As an artist who is also a small business owner, it sometimes feels like you’re pulled in two opposite directions: toward creative freedom and artistic expression on one side, and toward business-focused administrative tasks on the other. For most of us, in our creative training, whether that was art school or conservatory training or just a liberal arts education, everything was focused on the artsy side of things, with often no mention of business at all. And if you look to business literature or business coaches who cater to small business owners, which we are as creative entrepreneurs, that business material focuses entirely on efficient business administration, and creativity doesn’t even enter the picture. Where can the two sides – creative and business – meet? In today’s podcast episode, we’re going to figure out how these two elements of our creative businesses can and do interact in support of our artistic work. Let’s discuss how making decisions to follow our creative passion can actually help us in the business side of our work, forging a virtuous cycle of sustainable creativity.

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Hello, thriving artists, and welcome to episode 61 of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I’m thrilled that you’re here today!

This podcast episode features a deep and thought-provoking interview with actor, narrator, and educator Neil Hellegers. Neil is going to be a faculty member at the upcoming Thriving Narrators Retreat, which I’m hosting in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH very soon, in just a couple weeks, August 22-25, 2024. This event is just for the narrators in our creative entrepreneurship community, but it is an event I’m thrilled to be part of. We’re going to talk about both the business and the craft of audiobooks, because, as we’ll hear in today’s conversation with Neil, the business truly does help the craft, and the craft truly does help the business. If you’re an audiobook narrator and would like to learn more about the Thriving Narrators Retreat, you can hop on over to my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, where you’ll find all the details. Registration for the retreat will be open through July 31, which is still a couple weeks away at the time this episode is initially being published, and we’d love to have you join us.

If, on the other hand, you’re not an audiobook narrator, or you’re listening to this when August 2024 is long past, I still invite you to check out my website and see what coaching opportunities and events I have available. You never know, the exact event or coaching program you need might be coming up soon. That website again was www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com.

Let’s turn now to the main topic of today’s conversation: how to foster sustainable growth in your creative business so that you are satisfied and fulfilled by your work both creatively and financially. This is a topic I’ve discussed here on the podcast before, all the way back in episode 7, when I introduced the concept of working in your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot. If you have no idea what that term means, I really encourage you to go back and listen to that episode. I’ll link it in the show notes.

But a quick description of your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot is the place where you are able to do artistic work that you find incredibly creatively fulfilling and enjoyable, and where you’re able to earn your best and highest rates. The place where your creative fulfilment intersects with your financial fulfilment is the place that I call your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot.

The joy of focusing on work in your sweet spot is that it allows you to do your very best work. After all, when you’re working on projects that you find creatively engaging and enjoyable, you’ll be doing your best work. Every artist is going to be at their very best when they’re invested artistically in the work they’re doing. And because you’re doing your very best creative work, over time, that creative excellence will be noticed and will be rewarded financially, allowing you to earn higher rates for that work that you so love to do. And when you have the financial peace that comes from knowing your bills are going to be paid, and you’re not going to be the “starving artist” that society expects you to be, you’re able to create with more freedom and innovation, making the quality and originality of your work that much better. It’s a delightfully positive and supportive cycle.

As I mentioned in the intro to this episode, sometimes it seems like we have to have split personalities in order to be thriving artist business owners. But the concept of the Creative & Financial Sweet Spot points out that those two aspects of our business truly can positively influence each other.

That’s why I was so excited to talk with Neil Hellegers for today’s podcast episode. Neil’s artistic career has been a step by step journey of continually allowing his creative interests to prompt him to make business decisions that provide sustainability for him, his family, and his creative enterprise. Neil might not use the term “Creative & Financial Sweet Spot,” but the way he approaches his artistic business absolutely is an embodiment of that concept. I am thrilled that Neil will be a faculty member at the Thriving Narrators Retreat in a few weeks so that he can share his insight with the attendees at the retreat, and I’m even more excited that he agreed to sit down with me for a chat that I can now share with you, here on this podcast. So, let’s take a listen in on the conversation I had recently with Neil Hellegers.

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Jennifer: I am thrilled that I have with me today a good friend and an incredible artist. My guest today is actor and audiobook narrator Neil Hellegers. Neil, thank you for joining me for today's conversation.

Neil: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really. It's great to see you. And it's great to be here with you.

