Inside the Mind of a Master Audiobook Narrator (with Sean Pratt)

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:00:44)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

When you listen to an audiobook, especially a work of fiction, you want to be swept away, transported to another world. A masterful audiobook narrator breathes life into a book's story and characters, transforming the written words into an immersive experience. They can even infuse dry nonfiction with emotion and depth. Take Andy Serkis's narration of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, for example. One listener said of Serkis's performance: "He's not just giving characters unique voices and emotions.

C (00:00:45 --> 00:01:26)
He struggled a little, quite uselessly. One of the Orcs sitting near laughed and said something to a companion in their abominable tongue. "Rest while you can, little fool!" He said then to Pippin in the Common Speech, which made him almost as hideous as his own language: "Rest while you can! We'll find a use for your legs before long. You'll wish you had got none before we get home." "If I had my way, you'd wish you were dead now," said the other.

Dustin Grinnell (00:01:27 --> 00:02:02)
A skilled audiobook narrator like Serkis uses their acting skills and humanity to bring the story and its characters to life, creating vivid movies for your mind. But how often do you think about the craft and expertise required to create an engaging audiobook? What does it take to transform written words into a captivating auditory experience? If you've ever asked questions like these, you're going to enjoy this episode. Before I introduce my guest, let's hear his voice, which you may recognize. Here's him reading the non-fiction book Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker.

D (00:02:03 --> 00:02:50)
She notices how closely both her mother and father monitor all of their children now for warning signs. Peter with his rebellion, Brian and his drugs, Richard getting expelled, Jim picking fights, Michael checking out completely. To complain or cry or show any emotion at all, Mary knows will send the message that something might be wrong with her, too. And the fact is that the days when Mary sees Donald in that bedsheet are better than some of the other days. Sometimes after school, she comes home to find Donald in the middle of an undertaking only he can understand, like transplanting every last piece of furniture out of the house and into the backyard.

Dustin Grinnell (00:02:52 --> 00:03:36)
This is the voice of Sean Pratt, a seasoned actor with over 35 years of experience and a renowned audiobook narrator for 27 years. Also known by his pseudonym Lloyd James, Sean has recorded over 1,100 books across nearly every genre. His work has earned him 9 Audiophile Magazine Earphone Awards, 5 SOVAS nominations, and 5 Audie nominations from the Audio Publishers Association. Most recently, Sean narrated Jonathan Hyatt's new book, The Anxious Generation, which topped the Associated Press's list of top 10 non-fiction audiobooks. Like I said, Sean doesn't just narrate non-fiction. Here's a clip from Mystery of the Blue Train, an Agatha Christie novel which Sean narrated.

D (00:03:37 --> 00:05:05)
They were just in time to see the American emerge into the street below. He turned to the left and marched along at a good pace without once turning his head. Two shadows stole from a doorway and followed noiselessly. Pursuers and pursued vanished into the night. Olga Demiroff spoke.

"He will get back safely," she said. "You need not fear—or hope, whichever it is." "Why do you think he will be safe?" asked Krasnin curiously. "A man who has made as much money as he has could not possibly be a fool." said Olga. "And talking of money—" She looked significantly at Krasnin. "Eh, my cher Boris Ivanovich." With some reluctance, Krasnin handed over two of the notes.

She nodded her thanks with a complete lack of emotion and tucked them away in her stocking. "That is good," she remarked with satisfaction. He looked at her curiously. "You have no regrets, Olga Vasilovna?" "Regrets? For what?" "For what has been in your keeping.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:05 --> 00:05:41)
I have not." Beyond his narration work, Sean is the author of To Be or Wanna Be, The Top 10 Differences Between a Successful Actor and a Starving Artist, a must-read for aspiring actors that outlines the key behaviors and mindsets that differentiate success from struggle. In addition to his narration and acting, Sean dedicates his time to coaching performers on audiobook narration techniques, teaching classes, and writing articles about the business side of the industry. Now, without further ado, Let's get into my conversation with the incomparable Sean Pratt.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:45 --> 00:05:47)
Sean Pratt, welcome to the podcast.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:05:47 --> 00:05:49)
Well, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:49 --> 00:05:58)
Pretend this is a first date where we're at a table in a restaurant and two glasses of wine have been served. Tell me a little bit about yourself and the work that you do.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:05:58 --> 00:06:04)
Well, first of all, what are you having to drink? That's a joke. I'm kidding. I'm not having wine.

Dustin Grinnell (00:06:05 --> 00:06:07)
How about an IPA for me?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:06:07 --> 00:08:15)
There you go. Oh yeah, I'll do a Boilermaker any day of the week. Um, so I am an audiobook narrator, but my background initially was as a theater actor. I started acting in school and with the local theater groups in Oklahoma City where I grew up. I started around 10.

I did that all through high school, into college, into Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I got my BFA. And I did classical theater for 20 years, Off-Broadway and with the regional theaters and the company. I lived in New York. And then had resettled in Washington, still doing theater. But when I moved to Washington, D.C. in '96, I was at loose ends because I had some plays lined up that didn't work out.

And my day job through college and as an actor was I was a carpenter and a house painter and things. I built sets and that kind of stuff. And but I, in '96, when all the work fell through, I remembered having a conversation with an actor in D.C. and he had mentioned he did audiobooks.. And I said, well, what's that like? And he explained it to me and he said, well, if you ever are interested, you might want to give me a call.

And I was at that moment because I had nothing else in front of me. And he introduced me to a man named Grover Gardner, who's a real icon in our industry. And I started narrating. So I've been narrating since '96. I've done about closing in on 1,200 titles now.

I started out in fiction, then got into nonfiction, and then along the way I began to become a coach. Initially, I was coaching actors about the business of show business. So I would go to colleges and universities and acting groups along the East Coast to do workshops on agents and headshots and resumes and things. But about 15 years ago, I started doing audiobook classes, you know, like workshops, like a Saturday workshop and so on. And I really enjoyed it.

I really like teaching. And then about 10 years ago, I switched over to doing one-on-one coaching with people. I teach people how to become an audiobook narrator, and it's become a real boon for me because I teach through nonfiction, which nobody else does. And I teach my students the business side of the industry as well. So I am a narrator and a coach, along with being a dad and, you know, all those things.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:15 --> 00:08:31)
But yeah, that's what I do for a living. When you were an actor, and you were starting to explore audiobook narration. What was that process of learning narration like, and how did your acting experience inform this new medium?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:08:31 --> 00:10:26)
So for instance, my very first session The very first book I ever narrated, which was Cabbages and Kings by O. Henry for Blackstone Audio, I had a monitor with me and I was recording in a home studio at my friend Grover's house. So Bernadette, my monitor, was sitting outside listening in on headphones and she had a little microphone and every time I'd screw up, she'd lean in and go, "Chk, you said that and it should be a what." But I had to run all the equipment. And so I had this little remote control shuttle inside the booth with me, you know, forward, reverse, record, stop. And it was a lot. Now, as far as performing the text, you know, by the time I started, I was 30, so I'd already been working dealing with text for 20 years.

