The Importance Of Revision
I cannot tell you how important this is, not just in terms of writing a book, but for the voice actors who narrate the audiobook versions.
One could argue that the Exacting Art and Subtle Science of Revision could apply to just about any aspect of art, of making things, of life in general. And one would be correct.
In this specific case, I’m going to be talking about how revision impacts audiobook production, as I can speak from direct experience, as can many a voice actor who have had the dubious pleasure of narrating a poorly revised, or un-revised, manuscript.
Before I even get to that, let’s talk revision in the act of writing. This needs to happen! Regardless of whether you are writing a book/story/poem/script for the sake of writing one (i.e. only for yourself, and that is perfectly legit) or with the aims of writing full time, or anything in between, you owe it to yourself to go through the revision process.
Why?
This will do two things that will help you:
It will make you a better writer.
You will see where you made mistakes, where there are continuity or tense-agreement issues. You will see where characters aren’t fully developed, or aren’t acting as maybe they should. You will see which scenes drag on, which ones need to be edited or eliminated.
Listen, having someone else read something you wrote can be terrifying. What if your friend, whom you asked to be a beta reader for your newly-completed manuscript, doesn’t like it? Says it isn’t good? Or catches a ton of mistakes?
Getting feedback can be a very hard thing. But it is absolutely necessary. It will make you a better writer by showing you where the holes in your game are, where you need to improve.
And if, despite feeling that you have written your magnum opus, your pièce de résistance, a lot of people that you know tell you that it isn’t good, or more likely, that there are parts that could be fixed/changed/made better, maybe it’s worth taking that under consideration? Because if you are planning to release your work into the wild for fun and profit…
It will create a better product.
I will guarantee you that there isn’t a single successful author out there who ever wrote their book in one draft. I will bet all of the money in my pockets against all of the money in your pockets that they went through multiple iterations of their story before it went to press.
And this is likely one of the reasons, in addition to talent, hard work, and hustle, that all of your favorite authors are successful. They took their work down to the river and beat it against a rock until all of the unneeded bits fell off, every jagged corner was trued up, and every surface was polished clean.
Why?
Because people don’t want to read badly written books.*
It doesn’t matter if you are going the self-publishing route. Take the time to go through this same rigorous process to get the best product possible so that people will feel good about plunking down their hard-earned money and spending their valuable time with your words.
So why do you, a voice actor, care?
Well, for starters, I also fancy myself a writer, and I genuinely want other writers to be successful by whatever definition that they want to use for that. And that starts with good writing.
But from a voice actor’s point of view, I cannot tell you how hard it is to narrate a book that is poorly written, or clearly hasn’t been through enough revisions.
Strange sentence structure can really throw off narration where it may take me a few tries to get through the entire thing. When characters are poorly realized, or point of view swings wildly and without warning, it makes it hard to keep the dialogue sounding good, and it will take me a few takes to get it right. If the plot is nonsensical or cliched or just simply boring, it can make it hard to keep my energy level up while recording a book that may end up being anywhere between 8 and 15 hours long when it’s complete.
This all adds up to the project taking longer than it needs to. It means time, and time is the name of the game for voiceover talent. The faster I can lay down a quality recording, the faster I can get to my next project, to marketing myself and landing my next client, the more time I have with my family and friends.
Audiobook narration is also paid by “Per Finished Hour” in most cases, not by the total number of hours spent recording. It means that no matter how long it takes me to record the book, if it’s 10 hours of audio when all of the bad takes/retakes are taken out, I get paid for 10 hours of work. So the longer it takes me to record, the lower my profit margin is.
So, very selfishly, if I need to lock myself in a cramped, dark room and talk to myself for hours on end, I would prefer that I do it reading a good book. And again, I genuinely want to see you succeed, and to do that, you need to take the time to revise your work.
* I have no explanation for why this doesn’t apply to the works of Dan Brown. People just eat that stuff up, and I have no idea why.