Jennifer: Likewise, Neil, I want to start off just sort of by asking a general question about how you've developed your career. You're an accomplished audiobook narrator. You work both on stage and on screen. You have worked as a teacher and a coach in a variety of venues. Can you give me a little bit of a rundown about how you branched into all of those different areas in your creative career, and what led you to work with such skill in so many different creative venues?

Neil: Well, first, thank you for that assertion of of excellence. I appreciate that very much. I guess I always think of a bit more of a sort of a flow of, of a combination of happenstance and opportunity rather than branching, because I sort of see it like a path that presented itself to me as a result of the choices that I made at different points in my life that led me to seek out certain things that I thought I would either find satisfying and or sustainable as as a person in the world. As a however, I connected with the, the, the people around me. And what was the sort of the best way for me to accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish in, in a wider sense, in my life, but also artistically, but also spiritually as well as creatively. I guess my initial path that led me to the place where I started making those choices was actually nothing to do with acting. It was, in a certain sense, spiritual. I went to the college that I went to because at that time I was a senior in high school. Granted. But, you know, bigger decisions have been made at younger ages. I thought that I was going to become a rabbi. And so I made my choices about where I wanted to go to college. And based on what was available there for me to study and the path that that would present me very quickly, it kind of became apparent to me that that wasn't exactly the right path.

Neil: So that led me into a path of theater, which I'd always done. I'd always been acting since, since whenever and but that led me into a specific kind of environment where the where I was studying theater wasn't. It was a BA program. It was not a BFA program. And so that led me to while I was getting an excellent academic theater education with some practical aspects, it led me to having to find where what other kinds of training and picking up of technique while also combining it with a very firm kind of early understanding of what technique was. And and this begins the kind of journey that I have always sort of followed in terms of the interplay of inspiration, your natural proclivity for things, and the natural way that you connect to things. Along with how technique isn't a substitute for that, but is a means for stimulating that or generating that when inspiration is not available. And so in that respect, that led me to doing a semester abroad in London, which was my first major kind of initiation into Shakespeare, which after that, after college, I went to grad school and started working in Shakespeare, and that kind of led into that sort of life. And that also led to me teaching Shakespeare a lot alongside other acting technique. And that flowed into when I was in New York City and kind of starting to think, this is this is great.

Neil: I'm enjoying touring around and I'm enjoying working, you know, driving upstate and teaching kids Shakespeare. But I also I there's other things in my life that I need to be fulfilling in terms of what I want. That's aside from my artistic goals and that namely things like having a family and supporting and helping to support a family. So that led me to utilizing other things that were available to me at the time in New York City in terms of on camera work. And that led to something of a proliferation of on camera commercial work as well as on camera film, TV, TV work here and there. But oddly, it was the commercial work that lent a different, unexpected kind of inspiration because I'd never done improv and things like that. Commercial on camera acting is a lot about like taking an entire day to do 30s and finding a million different ways to do it slightly differently, and never knowing which one of those is going to be chosen by the powers that be. But always being okay with being in that moment of like, is this right? You didn't seem to think that was right. How is this one right? While not freaking out and coming down on myself and self-destructing in the process, which is something I had to learn as I went along. But, you know, it was it's seems like an unlikely place, being a bunch of goofy dads that I was like. Modern family was popular. Everyone wanted Phil Dunphy to advertise their products.

Neil: So that was like, I did that for like a while, but then that also kind of flowed into me being, okay, this is fine, but it's not sustainable in a consistency kind of a way. And that was the thing. Even if I was working what I would call regularly, I would still there was no structure to it. It was always like, what am I doing next week? I'm auditioning for this thing. Will I get it, will I not? I don't know, and even if I do get it, when exactly will those resources from the from doing that gig be available to me? Also slightly unsure. And so that led me alongside other while still continuing doing these things to find something that felt again that fit my mode of technique and inspiration and training that I already had. And that led me into audiobooks, which I'd always listened to, and all sorts of long drives back and forth between theater festivals and home and things like that as being another possibility. I couldn't know that at the time, but that began. All those things flowed into that practice and all of that experience of knowing what a multiplicity of technique, how that was valuable, how there was no one path into anything but different kinds of ways of approaching it, that certain techniques that I had always held close and had always kind of found inspiration may or may not work in the context of audiobook, or I had to be adapting those techniques, or I had to be supplementing them with new technique, and then also and observing a medium where it was it was so singular to how every person did it that even if I listened to so and so for inspiration for a dozen books, I had to know that it's not that I would narrate like them, but that I would pluck 5 or 6 different things from the way they worked and see if those matched my technique.

