to a rapt audience while others wrote them down to save them for prosperity. In fact there are people who believe that this is one reason writing first came into being.

I knew none of this when, largely by accident, I fell into working on audio original projects for audible, first Hamlet and Macbeth, co-written with my fellow author and Shakespeare expert A.J. Hartley, then on my own with Romeo and Juliet. There are more in the works too, not that I can tell you about them at the moment.

I still write books, of course. And I’m delighted to say my popular Nic Costa series has made a return with a new book, The Savage Shore, which has just appeared in the UK. The audio is released simultaneously, thank goodness, and if you’re in the US you’ll find the audio edition is the only immediately available version since the print and ebook versions won’t be out over there until November. See – it is important, isn’t it?



Another crucial thing that needs to be said about audio, too, is that writing to be read aloud tests and improves your technique for book work too. For example… here are some of my simple rules for tackling audio. You may think they work pretty well for books too.

Keep it simple
A physical book has a physical form of navigation built in. We know through the feel of the pages how far we’ve traveled and the distance left to go.

Once stories turn digital, navigation isn’t so simple. Yes there are ever more sophisticated tools that let you skip and navigate around the story. But listeners still crave signposts along the way, an indication, hopefully suggested by the story, where they should stop, rather than abandon something unsatisfactorily mid-scene.

Here are some of the ways I try to achieve this.
-       I write in short scenes. The average scene length in Romeo and Juliet: A Novel is probably around 1,000 words or five minutes or so in listening time. Some may run to twice that but they’re rare and usually important. Short scenes make it easier for the listener to choose when to break. They also tempt them to take on just one more scene when otherwise they might give up.

-       I structure the narrative in parts (or acts). Maybe, as in Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, a story that happens over a few days so it’s broken up by time, with an audio marker to denote the start of each act. Or it’s something thematic that marks a break. Whatever your divider you need to say to the listener… we’re starting a new section of the story now. It’s going to be big so if you want to put it off until you have the time now’s the point to do it.

-       Always, always make it clear at the beginning of the scene where we are and whose point of view is in operation if any. Listeners need to know that. They shouldn’t feel they have to catch up on what’s happening.

-       Make the narrative linear. Time jumps, flashbacks, flash forwards are going to produce speed bumps that will confuse the audience. I’m producing mainstream narrative fiction. Listeners should be engrossed in the story, not thinking about how it’s written or the cleverness of the author. The best writing is the writing that’s invisible just as the best acting doesn’t look like acting at all.

Dialogue
I’m working with world class performers and part of my job is to help them shine. A novel is a work inside itself, the author the cast, narrator, cinematographer and director. An audio project is closer to a film, TV or stage script. The way dialogue is handled is essential in all this. 
-       It must match the character. People speak differently according to class, sex and their role in the story. If they all sound the same it won’t work – and your narrator won’t have good raw material to work with..

-       The horror of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. God how we all wrestle with that. Look, attribution is necessary from time to time. But mostly I will let the narrator deal with the change in speaker through accent and approach. Too many ‘he said’ and ‘she saids’ in a book can be annoying. In audio they can drive you up the wall. I recently had to give up on a very good book in audio because the writer hadn’t given this a second thought. Tip: always read your work out aloud and listen to it very carefully. That goes for any kind of writing.

-       Speech must be easy to understand and straightforward. One of the key ideas behind these Shakespeare adaptations was that they ran with the heretical idea that his language would go out of the window and they would focus on the story. Shakespeare is difficult, archaic and often open to interpretation even by experts. What I wanted were people from the late fifteenth century speaking in modern, comprehensible English, occasionally with a twist. Anything else and we’d be back producing speed bumps for the reader.

