My Natural Voice Didn’t Come Naturally

“How did it sound?” I asked my husband on the way home from church – fishing, as usual, for compliments on the reading I’d given that day from the podium. I have served as a lector at every church I’ve ever belonged to, for as long as I can remember.

“It sounded fine,” came the usual retort. And then, something different: “But….”

“What?” I responded, intrigued. “But what?”

“You… um… ” A considered pause. “You didn’t do your voice.”

He wasn’t talking about my regular conversational speaking voice, the one I would use in an unguarded moment with a friend. He was talking about what I have come to think of as The Voice. The Voice is mellifluous, precise, projected, vaguely British, dark around the edges, with an air of maturity and authority. It is the aural equivalent of a mask, something I can put on regardless of the situation or my own state of mind.

Claire doing "The Voice"

I’ve had The Voice since my childhood, when I would trot it out at dinner parties to recite poetry or impress some bemused adult with my precocious conversation. I grew up a diplomat’s daughter, and as we flung ourselves from continent to continent every few years there were precious few things I could count on from week to week: one was my family. The other was The Voice. I could use it to make my mother laugh with the absurd oratorical flourishes I employed while declaiming Shakespeare. I could use it to claim absolute attention when I was the shortest person in the room by two feet. What I couldn’t use it for was making friends – children my own age were, understandably, unimpressed by my curtseying and speechifying. But adults were by far the greater part of my equation in those days as I accompanied my parents to dinner parties and functions; they were easier to impress with a few tried-and-true tricks and reacted more predictably than my peers. They were powerful too, and well worth wooing.

By the time I had returned to the U.S. for my sophomore year of high school, I’d discovered that The Voice was an excellent tool for making people think I was smart even when I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I’d also become interested in performing, and The Voice almost passed for good acting. Fantastic! I could be The Smart One and the Drama Girl.

I was on the Debate Team where I specialized in “Extemp” (extemporaneous speech) where style absolutely triumphed over substance. The discipline to eradicate any ums, yeahs, and upspeak goes a long way towards convincing the world that a young woman is the real deal. Add in a few good quotations from people who actually know what they’re talking about and an absolute commitment to sounding like an expert, and this can carry you an extraordinary way through life. Too lazy to do any real research in my topics, I still made it to Nationals a handful of times.

I swam through college on the current of native wit and a talent for reading comprehension, but I learned no discipline there, nor did I really learn about acting despite becoming heavily involved in drama. At the end-of-year ceremonies held by the theater department – an informal student affair known as the Paper Plate Awards – I was tellingly awarded the title of “Person We Would Most Want to Hear Read the Phone Book.” I then got up and read part of a phone book, and inwardly thanked The Voice for at least granting me something resembling an accomplishment.

It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I realized something darker and more self-destructive was behind The Voice. It was a combination of things, really: a sneaking suspicion that I’d spent five years as a “professional actor” coasting by on being smart and pleasant to work with, but without the burning ambition that powered real talent. A rising awareness that people often thought I came across as “fake” or “inauthentic” – descriptors I heard from friends, boyfriends, and my family enough to take notice. And in the final call to action, a dismaying tendency towards experiencing anxiety attacks while in mid-performance (usually as a costumed colonial on Boston’s Freedom Trail).

I became more and more aware that in situations of social performance The Voice was taking over, and I almost dissociated as I listened to myself blather on with some cocktail party anecdote. I knew that this was the total opposite of what I wanted to accomplish as an actor and a person. It represented an absolute failure to stay in the moment and remain responsive and alive to the world around me. Instead, I listened to myself almost from a perspective that was physically outside of myself – and I was powerless to stop it. Even when I could see someone’s eyes glazing over, I rambled on and on, expounding instead of just talking.

I wasn’t an adorable, precocious five-year-old anymore, and The Voice was failing to connect.

In the end, two things finally interrupted this cycle: motherhood and really good voice acting classes. They both came in my early 30s and they both accomplished the same things, in two very different ways. Motherhood taught me how focusing all of your attention on someone else can free you to be your truest self. There’s nothing like a newborn to suck up all of your excess “think about ME” time and leave you with a core sense of who you are and what you can do. Plus, kids don’t judge. When I sing my kids their bedtime songs or read “Goodnight Moon” for the five thousandth time I never use The Voice. What would be the point

When my husband and I moved to the Bay Area with our six-month-old, I found myself with little desire to return to the life of rehearsals every night and shows every weekend. I didn’t miss it that much, to be perfectly honest. During our preceding three years living in Korea, I had done some theater, but I had also started to branch out into voice acting, and this seemed like the perfect solution for the stay-at-home mom who wanted to keep herself in the game.

I enrolled in a voiceover training school nearby. With the financial and emotional support of my endlessly patient husband, I set to work. I took classes, I practiced, and I listened as hard as I could. And it is really, really hard work. The house went to hell, the shelves undusted and the floors unswept. Every spare moment I had when the kids were asleep, I was downstairs in my studio sweating and swearing and toiling away at what should have been the easiest thing in the world – being myself.

Over the last few decades, the world of voiceover has been shifting from the “voice of God” read (think movie trailer, radio announcer) to a much more natural and conversational style. So now the job of a voiceover artist is to sound like they are really talking to you. The trick, then, is to imagine a real person where your microphone is and, through a combination of imagination and technique, to accomplish the illusion that your best friend is telling you about this amazing new product they’ve found.

Claire's new voice

I also received a lifetime’s worth of excellent advice about how to be a human being. In class after class, and from teacher after teacher, I heard variations on the same points: You have a lovely voice. That isn’t enough to make it in this industry. You must stop listening to yourself. You – just you – is enough. Get out of your own way.

So that’s what I started trying to do, both behind the microphone and out in the world. I stopped trying to fit in with the mommy clique at Gymboree, stopped trying to sound like what I thought my client was looking for. I just attempted to be myself, and let the chips fall where they may. I learned through painstaking trial-and-error that I am most successful when I let my instincts dictate my behavior and not my intellect. As my favorite voiceover coach kept exhorting me, “Follow your heart and not your head.”

I’m still working at it, and will spend my whole life working at it. But I’m much better than I was (and I don’t have anxiety attacks anymore). I still use The Voice professionally on occasion, but now more as a “spice” than the main dish, something to add a little gravitas or authority or age to my reads. But in my personal life, I try to give people as much of myself as I can spare, not a carefully-curated version of what I think they want me to be. So when my husband tells me I got up in front of the congregation and just sounded like myself… well, I count that as a victory.

Claire is a voiceover actor, see more at www.loudandclaire.com.

Image:  “Repose” by John Singer Sargent (1911)

 

Next week: What happens don’t finish college? Hear from a real life Good Will Hunting… Follow us so you don’t miss out:

[wysija_form id=”1″]