Neil: If I did a workshop with someone, I would watch them work with five different narrators and see them take a different approach. Because the other thing about all of that leading into audiobook that I was doing the entire time was teaching. That's initially was my inspiration behind wanting to be a rabbi. It was about engaging in that sort of engaging with society in a way that tries to leave it a little bit better than I found it, by taking things that others had given me and redistributing them to other people in a way that would benefit their path and their flow and their life. And this has a lot to do with what I initially learned, almost accidentally, by the virtue of the theater program I ended up at was this idea of and this goes back to the Russians with Stanislavski, that he was observing a methodology of teaching and theatrical production that was he found to be stale and manufactured, and it was just like a do it exactly like this kind of a way of performance.

Neil: And that worked for several hundred years. But he was discovered and that led to others kind of picking up that ball and running with it in terms of how technique is a substitute for inspiration when it doesn't actually come or when you're working and you have to do it and you don't have a choice, no matter how you feel that day, you have to hit a deadline or something like that. So the whole time while I was teaching and that was that, that took on a very different form. Sometimes I was teaching very reluctant children in middle schools, who didn't necessarily want to do Romeo and Juliet that morning at 7 a.m. but here we were nonetheless, in combination with students at a summer university program who were very invested in learning, getting a basic background in acting Shakespeare technique. I always found that I learned from teaching and that was kind of what I was getting. That was a little bit I was getting back to it, aside from it being like a consistent sort of business structure that I engaged in. But all these things led me to always kind of be in a place where, like, I need to be learning more, I need to be, I need to be improving my craft technique isn't there's no permanency to inspiration, and therefore technique always needs to be kind of continuing the the process of finding how were you how are your how are you operating on that day with that work of art that you're channeling? At that point in your life at that time of year, at that time of day? Those were always going to be different.

Neil: And so audiobooks, because it's so rolling and continuous because we're working all day, it kind of becomes that flow that I talked about before. It's I don't know if it's by accident or happenstance or fate or whatever it is, or just the natural, organic kind of evolution of what seemed to work best for me. All the all those, all those streams have arrived at the river that I'm kind of flowing down right now, you know. And I like that, I like that I can't see where that river is heading. Like the earth curves. And you can't see it necessarily. You can't see over the horizon. But it's it's I'm very I'm grateful for the ride. And and part of what I'm excited about is, is, is I weirdly, despite all that, I got away from teaching during audiobook, my audiobook sort of period in the past ten years or so, I kind of put it aside and kind of was doing a thing. Well, well, well, I'm not I'm not exercised enough to teach. Even though I've been doing that for longer than I had been doing audiobook narration. And it's only just recently that I'm like, okay, I can start.

Neil: I can start to see how I can apply some of this, but not not what I know. That's the thing. I think audiobook technique, like any other creative craft, everyone's different. There's no there's no prepackaged educational program. There is a multiplicity of different approaches and opportunities for techniques or things that you can hand someone and see. Does this work? No. Great. Throw it aside. Let's try this one. Okay. That worked for you. Let's see why that worked for you and how that leads us to other points down the stream for you to continue to find that inspiration. And we'll piece something together that works for you. Now, next student in, like, in a row. Moving down the row, moving down the bench. Completely different arrangement. So there's no one way of teaching everybody one way of how to do this. I think that's probably true for most creative practices. I think that's probably true for a lot of things. But I'm trying to embrace that and get back to as I'm sort of reintroducing teaching back into my sort of my work, that educational experience that I always got from teaching. I learned more about Shakespeare from teaching those recalcitrant seven seventh graders than I did sometimes other people than the ones who were so eager to please that I am looking forward to seeing how getting reintroducing, teaching helps me learn more about audiobook narration and therefore be able to cycle that back into the community and and give back and try to bring everyone, try to raise the.

