Narrating Fictional Books and the Challenges that Come With It

Justin:

Welcome back to How to be a Better DM. Today, I am Justin Lewis. I actually am always Justin Lewis, but today I'm joined with Tanner Whelan. Go ahead and say hi, Tanner.

Tanner Weyland:

Hey guys.

Justin:

And we have today with us a very special guest, Victor Baveen. And for me, he's kind of, he has a special place in my heart because I first got introduced to really anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons by listening to the R.A. Salvatore books about Dredd Stoerden. I listened to them on audiobook and the voice actor who really personified, in my opinion, Drizztorodin was Victor Bavine. So having him here with us is a real treat for me personally because, like I said, I have fond memories of long road trips, listening to Drizzt battle the monsters of the Underdark and then make his way to the surface and kind of go through a, you know, a similar trek I think a lot of us go through when we're trying to find out who we are and where we fit in life. Thank you for being here, Victor. And if you want to, you can add to that introduction however you want. But thank you for being here.

Victor:

Sure, my pleasure. I'm thrilled that I've been doing the Driz books for about 10 years now. And I think I'm up to 40 plus. I've done all but I think three of them. And those were done before I got involved. And yeah, I've been an actor my whole life and I'm also a writer and entrepreneur. started doing audiobooks about 17 years ago and this was one of the first really big projects that I got. So, you know, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled the fans like it. I get a lot of really fun emails. In fact, the best one I've ever, one of the best ones I've ever gotten, I don't want to choose best, but this guy wrote me and said how... he was going blind actually, and he was unable to read to his children anymore. And so they would listen to the DRISD books as bedtime stories together. And it really brought a tear to my eye. So I'm thrilled

Tanner Weyland:

Wow.

Victor:

to be here, but I love the books, I'm thrilled to be here.

Justin:

Awesome. Yeah. Having experiences like that has to be life changing because in, you know, in accounting, you don't have the opportunity to change someone's life like that. Right. So, uh, well, let's get into some of our questions. Uh, and, you know, I thought one reason having you on the podcast would be so great is because as people play Dungeons and Dragons, uh, one thing that a lot of people kind of are drawn towards naturally is just kind of the the attempts at voice acting. And I think it's a really great way to help your players become immersed. And so I thought it would be a great, a great thing to have you on and kind of talk about that. But you also mentioned that you're also a writer. So tell us a little bit kind of how you got into voice acting and writing and kind of how those two interweave and things like that.

Victor:

Well, I pretty much always wanted to be an actor. I decided when I was five that I wanted to be an actor because I saw this TV show. I wasn't allowed to have a dog. I really wanted a dog and my mom wouldn't let me get a dog. And I saw this TV show about vaudeville and there was this one dog act and I got into my head that as an actor, I could have a dog.

Tanner Weyland:

Ha

Victor:

And

Tanner Weyland:

ha.

Victor:

so anyway, so I decided I always wanted to be an actor and then I always thought it was, I love to read and I, you know, I just... Classically trained as an actor, so I've done a lot of Shakespeare. So I think it really sets you up well for reading large blocks of text and making it understandable, cuz that's the trick of being a narrator is knowing how to use language, what we would call heightened language to. to tell the story, but at the same time, keep it personal and human without getting too involved in technique. So anyway, so I had been acting for years and I was living in LA and toward the end of my time in LA, my manager asked me, how would you like to read the Bible? And I said, okay. I was hired by this company to do, there were like eight of us, and I read six books of the Old Testament, six books of the New. And it was pretty cool, pretty cool way to make a living. And then I moved back to New York and I actually bought this house in New Jersey, in Newark, for God knows why I did it. Because I wanted

Tanner Weyland:

Hahaha

Victor:

a project to renovate this, renovate this old historic home. And so I... I was in the midst of doing that and it was right when Audible was moving to Newark, moving their headquarters to Newark. And I happened to see an interview with the CEO and the in the local paper and I got on the company website and I emailed him. I figured out his email address. It was dcatz at audible.com.

Tanner Weyland:

Ha

Victor:

And

Tanner Weyland:

ha.

Victor:

so I just emailed. Thanks for taking a chance on Newark. I said I did the same thing. I bought this house and my friend said I was crazy to move from Santa Monica to Newark, but here I am and here's my voiceover demo. And I'd love to come in for an audition. The CEO emailed me two days later and said, yeah, come in for an audition. So that's how I got started to really do an audiobooks. And that was, gosh, 2007 or eight

Tanner Weyland:

Okay.

Victor:

and I've done probably 350 books at this point and I'd always wanted to be a writer. I'd been writing screenplays when I was in LA and almost got a couple of movies off the ground and then I had a project that almost was super close. We had the money and I'm almost in the bank and then the financial crisis hit and the money disappeared. I was supposed to direct it and I'd written the screenplay and So it all fell apart and I said, well, I've always wanted to write a novel, now's the time. So I wrote the first draft of the novel and it was awful. It was basically the screenplay without formatting and because I didn't know how to write fiction, it was right around that time that I started narrating at Audible. And then two years later, I picked up the novel again after having probably. narrated 40 books and I suddenly started writing again. I said, oh I know how to write prose fiction now Because it was that was like my 10,000 hours. It was all it was all there so that so it all did kind of meld really nicely together and So that's sort of how I got to do all of it

Tanner Weyland:

Wow, I love that so much. That's man, what a roller coaster. Hot

Victor:

Yeah.

