Marley and Me
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Tape is.... Rolling!
I spent Monday and Tuesday in New York City trying my hand at a whole new life experience....recording my written words. Yes, that would be in my voice -- the same voice that everytime I hear it on our phone answering machine makes me cringe. A brave new frontier in audio recording.
I was in town from Pennysylvania to record the audio version of Marley & Me. Given that voice, which leans toward the nasal (I'm told I do a dead-on Bob Dylan imitation), I thought it must be some mistake. HarperAudio couldn't possibly want me to read my book myself. But no, producer Rick Harris assured me, whenever possible with nonfiction works, they try to have the author read himself. And so at 10 a.m. Monday I found myself in a small, soundproof room in the HarperCollins building in Midtown with a microphone, a glass of water and my manuscript. Harris and a sound engineer were in a control booth separated from me by a large piece of plate glass. A speaker allowed us to talk back and forth. Black-and-white photos of literary giants in the recording booth from years past surrounded me on the walls.... Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty. No pressure. Oh geez, no pressure at all.
"I've never done this before," I confessed.
"Not a problem," he said. "Just be yourself."
"You sure you really want that? 'Myself' is definitely an acquired taste."
He gave me the drill. Don't rush, don't drag, don't be boring. Don't shout, don't whisper, don't mumble -- but also don't get all wrapped up over-EE-NUN-SEE-ATE-ING. Pretend you are reading your kids a bedtime story. I would be making mistakes, he said, and that was to be expected. Just start the sentence over, and an editor would later go through and snip out all the flubs, coughs, sniffles, garbles, and the like. Then through the glass, he said, "Tape is...rolling."
Holy smokes! This was it. The moment of truth. I cleared my throat. "Preface: The Perfect Dog..."
I got about three words into it before mangling a phrase. From the top... Then eight words. Then twelve. So went the first hour. To the poor editor who has the misfortune of having to slice and dice out all the mistakes and make me sound polished, I truly, sincerely apologize. You're about to earn your paycheck, pal.
But as the morning progressed, I began to get my recording mojo down. By the time we broke for lunch, I already had more than 100 pages behind me. And by 1:30 the next afternoon, I read the book's final line into the microphone and looked up expectantly at Harris through the plate glass, half expecting him to say through the little speaker, "You know what? I really think we need to start over from the top...Has anyone ever told you, you sound an awful lot like Bob Dylan?" But he just gave me a thumb's up and said, "That's it. We're done."
And that is how I came to record Marley & Me, the audio book.
posted by John Grogan at 3:21 PM
 
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