Neil: I'm just going to keep throwing river metaphors in here. Raise it, you know, rising tide. It's a bit mixed because, you know, some some rivers are tidal. That's true. Estuaries are tidal. You know, that rising tide kind of a thing, especially because there are so many more narrators now and so many people looking to find ways to make it work for themselves. That journey of being, what makes you tick, what are the things that excite you, and how can we translate that into creative work? We'll talk about business, but at least for now, that you have a solid foundation of how you operate. What are the mechanics? What is the chemistry? What is the alchemy of you that translate into your best possible performances? Discovering that with each individual and sharing that with the person across the room who's like, yes, that was the technique I needed. Thank you so much. All those things make me excited about that. But also like on a practical level too, I'm, you know, I always thought like, well, aside from all the other gigging, you know, like, gig life that I was kind of doing. Why wasn't I doing more of this? You know, in terms of and in terms of coaching and in terms of individual teaching experiences and things like that, too. I'm looking forward to seeing how that lends a certain more structure to my, my to my work, to my practice, to my career as well to for sure.

Jennifer: So I'm hearing two really big, strong threads through your entire creative career. One is a commitment to ongoing growth and excellence through that growth. And that that growth might look one way in one situation and might look completely different in another situation based on the technique required for that particular project, or the amount of inspiration you happen to have and have that day or whatnot. But throughout all of that, just a true commitment to growing yourself and also growing through sharing that growth with other people, which I think is such a beautiful life philosophy. And then the second thing that I'm hearing, that I would love for you to sort of expand a little bit more, is that from a business perspective, your decisions have all been based on what is sustainable for you personally and creatively. Mhm. And I would love for you to talk a little bit more about that. What made some of those decisions sustainable?

Neil: I always track the beginning of my audiobook work and my desire to kind of steer into doing work in that vein with the birth of my son. I think that I always say, like, I like how long you been narrating? And it's really been precisely as long as I've had a kid. I mean, I have a very specific memory of prepping my first book when he's in the carrier in front of me. And so that in that moment it's akin to being like, I need more structure in my life. I need more consistency. I need more dependency on income and things like that. But it clarified for me why I was doing what I was doing, I think, earlier on. And I think this happens with a lot of actors, and I think this happens a lot of creative endeavors. There is this notion of an equivalence of success and, for lack of a better word, fame, notoriety, celebrity, those kinds of things about being well known. And, granted, being well known and having that is a vehicle towards working more. And so that leads back to stability. And I totally get that. What that clarified for me was like knowing who I was working for. And I was working for that kid in the carrier that that that was the reason why I was doing what I was doing.

Neil: And that was a big that that guided me significantly into being. I need to change up how I'm doing. You know, like I said, I was working in all these different kind of concurrent streams of work, whether it be live theater or whether it was on camera, commercial or other TV work. But I needed something that wasn't a side gig, but that was that. That could connect all those different strains and all those things and make that consistent for myself, the people that I talked to about it. And this is, you know, again, this was given that this was about ten years ago, or really, I should say 11 years ago, the industry was a little bit different back then in terms of availability, but it was still an it was still a complete unknown. I still felt like I still felt like I was starting from scratch, which was scary. And knowing that I was shifting my resources behind the physical materials necessary to build up to to physically do the gig in terms of equipment, in terms of the learning curve of what I needed to know about recording and and to optimize that aspect of it, the reconnecting with a completely different sector of the industry that was completely new to me, and the time and money that was invested in that, you know, I couldn't have known at the time that it was going to, I think, gratefully, be as consistent for me as it, as it has proven to be.

Neil: And this is not I don't think this this is not unique to creative endeavors, but life does involve a certain amount of risk. I feel like the the investment that kind of casting out of seeing if this is going to work and investing time and money with it was metered out by trying to adopt a practice of only. I'll only invest more depending on how much I'm able to advance, like I would at a certain point, I had a practice. I was only going to buy more, like a better microphone or better equipment, or to like refit my my original booth closet with better foam, better equipment, better things. Only based from money that I was earning from it. After all of the household needs and expenses were taken care of. I sort of have a line for that. Like, okay, I can I can redo this aspect, I can get a better I can improve the I can maybe get a different computer or a different whatever, you know, based on only by only returning that money into it. And that was sort of mitigating the risk to a certain extent. But that was while also while making choices that I was hoping to be the way to kind of make those edification for myself in the work.

