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?

(Here's a sample.)

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:

 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. 

David Hewson--The Flood

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Every so often you run across a book that you absolutely love. It may seem a bit odd that there are crime novels that create a world you don't want to leave, but it does happen. It takes just the right combination of story, setting, and character, but when it happens, it's magic.

I've been a fan of David Hewson's books since I met him at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California a few years ago. (I was on tour for In a Dark House, I think, so it's been a good few years! And that, by the way, is also how I met Hallie! It's a terrific workshop for aspiring writers.) I picked up one of David's Nic Costa novels, set in Rome, and was immediately hooked. So when I heard a few months ago that David had a new novel coming, set in Florence, called The Flood, I couldn't wait to read it. Here's a little synopsis.

Florence, 1986. A seemingly inexplicable attack on a church fresco of Adam and Eve brings together an unlikely couple: Julia Wellbeloved, an art student, and Pino Fratelli, a semi-retired detective who longs to be back in the field.

Their investigation leads them to the secret society that underpins the city, and back to the darkness in Florence’s past: the night of the great flood in 1966.

Rich in the culture of Tuscany’s most mysterious city, The Flood takes a dazzling trip back into the history of Florence, recent and as distant as that of the Medici.

The book is terrific--one of my best picks for the year. But David can tell you about it much better than I can.

DAVID HEWSON: I’ve written so many books set in Italy that I have sit to back and count them. Lucifer’s Shadow almost fifteen years ago. Then came nine Nic Costa novels, mostly set in Rome.  This is where the Nic Costa series actually starts.After that there was another Venetian kind of standalone, Carnival for the Dead which featured one of the Costa series most popular characters, Teresa Lupo.
And now we have The Flood set in Florence, with scenery like the wonderful Medici dwarf in the Boboli gardens you see here. So that’s a round dozen. Over the last twenty years my books have encompassed Spain, the US, the adaptations of The Killing TV series in Copenhagen, and now a new crime series set in Amsterdam. The fact these are all lovely places to work and visit apart, why do I do this? Aren’t we all supposed to ‘write about what you know’?

Well I don’t believe in rules for writing, and even if I did I wouldn’t think any of them were universal. ‘Write about what you know’ may be great advice for some, but rotten for me. My very first book back in the Nineties was set in a city much like Seville during Holy Week. I was a working journalist at the time and couldn’t afford the time and money to go there to research it. So I simply created a fictional Andalucian city and wrote the damned thing anyway.

Semana Santa got me a three-book deal and was later made into a movie. And yes, I did get a few letters saying that I’d made ‘mistakes’ when it came to portraying Spain. But just as many saying I captured the true spirit of the place too.

Five books later I made the decision to focus on Italy, moving to Rome for a while to enroll at a language school and try to see the world through Italian eyes. It was probably the best investment I ever made.

Writing about what you don’t know works for me on many fronts. For one thing it makes me work, and if writing isn’t work then something’s wrong. I have to deal with a foreign language, culture, and history. I need to read background books and learn to navigate strange cities. I must pound alien pavements, taking pictures, imagining scenes. Those photos are important by the way and I still keep them. Here’s a grainy photo of Tiber Island taken on a rainy February day in 2001.

Books must build worlds, in the heads of both author and reader. By assembling all this material about places I don’t know, I have to construct my locations from the ground up brick-by-brick. It wouldn’t be the same if it was London or some place around the corner.

And the great thing is you develop a routine. In 2011, with my friend A.J. Hartley, I produced an audio novel of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Now this is a fascinating play, but it’s full of holes. We’ve no idea, for example, why Macbeth begins as a hero and abruptly turns in a bloody villain. I hopped on a plane to Scotland and spent a week exploring Macbeth’s real-life Highlands — here’s a photo of Birnam wood, part of his comeuppance. It’s a beautiful part of the world, and there was the clue to his character.
 
Our Macbeth is a patriot, killing Duncan to oppose tyranny, just as Brutus and Cassius murdered Caesar to maintain the Roman republic. Could I have got that out of a book or Google Maps? Not in a million years.

The Flood is a standalone novel, not part of the Nic Costa series. While I tried quite hard to picture a Costa book set in Tuscany every effort stumbled on a simple obstacle: the characters don’t fit.

Romans are southerners, colourful, sociable, outward-looking. Whereas Florence has a darkness to it, a grim side visible in the fortress-like architecture of its rusticated palaces. Rome has always been a show-off, keen to display its glories to the world. Florence, especially under the Medici, preferred to keep them hidden and show them only to the privileged few.

It took a lot of visits before that became clear, and only when it did could I began to grasp the story I wanted to write.

The tale begins in Rome in 1942 where a young Jewish boy is being smuggled out of the ghetto to keep him out of the hands of Mussolini’s thugs. We then move forward to the winter of 1966 and a terrible real-life flood which claimed more than thirty lives in the city.

Then, for the bulk of the story, we find ourselves in 1986, dealing with two far from complementary characters desperate to unravel secrets from both those previous eras. One is an eccentric carabinieri officer, Pino Fratelli, the second is a young Englishwoman, Julia Wellbeloved, fleeing a failed marriage, thinking she can find herself in the art and history of Florence.

I want the reader to feel they’re there walking the streets with Pino and Julia, feeling her disgust when he stops for a Florentine snack of tripe, and his wonder at the marvelous paintings in the Brancacci Chapel and San Marco. I can’t think of any way to achieve that without going to the place myself. I know. It’s a tough life. But someone has to do it.

Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days and he’d never set foot outside Europe. But today the world’s a smaller place, which makes it so much harder to create a vivid version of it for readers’ eyes.

So what do you think? Can you write convincingly about somewhere without going there? Or is fiction just that… made-up stuff and the secret’s in the making?

DEBS: You can probably guess where I stand on David's question. I think writers can build any world they can imagine, convincingly, but it does take work. REDS and readers, what do you think?

While you're contemplating, I want to have another Negroni in a cafe in Florence with Pino and Julia....

And David, I have to ask: Wellbeloved is such wonderful name. How did you come up with that?  

David will be dropping in to respond to comments, and will pick a lucky commenter to receive a copy of The Flood. 

One last thing, although certainly not least. Be sure to follow David on his blog, where you'll find some of the best advice I've come across on writing. And David's book about writing a novel, Writing: A User Manual, is a terrific resource for both new and experienced writers. I'm hoping he'll come back and talk to us about that!