Currently Working on…

I thought it would be straightforward to write this one.

Track my journey becoming an established voice-over, share a few anecdotes, a few tricks of the trade, a few personal stories… But I couldn’t find the voice of the book.

I kept shifting to “how to” mode and the book became impersonal. Then it had some good bits and then it read like a manual again.

That was about two years ago.

Then, last December, my friends Ivor and Tomás came over to my parents’ house in Madrid, for tea. (No coffee, they’re off coffee.) As they sat down – well, after they’d sat down and I’d given them their cups of tea – I said:

“I need your advice. I have these memoirs and every time I come back to them, I find a problem. I want there to be a through-line, but I can’t crack it, I just can’t crack it.”

I knew that I wanted the story to somehow “hang” from my job voicing Xuli in the GoJetters, but I wasn’t sure how.

“Why don’t you follow your trajectory with the GoJetters? Start at the beginning and tell the story through to the end,”said Tomás.

“And let different moments in that journey lead you to other memories.”

The dialogue didn’t quite take place like that – but that’s ok. Something I’ve learned writing this book is that you need to take artistic license sometimes. Memory plays tricks on all of us.

That evening, I charted the book. I’d already laid down all the events and themes – now I just matched them to my journey getting the job with the BBC. From audition to launch.

So with this new plan in mind… I waited.

I waited for five months. I didn’t write a word. I only opened my Scrivener file on 4th May, the day before going to Lanzarote for a ten day kind-of-holiday. At the villa on the island, I started working on the book again and wrote down a third of the journey.

I read that draft through (I call it “my 6th first draft”) and now, I’m pleased. I’m on the right track.