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.