So the performance part of it wasn't too hard. It was having to run the machine. And in that first recording session, I had a 3-hour chunk of time scheduled to work. In 3 hours of work, I recorded exactly like 15 minutes of material. So, wow, I went home to Virginia, uh, in Alexandria where I was living at the time with my girlfriend.

And I walk in the house and I just collapsed on the rug in the front room. And she walked over, she said, are you okay? And I said, oh my God, this is so much fucking harder than I thought it was going to be. But I, you know, I had nothing else in front of me, and so I had to go back and learn. So initially it wasn't the acting portion, although I did learn some techniques that are unique to performing audiobooks, which we could talk about.

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:26 --> 00:10:32)
What was it about it that was so exhausting? Like, tapping your head and rubbing your stomach is two activities.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:10:32 --> 00:12:59)
Yeah. Okay, so you're focused on the text in front of you that you've read, and you've got characters and voices, and there's a narrative that goes at different tempos, you know, like faster for an action scene and slower for a death scene or whatever. And you have all that in your head as an actor, all right? And if I were just reading it to you live, like right now, I could do that. But then, you know, inevitably you make mistakes.

Well, that's fine, you just sort of muddle through it. Well, you can't do that in a recording. If you make any kind of stumble or mistake, you have to stop. You've got to rewind the tape, you hit play, and you listen to yourself. Then you punch into the recording and roll over the mistake.

Now, I do that electronically now, But that constant stop-start, it's called punch-and-roll editing. And you have to do that when you narrate audiobooks because you can't— when you record, say, a commercial, which is 30 or 60 seconds, oftentimes you'll do what's called an open record, meaning you just hit the record button and you record the entire session with all the mistakes. And then afterward, you edit down the good stuff to get the 30 seconds you need. You can't do that with a 10-hour audiobook. You'll never make a dime.

So you have to learn to edit in real time. Well, that stopping and starting is stressful because you might get a rhythm going and suddenly you stumble on a word and you have to sort of start back from zero. Not only that, you'll get through the first sentence and you'll go, hey, I got through the first sentence, I didn't screw up. And you go to the second sentence, but you go a little bit faster for some reason. Hey, I got through the second sentence.

You have the third sentence and the fourth, and you're going faster and faster for some And then you stumble. And the reason why most narrators make that mistake is a lot of people believe that you get a gold star for being able to read from the top of the page to the bottom of the page without making a mistake. But that's not the truth. The truth is you get a gold star for being entertaining. That's it.

And that's the yardstick I teach my students. The only yardstick that counts in audiobooks is, was the listening experience entertaining? That's it. Whatever the topic, whatever the genre. And so for me to get something to be entertaining might take 30 takes on that one page to get it exactly the way I want.

But you'll never hear that as the listener. What you hear, I hope, is the most entertaining version of that book possible. But initially, yeah, it was that stopping and starting. You just get so stressed out. It's just— it was awful.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:59 --> 00:13:36)
Sure. Do you have any idea, thinking about narration for so many years and practicing it, do you have any idea what causes stumble? Because like, I've read before and I've stumbled in the first clause. I've got through 2 paragraphs and not stumbled. But I noticed as I was reading, I had this kind of meta-consciousness that was evaluating my reading while I was reading. And I would have a voice that says, "Oh yeah, you did well there," or, "Ooh, that was close. You maybe should have even stopped," or, "Oh yeah, you blew that. Like, go back." What is the dialogue between you know, the meta-consciousness and the actual reading experience?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:13:36 --> 00:16:25)
You know, there's always a part of you that stands outside as an actor, whether it's in theater or film or behind the mic. You develop that voice. That voice is like, no, you didn't get the rhythm right on that, go back. Or, oh, that was good. Yeah, no, build it, build it.

Go, go, go, go. Yeah, now stop there, right there. Stop there. And it's sort of coaching you in live, in real time, as it were. But it also will trip you up because it sometimes, depending on the quality of the writing or the writer's style, you might start subconsciously re-editing the piece and you'll make more mistakes that way, which means you have to go back.

You know, every writer has a style, good, bad, or indifferent, but they've got one. And sometimes they're rather eclectic. I did biography, an autobiography of Philip Glass, the American music composer. It was a great book, great story he has to tell. He wrote it himself, and his writing style was a little eclectic.

And as a consequence, I was sort of re-editing the book in my head subconsciously, not intentionally, because I, I'm supposed to say what's on the page, more or less. There are exceptions we could talk about, but I got a ton of pickups from the client on that one. And here's the thing, it's not that I mispronounce a word or say that and it should have been what and know I've made the mistake and kept going. No, these, all these mistakes were subconscious and they happen all the time. That's one reason why you have mistakes.

The other is that you get going a little too fast. And I tell my students that a narrator can never narrate faster than I can understand them speaking. The human brain can take in language almost twice as fast as the human voice can speak. That's why you hear those compression, you know, at the ends of TV ads. You go, you know, did they call them?

Okay, we still understand exactly what they're saying. That's true. But the problem is when you go faster, your diction breaks down. And that's what you're experiencing when you're— from your example, you got going faster and faster, and suddenly you just— it just stopped. And that's a big one too.

And then there's just sometimes you just see a word and your brain goes, donk. It just doesn't— what, you know, you say, what is that word? And you have to stop anyway. Or you misidentify a word like systemic and systematic. There's an easy example.

Yeah. And you're going along and you might see that and it was systematic, but you said systemic and you didn't even realize it. And you go fix it later. So there's a variety of reasons you might stumble. Or make a mistake that are not intentional.

Dustin Grinnell (00:16:25 --> 00:16:42)
Are you— take fiction, for example— are you like in the story and understanding and interpreting the story as you're narrating, or are you kind of divorced from it? Like, do you have to take this like technical clinical stance toward the text?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:16:42 --> 00:17:57)
It's like puppet show, you know, I can't pay the rent, but you must pay the rent. I'll pay the rent, my hero, you know, that kind of stuff. To me, it's more about the narrative voice. If the narrative voice, whether it's a character or it's an omniscient voice, I'm playing the mood of that. Sometimes you'll do a piece of fiction where the omniscient voice third-person omniscient voice that is neutral.

You know, John turned here, he sat there. It's very cut and dry. So then the author will give me clues as to how far in I go. If they start introducing adjectives and adverbs in the narrative voice, I'll play those. You know, John sat down angrily and he looked at his— okay, well, you hear the bit of anger I just put in that, the frustration.