Neil: I always made a beeline right for sci fi and fantasy because it's what I knew best. But I also had a very keen understanding that someone pointed out to me earlier on that those are the books that are more likely to work in series, and so that it's not the singular. It's never the singular book, it's the continuance of it, which in my mind, coming out of theater and being desperate for collaboration as the way this thing worked was like, okay, I'm not just getting a gig, I'm establishing a longer relationship with that author, whether I meet them or not, you know? And that in many ways has proven to be something that has kept me, give me the most stability. Because when I view it as a long term relationship with that author again, whether I meet them or not, and I've been very blessed to have become good, very good friends with authors that I've worked for for years and that that makes the work better, that, you know, that we talk about things and we're like, oh, what's happening? This one? Oh, are we going to you're going to try that? Oh that's he's like, what do you think about this? I'm like, oh well wouldn't it be awesome if and you know that collaborative experience can kind of happen.

Neil: It happens to also be a financial kind of stability because it's it's perpetuating a long term income as well, but also it makes the work healthier and it makes the work better. It makes my work better to know the author. I do a lot of work in game lit and LitRPG, which is a genre that is invested heavily in the mechanics of video games and things and tabletop games. And recently, I don't know why I waited so long to do this. I've been playing online like gaming with authors that I've worked for for years. And it's like we talk about, it's like golf. You know, some people, you know, in business, other business endeavors, they play golf. And while they're teeing off, they're playing the game that they're physically doing, but they're also talking about other things. It's a vehicle or a conduit for strengthening those relationships. And I don't know, again, I don't know why I waited. We waited so long to do this. But it's it's also fun. You know, I also enjoy it. But it also, like I said, I think it makes the work better. So it's the marriage of the things that make me tick, like in this case, sci fi fantasy.

Neil: The thing that that I enjoy, the things that I know I'm automatically more enthusiastic about, combined with the acting technique that I had that, you know, is useful for things like, like I had a particularly great voice teacher in grad school. And one of the things that he taught for this is one example, I mean, so many great sort of foundational, basic vocal technique in terms of the kind of sustainability that we need for audiobook work. But the way he taught accents and dialects, this is not necessarily a unique approach, but the way it's what he left me with was not just about having like a dozen or half dozen or whatever back pocket accents that you can pull out, like reliably, like your RP or German, whatever it is. It was more about how do you learn a new accent in a reasonable amount of time and then drop it into your work while still sounding like a human being? That was always his like, bottom line. Like, that sounds perfect. That's technically correct, but you sound like you don't sound like a human. You sound like a caricature. So obviously that has served me in lots of different ways and lots of different books that require accents, but also for sci fi and fantasy. It's often about creating a whole dialect for a culture that does not exist, or that is analogous to one that we know, but is slightly different.

Neil: And so when I have that conversation of like when I after I finished my prep and I'm seeing like, okay, so you have the northern continent and the southern continent here. Do you think this is more analogous to Scots? And then down here where like southern England does that, does that work for you or not, or are there other was there if there was, oh, there was an invasion from the West. Well those accents would creep into as well too. So you'd have a continuity of it, you know. So it's that sci fi fantasy and obviously that works for like real world, even for urban fantasy, which tends to be more specific in terms of actual real world accents. But that confluence of all that of that work I had done previously as a first stage work fed directly into it. But that so that is a technique that is becoming a a solid practice that leads to continuity in continuing the business practice of that particular genre as it feeds into the sustainability of my audiobook work. So it's a creative thing. It's a technical element. It's a it's having invested the time and resources to have gone to grad school and taken that time out to study those things, combined with an an understanding of growing understanding of the industry that I was introducing myself into to find those sustainable, continuing opportunities to make that work and to, you know, therefore kind of be like, oh, this is a person who works well in this genre.

Neil: Perhaps myself as an author will approach this person to work as well, too. So, they all kind of connect. It's, you know, there's a lot of things about like auditions and things like that, that work. That's true for any other any of these creative endeavors, whether it's, I think, acting or audiobook or something else where you have to find a way to get into the room. But if you can't deliver once you are in the room, you're not going to. You probably you may not get the gig. You might. Who knows? These things are really wholly unpredictable in the end, but you increase your odds of getting the work by having the material and having the experience and having the ability to land the gig. But to get to that room is is a different endeavor and a different practice. But then to get into the next room and the next room, the next room is a matter of how those things combine and and lend opportunity and probabilities to the next opportunities coming along to do the same thing again, and so on and so forth.

Jennifer: Sure. So I'm hearing you say that you start with your creative interest and learn the techniques that will help you grow in that creative interest, and use the two of those things together to make sustainable business choices. And then when you get in that situation, in the business that you're able to show off that creative and that technical ability and passion, that's what helps you get to the next business choice and the next business choice and the next business choice. I love that virtuous cycle. I think that's truly a beautiful thing and how creative businesses are supposed to work.