Tanner Weyland:

dang. So

Victor:

Yeah, it's the life of an artist.

Tanner Weyland:

did you find that you kind of naturally gravitated to narrating the fictional books or was that purely coincidental that they were like, hey, you're great for this?

Victor:

It was just coincidental. I've done a lot of, like I just, my most recent book I just finished last week was about the Russo-Ukrainian War. Very intense, deeply historical. really dense. Normally, the process is generally a book called takes about four or five days to record and then you come in for like an hour or two of pickups, stuff that you got wrong and you have to go in and fix. And normally the most I generally, I have anywhere between 20 and 50 pickups in a project when I can knock that out in an hour. This we had 350 pickups. because the names, the Ukrainian and Russian names, you know, they wanted them so specific and really perfect. So, and then the longest book I've ever done, single book was a book called Gotham, which is a Pulitzer Prize winning history of New York City. And it's two volumes and it's 4,000 pages. And that took four months.

Tanner Weyland:

Wait,

Victor:

And

Tanner Weyland:

so

Victor:

that...

Tanner Weyland:

4,000, that many pages, how many hours is that? Like, it's gotta

Victor:

It's

Tanner Weyland:

be

Victor:

a

Tanner Weyland:

a lot.

Victor:

60 hours, about 60 hours. Yeah,

Tanner Weyland:

Hot day.

Victor:

yeah, it's a commitment. It's a great, it's a great book. I mean, it's a fantastic, I mean, you know, and I love New York, I'm a native New Yorker and I love delving into the history. And so it was fun. But then I loved doing the fantasy too. I loved doing fiction and I mean, I've done some, you know, classic fiction like Vonnegut. But... I'd done a couple of other fantasy series before I got the Drift. And the Drift thing was, you know, it was interesting how it came to me. Cause they had recorded a couple of the books, not starting from book one. And they had two different narrators and everybody hated the narrators apparently. And so they, Wizards of the Coast, came to Audible and they said, we need to find a new narrator. So they did a contest where they recorded, they had three of us that Ari Salvador approved, and then they put it on the fan website and the fans chose me.

Tanner Weyland:

Well, that's

Victor:

53%

Tanner Weyland:

awesome.

Victor:

of the fans chose me. So there was already like a lot of buy-in, you know? And I still get, when people come to those other books, I get all these like Twitter messages saying, what happened, where'd you go? Did they fire you?

Justin:

Ha ha ha!

Victor:

No, no, just be patient, I'll be back. But the

Tanner Weyland:

I'm

Victor:

fun

Tanner Weyland:

sorry.

Victor:

thing with the, so many of you were saying about character stuff, character voices, the fun thing about... about fantasy is that you really can take liberties with the voices. In general, they want you to be really subtle with characters and like obviously in you know non-fiction stuff but even in fiction they want you to be fairly subtle but you know you can just go crazy with the um I love some of the voices that I've managed to create and it's fun funny because I won't tell you. I will never reveal this, but Jarlaxle is one of my favorite voices that I created and a lot of people love that voice. And one of the ways sometimes I'll create voices is I'm so bad at celebrity impersonations that I'll

Tanner Weyland:

Hahaha

Victor:

do a celebrity impersonation and it'll come out as a voice but nobody recognizes it.

Tanner Weyland:

I'm

Victor:

And that's

Tanner Weyland:

sorry.

Victor:

how Jarlaxle started. So he's based on a celebrity, but I will never tell you who it is.

Justin:

I'm gonna have to go back and listen and kind of play Celebrity Bingo and see, you know, like process

Victor:

Yeah,

Justin:

of elimination.

Victor:

I would love it if you guessed it, but I don't think you will. It's so bad.

Tanner Weyland:

That's amazing.

Justin:

Yeah, and I do have to say Jarlaxle is, he's one of my favorite characters too. He's complex, but he's also mysterious and kind of cheeky. And I think a lot of people idealize that and wish they were like that in real life, right?

Victor:

I think that the genius of Bob's books is that they're simple enough for young people to understand, but as opposed to so much fantasy or comic book fiction, I really think all great stories, truly great stories are about moral ambiguity. And that's the heart of the story, is moral ambiguity. It's like, how do you be a good person in an impure world? And I love I don't know if you last summer I got to do a compendium of all drizzed diary entries.

Justin:

Yeah, I heard that.

Victor:

Yeah.

Tanner Weyland:

Oh wow.

Justin:

I haven't listened to it, but I wanted

Victor:

Yeah.

Justin:

to.

Victor:

Yeah, it was really fun. It was really, really cool. And at the same time, I did right around the same time I did the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. And it was similar.

