It took me a while to get the hang of voice over work, to really understand how the performance works. Certainly there is a technical structure to how the script is crafted and how it should be delivered. Emotional connection separates good voice over work from great voice over work.
This emotional connection comes down to just one simple point: be who you are. I kept trying to embody a character, to be a certain way that I thought matched what the script wanted. It didn’t work. I just needed to be myself – a friend, a neighbor, someone to rely on. It’s a performance that shouldn’t be a performance at all. Voice over work is for real people who know who they are and what they care about. That’s what commercial voice over work, and life in general, is all about. Hooray for the triumph of authenticity!
A Jedi in training doesn’t say, “You know I think I’ll do my best to try to become a Jedi.” He (or she!) says, “I’m doing this. I’m committed to this path.”
I’ve got Star Wars on the brain this week because I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of commitment and its vital role in our happiness. And if ever there was an example of serious commitment to a way of life, it’s the Jedi.
That muddy middle of indecision is like a tractor beam and we have to fight our way free. Progress doesn’t live in the middle, and neither does success. When it comes to our future, we have to take a stand and decide to decide how it’s going to go. We have to be the Jedi knights of our own lives. It’s not an easy path, but it’s the only one I know that leads to a well-lived life.
About 10 years ago, my sister, Weez, had a difficult health issue. (Don’t worry – she is completely healed, healthy, and sassy now.) In those scary days, her doctor said something that has always struck me as quite possibly the best thing that any doctor has ever said to anyone facing an illness. “I don’t fish. I don’t play golf. I am a doctor. This is my hobby. It’s all I do.” For all the talk about balance between work and life, this doctor’s maniacal focus on his work was exactly what my sister needed to hear.
Rather than building careers that we need a break from, that wear us out and deplete us to the point that a vacation is the only remedy, what if we find a way to build careers that build us up and give us energy? What if we all had careers that mattered so much to us that a separation between work and life was unnecessary, unwanted?
I know this may sound like la-la land to some people. It certainly did to me a few years ago, though now this is exactly the career I have. I wake up every day and write. What I used to do as a hobby on the side is now my focus. I write early in the morning and late into the night. I shut it down when my eyes grow tired or when Phineas lets me know it’s time for his late evening walk before he puts himself to bed, whichever comes first. I work a lot of hours, every day, and I don’t mind at all because I work at the craft that helped me build a life I love, no balancing act required.
I want you to know it’s possible. Even if you have a lot of difficulties, even if all you’ve known is difficulties, it can happen. The only reason I can say this with such confidence is because I came from very tough circumstances. Every step on this journey was tough and took a great deal of effort, and that’s okay. I wanted this enough to work hard for it. It takes planning, patience, time, and passion. I have to commit every day to this path, and it’s still not easy. It is always worth it. Every day, I wrap it up and say thank you because I know just how amazing it is to finally be right here, in this place, doing exactly what I love. I’m a writer, a working writer, exactly what I always wanted to be.
A few weeks ago, I watched an interview with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame. When he first started out, he met a lot of people who said they were giving their creative dream a shot for a year. If they didn’t have any success in a year, then they would pack up and go home. “That was amazing to me,” he said. “It takes so much longer than a year to realize a dream.”
This is exactly the reason I’m working on a new book, Your Second Step. You’ve taken your first step – you’ve identified your dream and you’ve started working on it – maybe part-time, maybe full-time. Maybe you haven’t seen the success you’d hoped for in the timeline you planned. So should you pack it in? Should you start to work on something else and come back to it later? In other words, should you hedge your bets?
Put aside any disappointment. Go back to the dream itself. Does it still matter to you? If the answer is yes, then don’t hedge and don’t give up. Commit. Double down. Invest more time and more energy, not less. Be Yoda. Don’t try. Do. And keep doing. Don’t back down now. You’re closer to your dream than you think.
A picture I snapped in Central Park over the weekend.
I just started a new project for CentralPark.com. I am curating 20 essays about Central Park written by college students. Essays will be roughly 500 words and can be about any aspect of Central Park. The essays can be from a wide variety of angles – a treasured memory of the park, the meaning of Central Park to the student, a recent event or experience the student had in Central Park, the history of the park, etc. Do you know a college student who is a good writer and interested in submitting a piece for consideration? Please send them my way – christa.avampato@gmail.com. Thank you!
“Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from The Little Prince
“70% of our perception of the outside world comes through the eyes,” said my yoga teacher, Julia. I didn’t realize it was that disproportionate. The eyes are so powerful, so sophisticated that they overpower our other senses if we let them. Close the eyes, and we can hear, feel, smell, and taste with greater intensity. The information from these 4 senses is just as important as our sense of sight. Our combined senses lead us into our emotional intelligence. We need this give-and-take between our internal and external experiences. Together, they create the whole picture of our existence and help us to “see” clearly.
For a few minutes every day, I close my eyes during my waking hours and tap in. I scan my body for signs of change. I feel the ebb and flow of my breath. One of my favorite meditations is a sensory exploration. I imagine a place I’ve been or a place I’d like to go and I rotate through all of the senses to create a complete picture. What does the beach look like? How does it sound? What scents does it have? How does it taste? What does it feel like? And finally, how does it make me feel? This only takes a couple of minutes, and when I finally do open my eyes again, I find that a little piece of the beach is still with me. I carry right there, in my heart, and also in my nose, on my skin, in my mind’s eyes and ears, and even on my tongue.
From there, my experience of the world around me is richer because of what I’ve been able to imagine. Now I see not only what’s right in front of me, but also what’s possible which is almost always invisible to the eyes alone.
These are my two big lessons from voice over land this week: 1.) Practice pays off. 2.) When we’re trying to develop a new skill, private classes help us move ahead faster than collective, generic classes.
A couple of years ago I took a group voice over class and it was fun. I learned some basic skills, general guidelines about commercial voice over work, and details about the voice over market in New York. What I didn’t get, and needed, was refinement. I needed specific feedback on my work. When I was in California this summer, I started to think about pursuing voice overs more seriously. I phoned my voice over teacher from the class and inquired about taking the next step. He suggested private lessons.
I hesitated for a split second because private lessons aren’t cheap. Neither is making a demo. I quickly realized that if I really wanted to make a go of this, or at least give it my all, I needed to think of this money as an investment, not a cost. So I bit the financial bullet and went for it.
So far, so good. In four private lessons, and with a solid number of hours of listening to commercials, transcribing them, recording myself performing them, and listening to the playback, I’m now ready to make a demo. My coach’s advice and attention in private lessons has been invaluable and my own investment of time and effort to listen, practice, and self-critique have helped me grow by leaps and bounds in a very short period of time. If all goes according to plan, a demo leads to an agent and an agent (along with personally pounding the proverbial pavement) leads to paid work.
I’m only at step 2 – I’ll record my demo November 11th with my coach and hopefully get this show on the road. Here we go – preparing for take off. Let’s see where this path takes me next. You’ll get the news as it happens…
Yesterday I sat up in bed before my early alarm, grabbed by iPad, and wrote down this post as it gushed into my brain:
“Snap your pictures. Get down these lines of text. Record history as it happens. Some day you’ll need this to see how far you’ve come, to bring you comfort when you feel like you still have so far to go, when you feel like everything is lost.
Time is a plastic surgeon. It does funny things to us, to our memory of yesterday. And all the yesterdays that came before. It covers the bumps and bruises and scrapes. It dulls the pain. It sands the rough edges and rounds out the sharp and jagged corners that were so hard to navigate. It makes everything soft. When we record our days as they happen, when we literally chart our experience, we get the real story.
And we need the real story. We need to remember what we’ve been through so we can fully appreciate where we are and all of the people who made the journey possible.”
I’m not sure where this came from, but I’m sure glad these words and the ideas they convey arrived.
“I know you’re busy but can I ask for your advice on….”
I get a lot of inquiries from friends and readers that start this way. They ask if they can ask me for advice about their project. My answer, always: YES, a thousand times yes. I want to help you and promote you and hear your ideas. A business idea, a product idea, a blog idea, a social media project. I am busy; everyone is. I make time to support others. It matters that much.
It took me a while to get the hang of voice over work, to really understand how the performance works. Certainly there is a technical structure to how the script is crafted and how it should be delivered. Emotional connection separates good voice over work from great voice over work.