Neil: Yeah. Well, it's the creativity is is it's not like a happenstance that that occurs like alongside it directly pushes you and it is is the thing that you apply your, your creativity and a creative career is your is your engine. You know, it's it's the thing that will keep you going and how you how do you set up that engine? Well, ideally keep you from burning out, you know, because you set up guide, guide guidelines and you know, and protections to yourself as you kind of go along. Hopefully, ideally, I've been better and worse about doing that as, as my life, as my career has gone on. But at least for me, that's how I found a way of kind of moving along in a way that it feels sustainable. But at the same time, I'm also very conscious of, like like I said before, I these days I've been doing a lot of game lit RPG in terms of my recording schedule, it's probably about 80%. Of course, I love to do literary fiction, and of course I love to do non-fiction. All these other genres as well too, and or like or a poetry gig, which comes along every so often to me, kind of randomly, and I always kind of do one or more of those things. But I have found that my sustainability really rests in what I've built with a large with a lot of indie authors.

Neil: And so again, it's probably a little bit more about these direct relationships, because mostly because of the happenstance of the genre I've chosen to specialize in isn't one that is there not. There are very few opportunities within traditional publishing for those genres. And as much as yeah, we'd all love to work trad, but yeah, but my sustainability has been working indie and I and I appreciate that and I love that. Like I said, I cherish those relationships that I've developed over the years. And the work that I've done, my feeling has always been like, try to find the literary fiction in this game that try to find the nonfiction elements that really teach us things about our world as they are found contained within this fantasy world because of the analogous relationship that the, you know, like any any good book or a lot of my the game that I really love. Yeah, it's taking place in a completely imaginary world, but the all of the lessons therein about society and about power and about love and all these different topics are all contained within there, and they're all real world topics. You can, you know, and so I always try to find that real, like my voice teacher, no matter how outlandish, crazy, weird this world is, I'm always trying to find the human being inside of that.

Neil: And because that's again, again, that's that's what I'm relating to on a technical, creative inspiration level. And I'm filtering that through. It's this is this is like one on one. It's the as if you're in that situation, regardless of whether it's because you got to beat the dragon. We all in our lives have to beat that dragon at some point or another, and we all go into that being like, I can't beat dragons. Are you absurd? That's that's you know, this is all this leads me to think of this thing I always talk about like this. I think this is a topic that has been well trod. This is not unique to me about about imposter syndrome. And I think this might be generational. I, you know, maybe not, or maybe our or maybe our parents generation just never talked about it or didn't have the means to talk about it. But I'm a big believer in weaponizing my imposter syndrome to make it be that no matter what I've done, no matter how many books, whatever what it is, whatever whatever other things, I'm always kind of thinking like, man, I'm not that great. I'm always kind of thinking I'm confident in my abilities. At the same time, I can recognize that I've worked hard, but at the same time, I would always really rather be coming from a place of like, ah, yeah, that wasn't great.

Neil: I could do I need to do better? Or what am I doing here? How did I, you know, I'd always rather come from that position because I think that always keeps me. This is the weaponization of it. That always keeps me trying to work harder to improve and to be listening work that I did a year ago and be like, ah, yeah, okay, I can see there's some parts of that that I really like this, this and this. However, that needs to change and never just be it, never be sitting back on those things, but always looking to be improving and without being self-deprecating about it, while being intensely critical of myself at the same time. You know, it's it's it's a weird, contradictory blend sometimes, but it's it's part of what I found. Work works works for me to always be endeavoring to do more, work harder, better. Not just harder, but also better. And and to try to make the whole thing more sustainable in a way that's like, get over yourself, take the gig. You don't love the book, but that's fine. You're going to find you're going to find that literary fiction element in there, that in chapter four that you're going to really love. And that's going to be the reason why you love doing this book. You're going to find a voice in there that maybe isn't something that the author necessarily intended, but is a suggestion that you made.