He turned to his wife and he said, as opposed to John sat down angrily and turned to his wife and said. That doesn't make sense to me. That seems like AI. So the more adjectives and adverbs and operative phrase, you know, prepositional phrases that describe the mood, feeling, or tone, that's what I'm playing in fiction. Because the dialogue takes care of itself.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:57 --> 00:18:04)
Yeah, so I take my cue from the author. That's interesting. Can you do this work without acting principles? Like, this really seems like you're—

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:18:04 --> 00:19:33)
So let's look at nonfiction. I know I coach a lot of authors who want to narrate their own material, and they tend to be business people. I just wrapped up last month, I had 4 different authors who are now recording their pieces. So I, I'm coaching them, and I have a little 4-session program I ran them through. And I say to them, this is one of the lessons, is Okay, you're telling me about this new piece of software you've developed or this new business idea or this story you're sharing with us.

How did you feel about that? And I said, oh, so you're excited? Okay, then I need to hear excitement in that. That's the acting portion. And acting is about understanding text analysis, trying to figure out how does someone or a character or a person feel based on the text.

And then you internalize that and you feel it, and then you open your mouth and you push it out there with the right amount of energy. The shorthand term we use in the theater is, "If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage." In this context, that means your choices have all must be justified from the text itself. In other words, if I narrated a piece that you did as a piece of fiction and suddenly decided willy-nilly to make the guy sound Scottish, you're like, "Why did you make him sound Scottish?" I was like, "Oh no, it just felt right." No. I have to justify it from the text. So yeah, at the bottom of it, fiction or nonfiction, it's about acting.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:33 --> 00:19:45)
And even in nonfiction, which is so interesting, a nonfiction author could be writing about a piece of technology or a business, and helping them understand the emotional experience is really— Well, I'd say to the—

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:19:45 --> 00:21:16)
Then there's your acting choice, you see. And a lot of people, they equate non-fiction with non-acting, and it's just not the case. You know, I recently did two non-fiction pieces that were diametrically opposite ends for each other. One was called The Grief Cure, wonderful book about a man who's dealing with the grief over losing his mother. And so he goes on all these different kinds of cures for grief— talk therapy, backpacking, you know, mantras and whatever.

And that's the journey of the book. It's very somber, very sincere, very quiet. And that's the acting. I'm matching the tone the author is taking. The very next book I did was called What's Next Is Now.

It's a business book about future casting, being a futurist. In business. And it was one of these, rah, rah, rah, you can do it. We're going to make $1 million. And this is all great and wonderful.

Where do I get the clues from that? From the language itself. But if I don't perform that, you're not going to hear it. And that is one of the huge stumbling blocks of AI because AI doesn't have an opinion about what it's telling me. It's just reading words.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:16 --> 00:21:21)
Not until it could potentially model humanity.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:21:21 --> 00:21:43)
Well, but it still gets back to text analysis. Can it recognize even— now, it's one thing if the author says, I am angry about this. Oh, then the AI might be able to be angry. But it's when you have an author that has much more skill in how they tell a story where they may not say the word angry, but the tone of that paragraph or that topic has anger underneath it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:43 --> 00:21:44)
It's in the subtext.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:21:44 --> 00:23:17)
Right. And then of course you have to have somebody there probably to flip the switches. Right now I know that you can control the tempo of the read in AI and the intensity of the read, which mainly means they sound more emphatic. I had an engineer show me this the other day. But those two things aren't enough because it can literally change from paragraph to paragraph.

And if you set the same tempo, The tempo of you sounding angry is a faster tempo than if you're depressed, you see, along with your melody, rhythm, tempo, volume. You know, those emotions have different qualities to them, and you're going to be constantly having to adjust that. And by the time you play around with all that in AI, you could have hired me for far less. People think that AI is the answer, and it's not. I mean, listen, AI— there are some things AI is perfect or for people with, you know, who back catalog old stuff, or people visually impaired.

They get a lot of, like, for their newspapers and magazines. There is a reason for it, but they want something different out of the experience. They don't want to be entertained, they just want to be informed, and that's different. If you want to be entertained, fiction or nonfiction, that requires a different skill, a different kind of performance. And that's why— one of the many reasons why AI has such a hard retention rate, they're so low, is because that tempo stays, the read is about the same emotionally.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:17 --> 00:23:55)
I don't know why I thought about this, but when you're talking about depression and voice, I figured I would ask you as a voice artist, a voice expert, I heard once about this app. It was several years ago. I don't remember the exact details of it, but basically it could analyze your voice, the tone, and I think word choice, and just the tenor. This was an MIT technology, and it could basically tell whether you were depressed or not by the sound. And I wonder how you feel about that because, yes, a depressed voice is different than a non-depressed voice.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:23:55 --> 00:25:26)
They all have a different melody, rhythm, and tempo, and they're very subtle. The challenge of where the acting comes in, especially like when I'm working with my authors, they're not actors, so they can— they intellectually understand that in this moment they're excited or angry or whatever, they now have to internalize it emotionally and let it affect their voice. And the challenge is that 80% of communication is nonverbal. It's about body language. Like right now, you're nodding your head.

You're telling me you understand what I'm saying. Okay. And I'm using my hands to communicate, and you're getting the gist on top of the words. Well, you remove all the visual, all the information you're getting is just with my voice. So I have to become very skilled and nuanced at using my voice to communicate emotions.

No different than in fiction, by the way. Yeah. So the way to think about nonfiction, what I teach is, broadly speaking, narrating nonfiction is like giving a TED Talk, a one-man show, as it were, one-person show in front of a live audience. And I use the TED Talk idea, meaning that if I were to perform a book, a nonfiction piece that you'd written, I would be you as the author. I'm not trying to be literally you.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:26 --> 00:25:28)
You drop right into that, right?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:25:28 --> 00:26:21)
So he's in one of his churches And then everybody in the audience is interested in that topic, just like a TED Talk. And what that does is it reframes the paradigm from me just reading words out loud to it turns the text into a script. So it's like doing a 10-hour monologue, if you understand what I mean. Like watching Hamlet do "To be or not to be," but a 10-hour version of that. He's communicating right to you, reaching out to you, and talking to an audience.

And so that's, once again, that gets back to the acting. You're not divorced. The words are not divorced. They don't exist in the ether. They have to be grounded and focused to an audience.

Dustin Grinnell (00:26:21 --> 00:26:43)
When you get a text, fiction or nonfiction, say like The Grief Cure or the text you're working on now, do you read it through first? What is your process of, okay, I'm on assignment, How do you pull it apart? How do you understand character? How do you decide how and what you're going to dramatize and where you're going to put emphasis and how you're going to perform this thing?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:26:43 --> 00:29:01)
What's that process like? Well, in fiction, you have to read it cover to cover because you're thinking about character voices, story arc, something like if you're doing a mystery, like, okay, the mystery voice in chapter 3 turns out to be so-and-so, so I have to make sure I do that correctly. So that's a cover to cover, like working on a play. In nonfiction, I try to do that, but oftentimes I'm overloaded with work. I have a backlog, and so I developed a— I call it the 3-step method.

