My First Character?

Blog image by Faith from Pixabay, not the character referenced in this blog

Around the house, I have a tendency to make up voices on the fly. Imagine the Genie from Aladdin, just throwing pop culture references into every conversation without provocation. It’s fun for me, and sometimes I can get a chuckle out of my kids or other family members when we are at a gathering.

The thing is, a lot of my “voices” that I make up are often some form of accent. I am not trying to be insulting or anything, but to make my voice sound different I use random accents.

Imagine my surprise when I receive an order on Fiverr, asking for a customized “character voice” that isn’t my “natural speaking voice” because they wanted it to be unique to their character! I don’t even have a character demo reel up on … anything at this point! I have been planning on putting together my own short demo reel to get a new gig going on Fiverr specifically for character acting.

Now imagine my horror when I realize that adding an accent on to something that could be seen from anyone around the word could be taken the wrong way. I am an African American woman, born and raised in Southern California. Any other accent that I use outside of my natural speaking voice sounds to me like putting on a costume. And I would never want to insult someone because of a costume I put on, inadvertently or not.

So instead of my usual gag of adding an accent and an emotion, I had to find a different way to not sound like myself. I decided to play with the cadence of speech, and irregular changes in pitch, to give this character her own voice. But it made me realize that I need to start researching - and PRACTICING - the art of creating unique voices. I’m sure doing that will also help boost my confidence when it comes to submitting auditions for fiction audiobooks…