LJ talks with playwright, actor, and Audie Award– and multiple-time Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator Dominic Hoffman to learn more about the process of storytelling and how he crafted his voice and style.

You’re an actor, director, narrator, and playwright. How did you get started in audiobooks, and how do they connect with your other creative work?

Writing started everything. Eventually, acting followed, as I felt a need to be a part of what I was trying to create. I moved from fiction to dramatic writing. Initially, I was writing stories and bad poetry. I went to school to study literature and immediately found myself enamored with people like Hemingway, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde. When I changed to drama, I was in college writing scenes and enlisting student actors to perform them. One day, I was trying to get a performance out of one of the actors when he turned to me and said, “Just fucking show me what you want me to do.” I did, and they all suggested I might want to do some of this acting stuff. I applied to one school, ACT, in San Francisco. Luckily, I was accepted and then added acting to my repertoire.

Fast-forward through decades of stage work. I was a company member doing a season of Shakespeare (coincidentally, at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz) and met Robertson Dean, a terrific actor/narrator who introduced me to Dan Musselman. Dan ran the Los Angeles hub of Random House Audiobooks. I began narrating. That was nearly 20 years ago. To say it changed my professional life is not hyperbole.

Regarding the connection of disciplines, the commonality is storytelling. Actors, writers, and directors are basically storytellers with different skill sets.

You’ve inhabited many different characters, from Effia and Esi in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing to the vividly voiced cast of James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. How do you craft such unique voices and styles?

I have had some success in the solo show world, having penned two. They ended up playing in several theaters across the country as well as the UK. These plays were peopled with strong characters, men and women, of various backgrounds, ages, and ethnicities. I wrote, performed, and directed the plays, so I had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of how to craft characters and fit them into a narrative. As I have an affinity for languages and accents, it was a natural progression to develop my skills for mimicry. I love the nuances found in accents and dialects, even if I can’t do them perfectly. I can approximate them and at least locate an emotional truth, which is very useful in narration. Again, it’s all about telling the story.

Your performance of Percival Everett’s James is resonant and nuanced, though full of pain. What is it like to approach an emotionally taxing project like this?

When I’m trying to find how to play a character in a stage play, I look for his walk, manner of movement—anything outward that will inform me even slightly of his inner workings. With a novel, it is not as simple. There are hundreds of pages and dozens of characters, with a myriad of accents, rhythms, and motives. The simple answer is to read the play aloud and let it gently take you inside the story. I usually get a sense of the overall theme after doing so. When I show up at the studio with a few specific notes [about] characters and events, I put myself once more into the life and mood of the story, with special attention to the narrator, because he should be singular and both inside and outside of the story. Then I hope for the best.

Now let’s talk about the painful stuff. Slave narratives are never my favorite thing to work on. Even when there is some kind of positive message or light at the end of the ridiculously long tunnel, they make for long, painful sessions. Also, I think suffering has taken the front-and-center position on the Black experience. It’s a sort of “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality. I also narrate a lot of books written about Africa by Africans. Some of them are historical pieces on Rwanda and the Congo, illuminating the various atrocities that have affected these places. Necessary stories, but painful to recount. Those require a distance and a closeness in their retelling. A distance for personal protection and relative objectivity, and a closeness to enable the narrator to expose the hard truths. I find my objective in these narrative pursuits is to survive them. Often, both narrator and director are reduced to tears. That said, they are important chronicles of history and need to be revealed.

What are the challenges you have encountered as a narrator?

Staying focused for long periods of time is an enormous challenge, requiring hours sitting in front of a microphone. Unlike stage acting, your body can’t help tell the story. Narration is 100 percent aural. So, you have to heave your heart, your passion, your all, into your voice. There’s a great phrase used by Shakespeare…mouth honor. It had a different meaning when he used it, but here, I’m referring to it being all things verbal. I use acting on stage as a reference because it is closest to the narration experience. Cinema and television are visual mediums. Theater, though also a visual medium, is more dialogue-driven than anything else. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.

Are you a listener yourself?

Full disclosure…I don’t listen to audiobooks. I read everything. On the page. In real time. It’s a hard habit to break. And no, I have never listened to more than a snippet of my own recordings. I feel uncomfortable listening to myself. I don’t believe I’m alone in that default.

Finally, all books are not created equal, certainly not from a narrative perspective. A narrator realizes immediately they must rise to the occasion for an extraordinary piece of writing. Lesser works pose a different challenge. In those, I try to hold on to the most obvious theme I can find, grab on to it, and move through it like the devil. As for nonfiction, I will steal a line from David Mamet: “Just say the words.”

Photo by Daniel Reichert