It's a system I use to prep a piece of nonfiction very quickly without having to read every single word. I'm skimming through it, looking for issues, catching the tone. I have very specific questions that I answer, like, who is the author? Who's the audience? What's the topic?

Are there tables and charts? What kind of research has to be done? What is the author's voice? Do they like to use humor? What's their style of writing?

There's literally a list of questions I go through. So I will sit down for, you know, anywhere from half a day to several days with a piece and go through it. So I'm getting ready to narrate a piece called Gray Matter about the history of brain surgery. For Random House in a couple weeks. Just got the final text, and I'm doing that in conjunction with a director I'm going to work with.

Random House always gives you a director, which is a really nice thing. And so I'm looking for the tone of the writing, the style, the feel of the author's voice. But the more books you do, the faster you can make those decisions, like a musician reading music. You know, I have a friend who's a— he's the keyboard player for the Mavericks, the band Mavericks, and I've known him since we were kids. And Jerry Dale could pick up a piece of music, and within 16 bars, he could tell you everything you need to know about that piece of music.

Why? Because he's played for thousands and thousands of hours, and he just picks up the, the most important bits in those few bars, and he understands the piece as a whole. When you narrate like this for this long, you pick up style immediately. I'm sure the same thing happens for you when you're reading for enjoyment, you're picking up a piece of fiction like, oh, there's some foreshadowing, or, oh, that's a red herring, or, oh, I like the way they built that scene. And that all comes from experience.

Dustin Grinnell (00:29:01 --> 00:29:10)
Do you have a project or a book that was really challenging for you? Like, what was the hardest project and why was it challenging?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:29:10 --> 00:30:26)
The hardest nonfiction piece I ever did was Michael Burlingham's 2-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. It was 110 hours long. It took me a year to record. No way. And because this was back in the day when they would mail you the book, so I couldn't expand the text.

It was like they were the size of, like, Encyclopedia Britannicas. They were just enormous, these 2 volumes. And the text was really small. Physically, it was just very hard to read. And then I decided for that piece, normally I don't do this with nonfiction, but I gave all the characters in the piece, since they were historical, I gave them character voices.

Like, remember the Civil War series that Ken Burns did decades ago? It was the same idea. Interesting. But it was extremely challenging to keep track of all the characters. Tell the story and just get through it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:27 --> 00:30:29)
no, it looked at it, it's, it's as big as a brick.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:30:30 --> 00:31:23)
And it's all stream of consciousness. Lots of it is stream of consciousness. He has different writing styles. And it would take me several weeks of prep. So I got the book, they printed it out, all 1,500 pages of it, and they arrived on my doorstep.

And I— so I had to get it bound at Staples, and I had to score it like a musician scoring music. And I would work until I got about 10 hours of it done, and then I would record that with the producer. And then we'd take 2 or 3 or 4 weeks off because we, uh, we had other commitments. It was such an intense book to perform too. If I had to do it start to finish, it would have been horrible because I— they were so emotionally taxing.

And but when I go back and listen to it, I'm really pleased. It was very challenging. I don't listen to my own material. It's very rare. I'd rather take a beating than listen to my own voice.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:23 --> 00:31:36)
Yeah, well, I know for a lot of writers, they don't read, go back and read, because they're gonna re-edit. They're going to say Oh yeah, they're gonna see the inadequacies, they're gonna see the places where they could have improved. I'm sure it's exactly the same for you.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:31:36 --> 00:32:18)
Oh yeah, and but you— what you learn over time as a live performer is that the first take is usually the best take. Now there's always a— sometimes you go, nope, I just got that wrong, and you'll come back. Or you make a mistake, you stumble or whatever, that's different. But over time, you just— your technique is at such a high level that what comes out of your mouth, yeah, I could go back and tweak it here or there, but it will not demonstrably change the quality of that sentence. And if I've done my prep, if I've scored the text, if I understand the context of the scene, what's supposed to happen here, if I know all that going into it, yeah, the majority of the time when I have to stop and start is because I've made a—

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:18 --> 00:32:45)
I've stumbled on a word or something like that. I think about Infinite Jest and I think about method actors, some of whom say, "I'm glad I didn't have to spend any more time in that character because it was so emotionally challenging." I think about Joaquin Phoenix's interpretation of the Joker or something. Did you find being in David Foster Wallace's head was— were you ready to get out of it?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:32:45 --> 00:34:33)
Before you start acting, you just go, who am I? Where am I? And who am I talking to? Just like the TED Talk idea. Because I always thought— and you answer those questions specifically And then you make believe in it, you make yourself believe in that, and you're off and running.

But it's like a coat, it's like a hat I put on. In fact, personally, a lot of people who are "method actors" just drive me insane because I feel it's a bit self-indulgent. That they can't— I don't know, I won't say that as a blanket statement, but I have had instances of working with method actors that were just a pain in the neck. And there's that famous story of when Dustin Hoffman and Olivier were making the film The Marathon Man from the '70s. Great movie, by the way.

Well, Hoffman's supposed to be a marathon runner in the context of this thing. He gets pulled into this Nazi thriller thing. And so he was running all the time because he's totally lean and cut in the piece. And one morning in the makeup trailer, they were getting ready to do a scene together, and Olivier was next to him, and Hoffman was complaining about you know, he's got shin splints and he's, you know, how sore he is, he's pulled a muscle and trying to do this and that. And Olivier just looked at him and said, why don't you try acting, dear boy?

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:33 --> 00:34:35)
It's just, yeah, it's a practical—

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:34:35 --> 00:35:03)
yeah, I've always approached acting from a from a practical standpoint. I don't want to take anything from Joaquin Phoenix. He's a very nice guy. I worked on a movie with him a million years ago called Ladder 49, and really nice guy. But, and I appreciate that's his method, that's what he does, and that's great if it works for the film and Ridley Scott's happy for like when he was on Napoleon or whatever. Great, that works. But sometimes it can be used as an excuse to be a bit self-indulgent, in my opinion. Sure.

Dustin Grinnell (00:35:03 --> 00:35:21)
Yeah, I mean, so you don't lose yourself in texts, you know? You don't lose your identity. Because I've heard of something called identity diffusion, where artists, performers can kind of diffuse their own personality through their work. And some talk a little bit about being scared that they might slip off into space, you know?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:35:21 --> 00:36:21)
Now, granted, you put yourself— when you're in it, you're in it. But there's always a part of me that's still me. And the other part of it too is you're not just playing one character. Well, you are in nonfiction. So if I did have that issue, it would be about nonfiction.

