I bet audiobook narrators love it when fantasy authors describe their weird nonhuman magical characters as talking in a voice like broken glass or tearing metal or a thousand ringing bells or whatever

Any nonhuman character in any story I write has a voice that I crafted specifically to make audiobooks narrators curse my name.

We just ignore the note and read it.

I hate that as a reader, too. It's not really descriptive, it's forfeiting the attempt to be. Like the stuff Edgar Allen Poe wrote. I dislike it with the zest of a snapping rubber band laced with citric acid that was extracted from Franklin Popanklin's bowels. AKA "a lot".

I know @rjbayley.bsky.social LOVED it when he had to narrate my undead characters who sound like they smoke 50 packs of cigs a day 😂

I got to meet my audiobook narrator two weeks ago and he greeted me with "a voice like honey on bark," a description from a book he'd narrated for me YEARS ago, so apparently they very much do remember those moments. (Great guy, and I apologized. I never expected that series to get audiobooks.)

*snerks*

This post is so well-timed. I’m trying This Exact Minute to figure out how to describe my half-human / half-octopus character’s voice and I’m not 💯 sure a human can make those sounds. 🤨

If I ever were to write a book, the voice descriptions would function like a prompt for an improv group, just to let the narrator flex their skills: “‘Stop that’, said the stranger in a voice that sounded like a high-pitched Peter Falk, but with the cadence of Christopher Walken”

The German Harry Potter narrator gave a lot of the side characters (different regional German) accents and made the elves sound really screetchy and so on. And honestly it ruled. Ludo Bagman may not be from the Rhineland in the books but it works if he sounds like it

Once listened to a book where a telepathic magic horse's voice was described as sounding like a young man's but the narrator went with Mr. Ed