Location
Characters, Narrative and World. It’s essential the first two come out of the last. If anything I write, whether it’s in Scotland, Italy, Amsterdam or Copenhagen, can be easily transferred to a new location I’ve failed to do my job. Making the world of Romeo and Juliet vivid and real, in Verona and during his brief sojourn in Mantua, was essential. I spent a week visiting both in a chilly February before writing a word of the story. If I can’t see the world in my head I can’t reproduce it for readers and listeners. It was particularly gratifying to hear from Richard when we met during the narration that he loved the Verona I’d painted, a new take on a city he’d visited, with aspects he’d never seen while he was there.

That’s what writing location is about: making people see the world with fresh eyes, even if they feel they know the place you’re writing about well already.

When I look back on the new Nic Costa I can see that The Savage Shore has benefited from my audio work. It has a more novel-like structure but I hope there’s a clarity to it that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. And I’m also lucky in having a fantastic narrator here too, Saul Reichlin who’s become the voice of the Nic Costa series. 


If you want to be a storyteller you need to think about audio. Professionally and artistically too. It’s a fast-growing, exciting and dynamic medium reaching a bigger and bigger audience each year. And we’re still playing with what it can do, of which more later when I can tell you about it.

DEBS: That's a hook! And can I just say how fabulous Richard Armitage is reading Romeo and Juliet: A Novel??????? I mean, it's Richard Armitage!! Be still, my heart! The story is so gripping that you won't be able to stop listening.


Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, narrated by Richard Armitage, is available exclusively through Audible worldwide. Juliet and Romeo, the print version, is published in the UK by Dome Press. The Savage Shore is published by Severn House in print and Whole Story Audio in audio, narrated by Saul Reichlin. 

Here's David on David:


David Hewson
 Photo by Dingena Mol


One way or another I’ve spent my entire life earning a crust through the written word. I left school at the age of seventeen to become a cub reporter on the Scarborough Evening News, one of the smallest newspapers in the country. Over the next two decades I worked for The Times, Independent and Sunday Times as a journalist.
But the hankering to write fiction never went away. My first book Semana Santa, now reissued as Death in Seville, appeared in 1995 and was later turned into a movie with Mira Sorvino. Since then I’ve written more than twenty different books in various locations around the world.
In 2011, with my good friend A.J. Hartley, I branched into audiobook adaptations with Macbeth: A Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming. Now we’ve added Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel to the audio portfolio, this time narrated by Richard Armitage.
After writing eleven books set in Italy, nine featuring the young Roman cop Nic Costa, I went to Copenhagen for the three novel adaptations of The Killing series. After that I turned to Amsterdam with a series set around Pieter Vos, a detective who lives on the Prinsengracht canal. In 2016 I returned to the audio world with Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, once again narrated by the superlative Richard Armitage.
I live near Canterbury in Kent. The photo above is available for general use, but please give a credit to Dingena Mol and Crimezone  who took it in the bar of De Eland in Amsterdam, the fictional Drie Vaten in the Vos books.

David is in Italy, (I hope researching another book) but he'll be checking in today to chat with us and answer our questions. 

And do check out David's website at www.davidhewson.com. He's a very good photographer and if you're not careful, his photos will have you buying your plane ticket to explore the settings of his books in person. 

41 comments:

  1. Congratulations on your Audie award, David.

    This is all quite fascinating and I agree with Debs: it’s difficult to stop listening to a wonderful storyteller . . . .

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    1. In case anyone is still interested in the audio version... in the US it's deal of the day at Audible today only. Down from $24.95 to $3.95 and you don't have to be an Audible member to get it. Apologies for the native plug.
      https://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Romeo-and-Juliet-A-Novel-Audiobook/B01KGL9QN4?qid=1534415537&sr=sr_1_8&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_8&pf_rd_p=e81b7c27-6880-467a-b5a7-13cef5d729fe&pf_rd_r=VJYDQD59YKYK0870QRRX&

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  2. I am slaving away in a very hot Venice at the moment but if anyone has any questions I will try to answer them. Thanks as ever Debs!