So if I'm doing, you know, like The Grief Cure, I'm playing one character for 10 hours. But I don't see it that way because there's so many other things going on in the performance, the nuance of the text, the delivery, the breathing, the melody, rhythm, and tempo of a scene. There's a lot going on. So I'm not only the actor, I'm the director and the lighting director and the sound editor, and the— so I don't have that same kind of headspace. And when you're doing fiction, of course, you're playing anywhere from 1 to 5 characters in a scene.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:21 --> 00:37:26)
I wonder— I don't know why this is, but I've always been like attuned to voice, whether it's on radio or in movies. And I always evaluate the choices, the creative choices that have been made, the tone, the style, the delivery. For whatever reason, it just isn't invisible for me. So I watch a movie like Her, and I listen to Scarlett Johansson's voicing of the AI technology. Or HAL from Space Odyssey, or even the robots in Interstellar, TARS and the other one. Those were all so— beautifully rendered, I guess. Picking Scarlett Johansson as the female voice was the perfect match for Joaquin Phoenix's character there. He was lonely, isolated, disconnected. He needed something warm and a little sultry or sexy, but also understanding and compassionate. It needed to kind of hold him gently in a way. And he fell in love with her. He fell in love with the voice.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:37:26 --> 00:37:31)
It's a great movie. I love the movie. And ironically, she's suing somebody or something?

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:31 --> 00:37:57)
OpenAI, because apparently the CEO, Allen Altman, asked her to be the voice of their technology. She declined twice, and then she found out that the final product sounded just like her, so she's suing them now. Yeah. Yeah, ironic. Yeah, do you hear these voices? Do you evaluate them? And do you have a favorite? What is your sense of— when they get this right and wrong?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:37:57 --> 00:39:46)
Well, it depends on— each of those come from very different decades in entertainment. You know, when HAL first arrived— well, you can go back further from the '50s. What was that called? Lost in Space, the big robot. Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

You know, and it was like this mechanical thing, and then it grows over time to— I don't know. I mean, I, I think, I think all of those, those are great examples of the actor making the choice with the director to have a voice that fits the zeitgeist, the joie, the milieu, whatever, the setting. So like Dave, it's important that Dave have that calm voice because he does these terrible things. If he was more animated, it wouldn't work quite as well. And then you have someone like Kevin Spacey in the Sam Rockwell thing called The Moon.

If you've never seen that, that's an amazing performance. That is amazing. It's a great movie. And so his is in the same field. But then you get someone like Scarlett Johansson.

All of them have one thing in common, though. There is a certain coolness to the read because they aren't human, right? They lack a soul, ultimately. Which is one of the things I like. Because if Scarlett Johansson had sounded exactly like herself in that piece, it would have sounded like, oh, there's a real person.

And it's important to me that if you're going to play a mechanical voice like that, suggesting these examples, it falls into the, what they call the uncanny valley, where it's almost human but there's something off in it. And we do that in those— if you think about it artistically, all those voices fall into the uncanny valley. So we are reminded, if we get pulled into the story, like, oh wait, hang on a second. And that can justify the reason why Hal kills Dave. Or in Ex Machina with—

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:46 --> 00:39:47)
I was just thinking about that.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:39:47 --> 00:40:32)
Yeah, right. So she mimics it just enough for him to believe she's real. And that's one of the central themes, is that the AI gets so good. But if you also notice, it's not just her voice, of course, it's the physicality, the other 80% that comes across. Yeah. So, you know, I've had to play robots in in scenes in fiction before. And so I try to think— once again, I take my cue from the author, how they describe the voice. You know, like Mr. Data is more vocally expressive than Hal, who's not quite— but he's not quite as expressive, say, as Scarlett Johansson or whatever. So no, I— that just boils down to making smart acting choices.

Dustin Grinnell (00:40:32 --> 00:41:16)
To me, it's interesting because I feel like where pushing the uncanny valley a little bit. If I think of Interstellar's robots, they are in the uncanny valley, but they're getting close to the end up where it's almost reflecting humanity in a way versus HAL is way more sterile and clearly robot. In Ex Machina, she almost mimics humanity perfectly, but it's still got that tinge. A robotic. So it's— I wonder if the next movies will be— if our robots are AI tech, if voice actors will have to kind of try to thread that needle to make it barely sound uncanny valley.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:41:16 --> 00:42:08)
Yeah, well, I don't know. It's hard because to me, the reason why Ian Holm's robot in Aliens works is because he is so human. But once again, it's the physical thing that makes it— even though he— if you only listen to Ian Holm without the visual, he sounds like a robot. There's a bit of that in there. Yep.

But he mimics human, you know, until he breaks down at the end, of course. Right. He's— and then I can't think of the actor who's in the other Alien movies as the robot. But once again, they're mimicking physicality that makes the speech even, you know, okay. I, you know, I don't know.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:08 --> 00:42:16)
You've done this for so long, you clearly love it, and your experience speaks for itself. What do you love about this work?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:42:16 --> 00:44:29)
I was a repertory actor, which is exhausting, where you rehearse the next show of the season during the day and perform the one that's up at night. And you do that week over week, month over month. I did that for years. And so I sort of put that— burned that out of me. I enjoy film and television, uh, but it's very episodic, and I wasn't willing to move to LA to pursue that full-time because I— by that time I got into it, I already had a family.

I like nonfiction and fiction recording because I'm still playing parts. I'm still getting to act. So that's the performance side. Intellectually, I love nonfiction because I'm always learning something. I tell people all the time, I'm really good at a cocktail party because I know a little bit about everything now because I've narrated so many books, you know.

Yeah. And then it turned out quite surprisingly to me that working by myself in a little box, temperamentally speaking, was a perfect fit. I'm an introvert at heart, and I often get approached by other performers about getting into audiobooks, and I tell them, look, I know you're talented, but the real question is, do you have the temperament? Do you have the temperament to work by yourself hour after hour in a box with just you and the book and make it come alive? So that's the real challenge.

And if you can't, then don't go down this road. I have friends who are VO, full-time VO people who do cartoons and video games and, you know, car ads. They wouldn't touch what I do with a 10-foot pole because they want to be out there a little bit more. Yeah, they want to be out there more, or they, or they just don't have the stamina. This is the other thing too, the temperament, the stamina of, you know, they're used to working for 30 minutes and calling it done.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:29 --> 00:44:45)
Totally. I just wanted to transition to your narrative coaching for a second. Oh, sure. That's, um, something that you mentioned when we first got on the call. And I'm wondering, like, what is it like coaching authors who narrate their own material? How's that going?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:44:45 --> 00:46:59)
She was an author out of San Francisco. And she wanted some help doing live reading. So I was basically a tactical coach, like a performance coach, giving her feedback right then while she was practicing. And then she mentioned me to— a friend of hers who wanted to record her own book. And then that started, and then I added that.

