Helen Taylor: The Road to Voice Acting
Stories have always been my thing; I was a voracious reader from a precociously young age. And my dad was an irrepressible man, and a natural storyteller and teacher, so I knew the joy of an expressive performance. (I remember when he took us to places like the Tower of London he would start telling us the story of, say, Anne Boleyn, and before you knew it he'd have drawn a crowd).
I studied English and European Literature at university but I wasn't a great academic. While I was there I got seriously into theatre and spent far more time in the rehearsal room than in the library (also the bar, but we won't dwell on that). I loved it with such a passion that I toyed with the idea of training to be a professional actress after I graduated. But I decided I didn't have the right kind of personality to cope with the ups and downs and uncertainties of that kind of career.
So, I started off as a bookseller in a big London store, then I went to work as a proof-reader and text prepper on Microsoft's Encarta encyclopaedia, then I got promoted to do a bit of writing and editing for them.
I met my husband, and moved from London to Oxford, where I got a job as books editor for an online book store - this is back in the day when Amazon had competitors! I loved this job, interviewing authors, writing features, competitions, and newsletters etc. When I was expecting my second child though, they were bought out by a large chain company who centralised the editorial side of things, and I was made redundant. I decided to stay home with the children until they were at school, and earned bits of money here and there doing proofreading, cataloguing books for a second hand book business, anything that came my way really.
When the kids were bigger I went back to work, this time for Oxford University's maths institute (hilarious, as I am TERRIBLE at maths). I worked on an academic journal, and did some PA work for some of the professors. A couple of years ago. due to quirks too complicated to explain, I ended up doing the journal side of the work as a freelancer, and started working from home.
But in all these years, while I was earning money in book selling and editing and marketing, my driving passion was always theatre and performance. I devoted all my free time to it - in fact I racked up more than 100 shows over the years, and played some fantastic roles. When I turned 40 my husband gave me my own theatre company (!!), and I moved on to directing and producing too.
So you have the book background, you have the performance background - wouldn't you think it would be obvious that I should try audiobook narration? Well it never even crossed my mind. Until one night in 2014 I was having a night of insomnia and I was laying on the sofa at 3am hunting for something to listen to. I searched for free audiobooks and came across a LibriVox recording of a childhood favourite 'What Katy Did'. It was such a pleasure to listen to, that I searched for more books, and discovered that LibriVox was a project where anybody at all could volunteer to read public domain books. I thought, "Hey, maybe I could have a go...".
It was quite the learning curve, getting to grips with the recording and editing software. My earlier efforts are technically pretty awful! If I'd realised at the start how much I didn't know, I might never have started. But I learned stuff as and when I needed to, and it was manageable. I loved it, and ended up recording eleven solo projects for LibriVox, my last one being Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which clocks in at a marathon 35 hours. By this time I was growing in confidence and thought I'd put out some feelers and see if maybe, possibly, miraculously, I might be able to earn a bit of money doing this... and the rest, as they say, is history!
Since going professional I've upgraded all my equipment and undertaken some voice and accent training. But really what I draw on is all those years of acting experience, and a love of literature that has underpinned my career. I love to bring characters to life.