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  3. Debs, like you, I seem to be liking audio books more. I don't really listen to many yet, except for the car, but I wouldn't be surprised if I start listening to more doing other things. One of my favorite audio experiences is radio theater programs. When my husband and I were a young married couple without kids and traveling, we loved to listen to Mystery Radio Theater on late at night. It's still a favorite audio form for me.

    David, I think the work you do with audio is fascinating, and your rules for tackling audio make such perfect sense. Congratulations on your Audie. What an honor! I plan to check out Romeo and Juliet: The Novel.

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    1. I should have said and perhaps didn't make it clear... the rules for writing good audio are pretty good rules for writing good mainstream narrative fiction too. Clarity and making life easy for the reader when it comes to navigation especially. I think modern readers don't have the time or patience for some of the 'clever' stuff people, myself included, have given them in the past.

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  4. Wait....THE Richard Armitage? North and South? Vicar of Dibley? Oh my. I'm fan gal-ing here. Sorry. Carry on.

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    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxCcTojIvNo

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    2. If you want to see the full version of Richard and I talking about the project it's here. Please excuse my inarticulacy. I'd turned up from the UK the night before and not slept a wink because my hotel room appeared to be located in the Midtown Tunnel. Richard was as articulate as ever. He's clean shaven here because he was playing a character who aged from 19 to 60 in an off Broadway play at the time.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7ahH4-LoCk

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  5. Thank you for sharing these insights, David. As a fellow author, I am often surprised by what I see and hear when I read my own manuscript aloud. It's a really important stage in my revision process. Congratulations on the award!

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  6. Fascinating! Audible markers for scene transitions. I always read my final ms. out loud and will make sure I have these. Thanks for sharing.

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  7. This surprised me--but in a good way. Of course, writing directly for audible makes perfect sense--we are all storytellers--telling each other small stories, big stories--the stories of our lives, our days. Audible books are about to become a bigger part of my world! Thanks for stopping by, David, and thanks for the writing tips, too!

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  8. Can't get the link to work Deb. Is it just me?

    Welcome David. The only time I've ever listened to audible is on long driving trips, and my partner finds it very distracting, so we rarely do even that. (ROSE MADDER lasted from Dallas to San Francisco tho) However, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare revised, is meant to be heard not read, and I will certainly have a look/listen to Juliet and Romeo.

    My infatuation with e books isn't only because I can get instant gratification and adjust the font so I can actually see the words, but that I can also look up word origins, get translations for foreign phrases, highlight and share impressive sentences, and promote immediately on Facebook my delight in what I'm reading. I do have a small collection of books signed by the author that I treasure, but I'm likely to also buy the Kindle version to read it.

    Sigh, all those virgin books that my children will wonder about!

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  9. Fascinating. I guess I don't consciously think of whether my stories would work in audio, but as part of an interview, I was asked just that question and yeah. I can see it - or "hear" it as the case may be.

    I bet Richard Armitage made a wonderful narrator.

    Mary/Liz

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  10. Congratulations of your award, David! I'm rally on the fences when it comes to listening to books. There is a series that I love and so I thought I would try listening instead of reading. Nope! That would not work - the voices were NOT the ones I was hearing in my head. And then there was another book I heard about which I thought might be interesting so I listened to a sample. Wow! Pulled me right in in a way that I am not sure the written word would do. So I guess I should always listen to a sample before I make up my mind.

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    1. The narrator is key. Get the wrong one and nothing can save you.

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  11. , Thank you for this wonderful piece! I am so passionate about this, I cannot begin to tell you. When I heard my first audiobook, I mean, of my own book :-) I realized so many things! Most particularly, the need to place the setting and characters instantly at the beginning of each scene. We don’t realize, reading book books, that if we are confused we can just easily flip back and say… Wait a minute, who is talking? Where are we? An audiobook just plows relentlessly forward.

    And oh , the he said she said situation. Sigh. Constant struggle.