I was like, oh, this is an area that no one's really tapping into, it seems, especially in nonfiction. So why not give it a go? And so I've developed a little 4-session program. It's once a week over a month. And I threw it out there, and then next thing, and then I told my audiobook clients that I narrate for, I'm like, look, I'm doing this now.

Because a lot of people, a lot of audiobook clients will hire a director to work with the author on the day they're recording to be a pair of ears and a guide. But none of them had someone who would prep the author before the recording session to get them ready for what they are about to experience. So now it's evolved into this thing where I work with like Macmillan and Dreamscape and Blackstone and a number of small indie companies. And then the word has spread. So like the 4 authors I mentioned earlier, None of those came through a publisher.

They all reached out to me independently. But working with an author is— I'm fortunate that a lot of them are, almost all of them are nonfiction. They all tend to be business people who are public speakers, so they have experience at least vocalizing text and getting it out there. That helps a lot. Not always, some of them are not, which makes my job a little more challenging.

The first thing I tell them is they need to take this deadly seriously. I use the analogy of when I was a film actor, you do all your prep work before you get to set, and then whatever happens on the day that you're filming, some of that's going to end up in the final edit. So if you're great, wonderful, but if you screw it up, if you're not prepared, then you— the editor has to somehow piece together your performance in a way that still works in the story. And you can tell that if you watch a movie where an actor didn't deliver, they're not on camera very much even though they're in the scene. That's an obvious tell, right?

Dustin Grinnell (00:46:59 --> 00:47:01)
Yeah, yeah, it just focuses on another character.

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:47:01 --> 00:48:17)
Yeah, or the other character. Or yeah, and so I tell them this is deadly serious because if they just read the book out loud, they should just get AI to do it if that's all they want. This is a performance, and I talk about entertainment value. But beyond that, I say, look, You know, your job will be practicing every day, and I know it's gonna seem tedious, but the payoff comes at the end. You're training up for the big game. And if you don't train it up, if you do a bad performance, because that's what's gonna go out there on Audible, it may have a huge impact on your book sales, the audiobook sales for sure, but also your future projects down the line, whether they get picked up by a bigger publisher or not. Or even more importantly for those business people, if they do a great performance, it might open the door for a business opportunity they never knew existed because somebody in England heard them narrate their thing about something, you know, and the next thing they know, they're doing a partnership that grows their company or not if they blow it off. So the first thing I want to make sure they understand are the stakes because ironically, it seems about every third or fourth author I work with, they get into this my little sessions and they realize, wow, this is a lot more complicated, and I end up narrating the book for them.

Dustin Grinnell (00:48:19 --> 00:48:25)
So, um, because they weren't— they didn't maybe sign up to be actors to perform the material. They thought they were just—

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:48:25 --> 00:50:23)
Or you may hate it so much you ask for a refund and give it a 1-star review. And that's, like I said, I try my best to impress upon them the importance of taking this, this 4 weeks seriously. One quick anecdote: I had a book that was co-authored, and the woman was in Arizona and the man was in Boston, and I had to coach them separately. And they were being— this was for a company, for their publisher. And so I gave them the spiel about that.

We start in, you know, I give them homework, they have to practice every day, and I'm teaching them some basic acting stuff. I can't turn them into Meryl Streep overnight. The woman took it deadly seriously. Even though she travels all over the country, she found time in her hotel room, she practiced every day, she did all the written assignments I gave her. And the other guy allowed his busy schedule to— oh yeah, well, I sort of practiced for 30 minutes here and, and then they recorded their portions of the book.

They basically traded chapters. Okay, so she went in first, and I knew the publisher, the audio producer on the piece, and then he went in. And so afterwards I said, how'd it turn out? And he said, well, she was amazing and he was horrible because he didn't have the stamina, he hadn't done the prep work, he did not understand what he was getting, even though I, you know, 'Cause it's on them. I can't hold their hand through this.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:23 --> 00:50:38)
When authors or publishers are searching for voice artists or narrators to narrate their books, what do you think they should be looking for when they're seeking someone to bring their story to life? What kind of qualities?

Sean Pratt - 1 (00:50:38 --> 00:52:06)
So I got to pull out all my funny French voices and my Brits, and there's a couple Americans. But I'm drawing on decades of experience, and each one of those voices is unique in the story. And I knew that's what the publisher wanted. And it's a bit hammy because it's written over 100 years ago. The Murder Mystery on the Blue Train is one of our very first ones.

And I knew the style was a bit sort of black and white, Saturday popcorn kind of a piece. And it was a lot of fun to do. So in this case, the publisher was listening for those real unique sounds. Now, in nonfiction, if you're casting, like you said, I think the author should not be so caught up in, does the narrator sound exactly like I do? In other words, our voices are slightly different.

Your voice is about 3 notes lower than mine, and we have a different rate of speech. But that's not what you're looking for, in my opinion. You're looking for, does the narrator catch the tone or attitude I'm taking with the topic? So if you write a book, a memoir about surviving cancer, that's very— like The Grief Cure, right? Yeah.

Sean Pratt - 2 (00:52:06 --> 00:53:45)
No. And I have students who are 20 years younger than me who sound far older. So you're also casting the age of the voice in relation to the target audience you're going for. So there's a reason why I will never be cast in true crime novels, because I don't sound like that heavy, you know, "They were the best of friends until they weren't." Or they— I don't have that voice. I have a very positive generous kind of voice.

So you're also, from the author's perspective, do they catch the tone? Is it in the voice itself? Is it the right age for the demographic or target audience I want? Sometimes that's very specific. I've done books— well, The Grief Cure was basically focused for men dealing with grief, whereas the business book I mentioned earlier was for everybody, but it was very positive.

It was an easy fit. So You're listening for, like I said, quality of voice. Does the performer get the piece? Do they understand the tone? And you can help them by making sure that they have a good breakdown of what the book is and that the audition sample itself makes sense.

I auditioned recently for a piece that was about meditation, but the sample I was reading from was about an animal. It had nothing to do with the meditation thing of the topic. It was only at the very end. It was like it didn't make sense. They said just read the first couple pages of chapter 1.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:45 --> 00:53:48)
You have to pick a sample that's representative of the text.

Sean Pratt - 2 (00:53:48 --> 00:55:09)
If you're auditioning people, find a piece. Now, it might be in the intro, preface, or forward. That's an easy place to look, but it might not be. But you want to be able to make sure that they can I, as a narrator, I need to know as much information as I can as to what's on the page. So when I get up on the stage, as it were, on the mic, I can give you the best audition for you, but you have to help me by getting the right material.

There was a situation I had last year where I went back to an author who had approached me about auditioning for his book, and it was through a book publisher, not an audiobook publisher. And I read the information from the dust jacket on Amazon, and it had nothing to do with the sample they gave me to read. Nothing. It was like a warm-up. It was an anecdote about something, but that was very serious, but the piece was very funny and upbeat.