Justin:

I was

Victor:

I mean,

Justin:

gonna say...

Victor:

it was very similar. Yeah.

Justin:

That's

Victor:

So

Justin:

so cool.

Victor:

So I love that people are getting, you know, like you say, Gerald Axel is such a great character because he's morally ambiguous.

Justin:

Yeah. And honestly, that is actually something I wanted to talk about because one of the things that really struck me about your voice acting style, specifically in the Drift books is in those diary entries, because it's one thing to just read a diary entry, but it's one thing to also kind of hear someone read it and, and really get, or feel like you get the emotion behind the entry, right? So, so how. And you mentioned this before with like heightened language and making it human. W what tips would you give to someone who is trying to really convey the deep emotion behind just the words they're saying, right?

Victor:

Good question. Well, let me go back to, so I do sometimes, I've done classes, audiobook classes for actors. And what I always start people out with is Shakespeare's sonnets. And, you know, there's a, there's a, this is sort of my motto as a writer is, Mark Twain said, the difference between the perfect word and the almost perfect word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. And so if you're reading really good fiction, you're really imbuing finding that. It's just, you know, you're, I mean, okay, let me back up. So one of the reasons I choose Shakespeare for people to work, start with, I do a sonnet and then we get into the books, is that the great fear that actors have with Shakespeare and with American actors is that it's gonna be boring. And the only way it's boring, because it's not boring material, the only way it's boring is to shy away from committing to the emotion of the moment. So it's if you commit to specifically what you're saying, this is not a general sort of wash of emotion. You've got to be specifically following the, so again, that's why classical training is so important for audio books, because what you're doing when you're narrating is you're helping the listener follow the thought. So you've got to really follow that thought. And these, again, like classical characters, they're passionate about their thoughts, these people. What they're thinking is passionate, whereas so often, and I think it's less true now, but for so often it's been we hide what we feel with our language, with the things we say. So you've got to be capable, you've got to be willing to look for what's the specific thing that's being conveyed with each word, and it becomes very natural, but just commit to a specific meaning word rather than a general and really just follow the thought moment to moment. Does that make sense?

Justin:

Yeah, so go

Tanner Weyland:

Yeah.

Justin:

ahead Tanner.

Tanner Weyland:

No, I just I love it because I've had the same experience. I saw some clips of what's the show called? It's in the actor's studio. What's that one

Victor:

Oh

Tanner Weyland:

called?

Victor:

yeah, yeah,

Tanner Weyland:

Yeah. Yeah,

Victor:

in the studio I think, yeah.

Tanner Weyland:

yeah, yeah. Thank you. And, you know, they have some actors who read Shakespeare. And I'm like, these guys are amazing, you know, and they do it so differently depending on who's portraying it. And it kind of does go to show what you were saying. It's like, hey, you have to commit to something, you know, and there's no necessarily right way to do it in at least

Victor:

Right.

Tanner Weyland:

in certain, you know, stories. Right. I think especially going to D&D and other kinds of places where we get the freedom to act, you know, so many players wait until the moment. is quote unquote worthy of having like emotion or like being passionate about. But it's like, Hey, before that during mundane things, you can choose to have. Emotions as well. Right. Even when you're buying an egg from the market or whatever else. Right.

Victor:

Yeah, because what's the, you know, sometimes you start as an actor, you start a scene. By asking yourself, what's the preceding moment? What happened before it started? Where is the character coming from? We're always bringing something into every moment. We're not, we very rarely arrive, unless you just came from a meditation, you very rarely arrive totally clean. You've brought something with you. And how does that affect what you're about to do? And again, I've never played D&D. Actually, I did do a book. about playing D&D two years ago, which is kind of fun.

Tanner Weyland:

That's fun.

Victor:

But it, you know, how much do people really explore? What's the point of view? What is the life experience of this character? And what's the point of view they're bringing with them? And that's what, and again, it's so much easier when you're working with good material, because that's what, you know, Bob's books, they're in... in a way they're formulaic, but still you know that ultimately these characters are going to survive, but he still puts you on the edge of your seat. Every time you're still worried when these characters are in jeopardy. That's just a fantastic skill and talent. And again, like I said, certain materials better for certain people. I love the questions that Drizzt

Tanner Weyland:

Thanks

Victor:

asks

Tanner Weyland:

for watching!

Victor:

himself. I mean, there are questions that I ask myself. Sometimes I just really can put myself in the moment and think that I'm Drizzt. So. But that's the key. And again, audio books are so much fun because you get to play all the characters. So you get

Justin:

Thanks

Victor:

to keep

Justin:

for watching!

Victor:

switching points of view. And nobody thinks they're a bad guy. Everybody thinks they're doing the best they can in the way that they understand the world. Even like Loaf or Matron Mets Barris or whoever. They all think they're doing the best they can. in the world that was given to them. And then you have the heroic characters like Drizzt who are willing to push out of the boundaries of the world they were given, question that. Maybe this is not the way it should be. And that's the hero's journey.

Justin:

Um, so if I've understood it's, it's not so much like acting as it is like...