    And I am super aware of using the same word more than once. I once heard an audiobook where the author had everybody pausing pausing pausing through the whole thing. He said, pausing she said, pausing. Pausing, he said… Oh, it was so annoying!

    And if you don’t read your work out loud, you will miss your quirks, too. I once realized I had used the word flicker about 15 times. Perfectly good word, but not 15 times :-) but I only found it by reading it out loud!

    You have given us such valuable information! Thank you!


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  12. This is so interesting. Thank you for this post, David (and Deborah). I love well read audio books, especially when I’m puttering around the house. Makes me focus on the story not the chores!!

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  13. Sorry about the links! I thought I'd stripped out the personal tags but apparently they are still going to my Audible page. But just go to Audible and type the book in the Search bar.

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  14. I am absolutely with Hank. I now listen to the audio versions of previous books while I'm writing, partly because I love my narrator and it helps me to stay in my characters, and partly because it's a constant reminder of how the book is going to sound. And, oh, do I struggle with the dreaded he said/she said.

    As David suggests, I almost always write in fairly short scenes, and I try to make it clear in the first sentence whose viewpoint we are in. All of David's tips work equally well for printed books.

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  15. David, I'd love for you to tell us how you ended up with your wonderful narrators.

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    1. They were selected by the publishers. Audible hired Richard for this and an earlier Hamlet I co-wrote. Whole Story Audio picked Saul for the Costa books.

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  16. Such an interesting discussion! I listen to books only on road trips. My vehicle is so ancient I can play only books on CDs. So no Audible experiences here. I am beyond thrilled to hear that Nic and the gang will be back. I have really missed them.

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  17. I've been listening to more audio books in the last few years, so I found this very interesting. And I certainly agree that a good story is a good story regardless of how it is told.

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  18. I love to read a book first and then subsequently listen to it. By listening to it I pick up on details that I rushed by reading it. I tend to do this over and over if I love the characters in a book or series. I also can multi task by listening to a book while at the gym or driving my car, etc. it can be soothing also to listen to a story. If I have insomnia, a good book that I’m familiar with will help me fall asleep.

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    1. Yes, Teri, I really enjoy listening to book that I've read. It gives you a different perspective and notice so many things you might have skipped over while reading--especially if you're hurrying to find out the ending!

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  19. Just reminding everyone that our Bad Hemingway contest is open until tomorrow, and that's it a great 6 book prize! We'll be publishing the entries and announcing the winner on Saturday.

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    1. You Jungle Red women run a terrific blog. Reading it every summer-vacation-morning is a real treat! Am looking forward to lots of good reading of bad Hemingway on Saturday!!

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  20. This is brilliant stuff, David.

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  21. This is fascinating, David. I have to admit that I've never listened to one of my own audio books; I just don't like to hear it, but maybe I need to get over that!

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  22. The youtube interviews are fabulous! Thanks for the links, Debs (in part because, being me, I didn't know who Richard Armitrage was...).

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    1. Edith, you need to watch more British TV. And maybe a few movies, lol!

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  23. The only book I ever listened to had a narrator so annoying that it took 3 chapters of the regular book to get her out of my head! The other problem is that I can't just sit and listen the way I sit and read. The only way I see using audio books is if my sight gets really bad. I can play records while I'm cooking, doing dishes, or dusting but that doesn't take long enough to read a book.

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  24. A real treat is Boris Karloff reading Kenneth Grahame's The Reluctant Dragon. You can find it on Amazon for less than a dollar. It takes less than an hour to listen to. It was originally released on vinyl in 1958.

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  25. This is fascinating. I love audio books & had no idea that some books were written just for audio.

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  26. I am new to the delights of audio books - I'm listening to Kitchen Confidential now and it is both a comfort and a torment to hear Anthony Bourdain's voice in my ears. I am so looking forward to listening to your version of Romeo and Juliet, David. Congrats on the Audie!

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    1. Oh, Jenn. I own it on Audible but haven't been able to bring myself to listen.

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