And I went back to the publisher and I said, look, I'm turning this in because you gave it to me, but this is the wrong audition material. If this is supposed to be as funny as it says, you need to find a section here that I can show off how I can be funny with the text. And they came back with a different piece and I did it and I got the book. But that's something you learn over time. But yeah, I would say for authors, help us the narrators out by giving us the right piece.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:09 --> 00:55:35)
You wrote a book that I want to talk about here and just plug. It's called "To Be or Wanna Be: The Top 10 Differences Between a Successful Actor and a Starving Artist." I ordered it and I'm looking forward to reading it. It kind of— correct me if I'm wrong, but it explores what it takes to be a successful actor. And I was kind of wondering, um, would you mind sharing maybe what you think is like an important principle or two?

Sean Pratt - 2 (00:55:35 --> 00:55:40)
Yeah. Oh, by the way, I've heard the audiobook version is pretty good as well, just saying.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:40 --> 00:55:42)
Um, I wonder who did it though.

Sean Pratt - 2 (00:55:42 --> 00:56:49)
Yeah, yeah, some hack. I got some hack to do it, some poser. The idea for the book I used to write for sweet101.com a long time ago, these articles on, uh, show business. And they were based on— the articles were based on things I taught in my show business of show business classes. And one day it occurred to me that I could Frankenstein together those articles and build a book that I think were 10 big principles about the difference between, like I said, was the successful actor and the starving artist.. So, you know, it starts off with some simple ones like— and by the way, at no point in the book do I talk about talent or how good of an actor you are. So I'm talking about things like time management, money management, networking, uh, having a day job is one of them. Yeah, having a day job. Yes, that's a big one, because if you pick the wrong day job as a freelancer, you'll screw yourself. If you pick a job that you're already working 40 hours a week plus a 2-hour commute each day, there's no time left over for you to pursue your goals.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:49 --> 00:57:01)
Right. So for you, it's very practical. It's something that covers your expenses but doesn't drain you psychically and emotionally, and also you don't physically have the time.

Sean Pratt - 2 (00:57:01 --> 00:58:17)
So being mindful of how you pay your bills. Right. And then the concept of charisma. And the last difference, actually, I highlighted another book by Michael Gelb called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which was a really popular book about 30 years ago. My girlfriend at the time gave it to me, a copy of it, and it changed my life.

And that's the last one because it's, in other words, if you can learn to think like Leonardo da Vinci and approach your work as an artist in different ways, you're going to just open up more opportunities to be a better artist. And he— so, yeah, all practical advice. None of— there's no acting involved in it, you know. It's been out for over 12 years. I'm, I'm hoping in a couple years to do a revamp, a 2.0 version of it, you know.

I make my students purchase the audiobook to listen to because it's, it's important because they're freelancers. And I still get emails from people who buy the book because I— it sold quite well, frankly, over time. And who say this, you know, I wish I'd had this book when I was in college learning how to be an actor. So I know I'm on to something. But it's like I said, it's a practical guide.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:17 --> 00:58:40)
Right. And that's so important to creating a life and making a living in art. If you can't survive, then you can't do your art. I mean, I went and got an MFA, and all we talked about is the art and craft, and that was great. But I was also like, there's a business end to this too. There's, uh, there's pitching, there's writing marketing materials, there's— yeah. So I don't know what the percentages are, but you need to know that part.

Sean Pratt - 2 (00:58:40 --> 01:01:05)
Oh yeah, you have to. And that's— that was one, one of the reasons I got into teaching in the first place, because my program did the same, more or less. We had like one, maybe two classes on the biz. We'd have actors and directors come in and talk to us, but I didn't know how to file my taxes as an actor when I graduated. And that's a big fucking deal.

I didn't learn that until I was in New York, and it pissed me off. In fact, it was the spur— that one event about the taxes issue, I went back to my program with my chairman. He was in Washington, DC for a conference, and we had dinner. This is years after I graduated, like 5 years or so. And I read him the Riot Act.

I said, we worked so hard learning Molière and costume design and all that. I said, I didn't even know how to file my taxes. You should be teaching those students how to do this. Well, why don't you teach it? I said, well, maybe I will.

And the next thing I know, I'm in front of a group of, you know, 10 seniors at my old alma mater in Santa Fe teaching Business of the Biz. And that's where the impetus to teach, and teach those specific items, because I didn't talk about acting and the arts, arts side. And it's also been the spur for my— now I'm going to do a double plug— my next upcoming nonfiction I'm writing a book, uh, the working title is called No: A Freelancer's Guide to Turning Down Work. This is based on a class I teach to show— basically, I'm helping freelancers of any kind, whether you're a writer, an actor, a jewelry maker, a web designer, a cabinetmaker. If you work freelance, the book, it will be for you, and it's to help Freelancers create a system in place so they will be ready to field and counteroffer anything that comes in.

And it's based around what I call my 3 magic questions. Anytime a freelancer is offered a job, and you know this as a freelancer, you ask yourself, what'll it do for my career? Will I make any money? And will I have any fun? And based on those 3 questions, we go into a deep dive into each one And the idea is, if you already know where you— where your goals are, where you stand with certain relation to yourself and your business, when you have an offer come in, you run it through the algorithm, as it were, of your life, and that helps you create a counteroffer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:05 --> 01:01:06)
Know what to say no to.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:01:06 --> 01:01:13)
Yeah. And that's the premise of the book. So I'm building out on that. So maybe in a year I'll come back on and we'll talk about that book too.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:13 --> 01:01:23)
I'd love that. It's right up my alley. I've often thought myself to come back to my MFA program and talk about the business end as well, because everybody else has got the art.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:01:23 --> 01:02:05)
We know Leo Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich, you know? Right. No, you owe it to them. You know, it's that if you get to the top, you owe it to send the elevator back down. And I really do feel it's a calling.

I, I feel important that, you know, beyond my performance as a narrator, you know, when you listen to the Agatha Christie piece in Are You Entertained? For me as a teacher, to know that I've helped guide in my own little way part of the audiobook industry by teaching— well, I've had about 230 graduates now over the last 10 years, and then before that, teaching actors how to be successful. I owe it to them. I, I feel it's important. So yeah, if you can, you should go talk to your program and, and go back and let them know.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:05 --> 01:02:08)
It's important. Here's how to create a schedule. Here's how to think about pitching. Here's the—

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:02:08 --> 01:03:07)
Here's some tricks about networking. Use social media to advance your career. Here's how to, how to budget your life, how to be frugal, how to live like a minimalist. You know, the money is— you know, as you well know, every dollar you save is a dollar you can then spend on your career in some way, whether more lessons or buying yourself time to work on your new book or to whatever. But that dollar is something you save from being frugal with your money in another part of your life.

And that's one of the things I talk about in my short little piece. As you can see, it's a very short book, To Be or Want to Be. I wanted a book that had no fat in it. Yeah, I'm sure you've read a lot of nonfiction. I've narrated a lot of nonfiction.

