Robert Petkoff on the search for the right narrative voice ‹ Literary Hub

Golden Voice narrator Robert Petkoff talks to host Jo Reed about his work on audiobooks and the career path that led him there. Robert has brought to life everything from suspenseful crime novels and sci-fi epics to thoroughly researched nonfiction. He manages to create a distinctive and memorable voice for each character, and he has a knack for compelling storytelling. Listen to his conversation with Jo to hear more about how he got started on stage and behind the microphone, and how he’s preparing to narrate novels like Andrew Sean Greer’s. Less is lostthe fun of telling thrillers and the special skills required to make non-fiction books exciting and entertaining for audiobook listeners.

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From the episode:

Jo Reed: Let’s talk about how to prepare for novel-telling. Take, for example, Andrew Sean Greer’s book, Less is lostas an example.

Robert Petkov: I love this book.

JR: Yes, let’s talk about it. How do you prepare?

RP: Well, number one, you read the book. I tried it once – I read the John D. MacDonald books, and we got through them all in a very short period of time, and I ran out of time to read the next book, and I thought, I’m good at this. I know his characters. I can read this in advance, and I stumbled. There was a character with a certain accent that John, God bless him, didn’t mention until later in the book, and so I thought, Oh no. See, that’s why I have to prepare, because we had to go back and re-record some dialogue and stuff. So, lesson one, always read the book, and then you get a sense not only of what the characters are going to be like, but of the tone, of the whole overarching way the story should be told, or at least the way I think it should be told, the way I think the author wants it told. As I read through it, I’ll mark each character. I use a little app called iAnnotate on my iPad and I use a highlighter for each character. This helps me when I’m writing dialogue back and forth, or when I have five people or even two people speaking, to know exactly which voice is speaking. I don’t have to go back and say, “Oh, wait, wait, that’s the wrong character.”

JR: Since Less is lost is the second book about Arthur Less, the first is Fewerof which you are the narrator, did you try to recreate the voice of Arthur from the first book?

RP: Absolutely. I went and heard Fewer to remember how certain people spoke and how each character sounded, because I can’t imagine many people listening Fewerand then listen immediately Less is lost. But I am sure that there are people who have done that and later said: “Oh, I want to hear Fewerand I want to hear that. But even though there is time between them, you want to get it right, and you want someone who remembers the characters to voice the Less is lost and say, “Oh, I remember that person.” And they can bring a lot of what they felt about that person in the first book right into the second book. So I think it’s important to keep that consistency.

JR: Robert, how about finding that all-important narrative voice?

RP: Ah, yes. I find that so fascinating because I think there’s a wide range of it. I know some narrators try to find a very neutral sound, a neutral tone when they’re telling the story because they don’t want to affect the listener’s own interpretation of the book, and I can’t do that. I have to think, just like with nonfiction, who I’m talking to. With fiction, I have to think, who’s speaking, who’s telling the story? And so I have to decide. If it’s a first person narrative, of course it’s easy, but with a third person narrative, I have to decide what tone to use. If it’s a very lighthearted book, if it’s a very simple subject, then I might start the book with the words, “On July 3, 1944, Henry found himself” – just a very relaxed, easy-going thing. If I know I’m telling something that’s going to have a heavier tone, I don’t want to disappoint the listener by making them think we’re going to take a light walk through the woods and then suddenly it becomes something heavy. At the same time, I don’t want to overdo it and say, “Oh, I know this book has some heavy themes at the end, so I’m going to be really heavy throughout the book.” An author writes each chapter with their own feeling and knows what they want to convey to the reader or listener, and so I try to figure out what that tone is. But in general, as a narrator, I try to keep things moving and sustain them so that when you listen to this thing, you’re not hearing a dirge, but trying to be conversational in many ways if possible.

JR: Well, in both Fewer And Less is lostthe main character, Arthur, travels around the world in the first book and across the country in the second, and that gives you a lot of characters with different accents to portray. Was that daunting? Was it fun? Was it both?

RP: It’s fun. I mean, it’s daunting because you want to get it right and you don’t want to make it too difficult. If it’s a German character or an Indian character or something like that, I never want to try and do a complete 100 percent characterization because again, you want to give the listener some room for imagination. So I think you want to give a certain taste of the dialect. I want to give a taste of the dialect so they think, “Oh, German or whatever,” and at the same time I want to be very sensitive to other cultures and countries. I don’t want to imitate the Hollywood version of an accent from 40 years ago that was quite offensive to people. So I want to take the lightest approach to these things and basically, unless it’s a particularly silly thing, I want them all to sound like real people. So I’ll do a note of the accent when I play it, but generally it’s fun when there are multiple characters from different places because there are only so many places you can do a voice in my own voice and I only have so many facets to my natural voice. So if there’s a different dialect, I’m like, “Oh, great, that helps set this character apart.” It gives me the opportunity to make that character’s voice very distinct.

Nothing is harder for me than having, say, five women talking to each other who are all kind of from the same place, because I want the listener to know the voice of every single woman, but I don’t have that many women’s voices in my voice, and especially when I’m imitating a woman’s voice, I’m not trying to imitate some kind of falsetto. That’s so offensive. I just try to lighten my voice, and if it’s a woman, she speaks like that. If she’s talking to a man, he’s here and she speaks here, just to maybe give the impression again that it’s a more feminine sound. Unless the character is a woman, which doesn’t require a feminine sound, but it’s an adventure. It’s fun. My wife and I always joke about the character of Bottom in Midsummer night’s dream“Oh, let me be the lion too.” Most of the actors said, “I want to play this role, and I want to play that role, oh, and I have an idea for that role.” Well, that’s the beauty of narrating audiobooks, you play all the roles.

JR: You may be down.

RP: I can be below. I can also be the lion.

RP photo courtesy of the narrator.

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