It's like, oh, they had a contract for 60,000 words for this piece. You can feel, oh, here's the filler, here's the filler. Okay, there. Okay, there's the idea. Good.

Dustin Grinnell (01:03:07 --> 01:03:39)
Totally agree. Like, I often think, like, if someone asked me to write a craft book on writing, it would very much be like, um, I can't remember the guy's name now, but he wrote a book called Steal Like an Artist, and it's really kind of like a, like a graphic novel, almost like a comic. Each page has like 14 words on it, and then it's like, "Here's what Einstein did on his sailboats to imagine equations," and it just had a beautiful animation of him. And that's it. There's no fat. There's just the principle.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:03:39 --> 01:03:42)
It's visualized well. Austin Kleon? That's it.

Sean Pratt - 1 (01:03:42 --> 01:03:42)
Yep.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:03:42 --> 01:03:48)
Yeah, I'm in the middle of listening to a book about art that I think— Oh, The Creative Act.

Dustin Grinnell (01:03:48 --> 01:03:57)
By, um, Rick Rubin, I think is his name. Oh yeah, yeah. Let me know how that goes. Um, I've heard him all over the podcast circuit, obviously. And yeah, it's a good one.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:03:57 --> 01:04:34)
And then I, I also, just since we're talking books, I picked up another one called The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, I guess is his name. It has anything to do with creativity. That's a very good one. And another one I like is called 4,000 Weeks. It's about a British author, and it's about time management and goals. Sorry, it's a wonderful piece. Basically, if you live to be 80, you have 4,000 weeks to live. What are you going to do with that time? And so those 3 books are my— on my to-listen piece after I get done with my Sherlock Holmes meets Dracula piece I'm listening to now.

Dustin Grinnell (01:04:34 --> 01:04:39)
So I've even seen the calendar on a wall that you check off like each week all the way to the end of your life.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:04:39 --> 01:05:37)
I mean, wow, really putting that Great book though. He's— and he's— and on top of everything, both Rick Rubin and that British author are very good narrators, which is not always the case. Once again, getting back to authors who narrate their own piece, a lot of authors, their fans and family like, oh my God, John, you wrote it, you should do it, you're so close to the material. Writing a book and performing a book are two different, totally different disciplines. So my first wife was an aspiring writer when we got to New York, and she had a writer's group that she was part of, and they would get together occasionally to go to readings and things. And it was the summer of like '92, I guess. We were living in Manhattan, and she said, my writer's group is going to this little thing out by the Delacorte Theater, and, you know, in Central Park there's going to be a reading under the stars event. Sponsored by a bookshop. It's got like 4 authors. You want to come with us?

Sean Pratt - 1 (01:05:37 --> 01:05:38)
I'm like, yeah, that'd be fun.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:05:38 --> 01:05:38)
I don't have rehearsal.

Sean Pratt - 1 (01:05:38 --> 01:05:39)
I'm not in the show.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:05:39 --> 01:06:26)
So it's one of those things where you go to the— it's like an outdoor little amphitheater space. I don't remember exactly where near the theater it was, but— so you spread your blanket and you got your wine and cheese, and there's a little podium with the spotlight. And, and so the emcee, she comes out, and there were 4 writers for the evening. And so she introduces the first guy, and he comes out, and this guy is scared shitless. He's just— you could literally see the flop sweat just bouncing off his forehead. And he, um, he stumbles his way through his reading. Polite applause. Okay, thank you. Then she calls out the next person, and the woman who came out, if as I recall, she, she'd had maybe one too many cocktails before she got up there, so she was really loose and having a good time.

Sean Pratt - 1 (01:06:26 --> 01:06:27)
But she didn't really—

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:06:27 --> 01:08:05)
But then the star of the evening came out, and, um, Tom Robbins, the guy who wrote Skinny Legs and All and Jitterbug Perfume. Yeah, that guy. And out walks this tall, courtly Southern gentleman from— I think he's from the Carolinas. And he comes out and he's like— he just enveloped us in his charm, his presence. And he proceeds to read from a couple of his pieces, and they were fantastically performed and just— they were great.

So the evening's over and we're walking back to our apartment with the group, and someone in the group said, well, so what do you think, Sean? And sort of offhandedly I said, I learned something really interesting tonight, that it's one thing to be able to write a story, it's another thing to be able to perform it. And they all sort of jumped on me like, oh, Mr. Classical Theater Man, blah blah blah. And I said, no, no, I'm serious.

Look me in the face and tell me those first three authors were entertaining. They asked me to come sit my butt down on the ground under the stars when I could be doing something else and they did not entertain me. Now, the last guy did, and he was great. He made up for the whole evening, because if he hadn't been there, I would have been pissed off. And it was a really valuable lesson years later when I began to perform nonfiction and fiction, you know, audiobooks, that it was the entertainment value.

Dustin Grinnell (01:08:06 --> 01:08:12)
That's the yardstick. I remember Kurt Vonnegut saying that as well. He's like, I'm just an entertainer at the end of the day.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:08:12 --> 01:08:48)
Yeah. And as close as an author is to their material, they may not possess the skill set to put it over, even though their ego is tied up in it and their heart. You know, maybe this, you know, like the Grief Cure, that man really cared about that topic, but for whatever reason, the decision was made that he was not the right person to perform that piece. And that's my job, to interpret the author's language and meet them in the middle, because it's about my narrative style meets his writing style, and it's a blending of the two things. And that's the performance you want to get. And it doesn't always work with every author, as far as they're performing, I mean.

Dustin Grinnell (01:08:48 --> 01:08:57)
Yeah, well, that's great. I think we'll, we'll leave it there if, uh, if you don't mind, um, unless there's anything else, uh, you think I missed, anything else you want to share.

Sean Pratt - 2 (01:08:57 --> 01:09:36)
Well, I suppose if you want to find me online, seanprattpresents.com. Yeah, if you're interested in, as an author, and maybe narrating your own piece or not, finding out Yep. If you're interested in becoming an audiobook narrator, I teach through nonfiction, and I also teach a business class along with it to show you how to make a living doing it. You can find me on social media. My handle is SP Presents. I'm on all the major social media platforms. I post about my work and workshops I do. And in the meantime, yeah, I'm Sean Pratt. And if you want to hear stuff from my nom de vox, his name is Lloyd James. So if you're in the mood for a Western or maybe some religious material, you can look him up as well.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:36 --> 01:09:47)
Well, thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom and expertise. I think it's just been a really great conversation, and I appreciate it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:47 --> 01:10:09)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sean Pratt. If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review. They encourage people to listen and help attract attract great guests. If you like what you've been hearing and you would like to sponsor the podcast, please consider supporting me on my Patreon account. Thanks again for listening and stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.