Neil: And it led to a great collaboration that in book four, will will be written in and book five will be written in. And so because you have that creative collaboration with that author who you met on discord or whatever, you know, you're in a position to do that. So, those opportunities that would, you know, not necessarily be like, that would come along and be like, okay, you know, this this is just fine. But, you know, this is going to be a sustainable this is going to add to my sustainability. I'm going to find the thing in there that is going to give me some degree of artistic satisfaction, but it also is going to allow me to, to complete the gig satisfactorily and, and hopefully make it successful enough that the author has the funds to do book four, book five, book six, you know, sometimes the or to fund at least the audio book not to write the book, but to at least have the again, because it's an independent, it's usually coming from the author itself. So they need to feel successful along with me. The book needs to be successful enough to justify book five, book six, book seven, book 15, you know, and so forth for sure.

Jennifer: Yeah, that reframing of how you're thinking about a project creatively so that you can find what does creatively fulfill you, is a very powerful mindset, I find.

Neil: It's the same mindset that's like, you get in early in the morning and you're like, ah, I'm not, I'm not. My head's not here today. Sometimes it is good. I, you know, to be like, you know what, I'm going to take an hour and I'll come back. But we don't sometimes have the luxury of that in our lives. And so that that same finding a place to either physically warm up or mentally warm up in it to be like, you know what? I don't have a choice. I need to get this done today. I'm going to make it happen. I'm not going to phone it in. I'm not going to do it on automatic. I'm going to dip into something, whether it's technical or personal or inspirational, in order to make it happen is a necessary part of what we do, especially for audiobook, because we have to be producing all the time, all the time, in order to have a lined up kind of schedule that makes sense sustainably. We can sometimes take an hour off or even half a day off. I've certainly done that many times, but more, more often than that, I have to be like, no, I'm going to make this work. And that's when I turned to my, what I've learned technically in order to if I'm not feeling physically there about what can I what am I, what am I lacking right now? What what aspect of my vocal apparatus do I need to warm up a little bit more? Oh, I can feel my I can feel that my my top register isn't there for my female characters.

Neil: What technique can I go back to? What additional warm up can I do that I know particularly warms up those areas of resonance that I can activate so that I can use that part of me so I can go back into the scene with a little more fluency and a little more ability to make it happen, and kind of get past my own block about this character isn't working today because it's not it's oftentimes it's not this character at this moment isn't working. That's an externalization. It's really like, I'm not making this happen. So what can I reconfigure for the time being in order to hopefully arrive at the place where I can make that happen and not let it not happen to me passively? I'm I'm the, you know, the captain of the ship, as it were. And, if I need to, I need to build a bilge pump in the middle of the day. That's what I'm going to have to do in order to get to the deadline so that I can, you know, finish the book so I can upload it, and then so I can go on vacation, you know, or whatever, you know. Yeah. Or make dinner, whatever, you know, on a given day. As the case may be.

Jennifer: I saw an anecdote recently of Neil Gaiman, and I do not know whether this is accurate or not. It was like sort of one of those memes that you see that Neil Gaiman's rules for himself is that he has a set time, that is his writing time every day. And during that time he doesn't have to write, but he has to be sitting in front of his computer with his writing program, whatever program he uses open on that computer, and he is not allowed to do anything other than be there with With that writing program open on his computer. He can't open anything else up. He can't, you know, get up and go someplace else. And it's that idea of making the inspiration happen by being physically in the space where the inspiration comes.

Neil: I heard a that reminds me of a similar anecdote, and I don't know if this is true or not, but I think Norman Mailer, the writer, there's problematic aspects to him, but whatever. But legend has it that his apartment in New York City, which I think was sold recently, I think it was I saw this sort of follow up to it. He had like a writing loft, and there was a rope ladder or a ladder of some kind up to the writing loft. So every day when he went to write, he had to climb up this ladder, this rickety kind of ladder, to get up into the writing space. And then he would say a similar thing. He would he would be there and then have to take the ladder back down, you know. What I take away from that is that kind of like, it's a precarious process getting to that creative space. But you do it every day, and you make that your practice when you have to. And I think that that's true. I mean, audiobook happens to be an artistic endeavor where we do work and produce every single day. It's not as true for a lot of other creative endeavors. But I always think about and this is something that my grad school teachers always talked about where professional instrumentalists like violinists and the like, and Olympic athletes, that they weren't competing all the time, or nor were they performing, you know, a symphony all the time.

Neil: But violinists play for hours and hours every day. And you know this, for hours. And professional athletes have to work all the time, and they do this amount of work. I'm holding my hands up and giving an amount of space for those listening at home. And this, you know, and this is true for, I think, for theater and a lot of other endeavors where you have rehearsal time and then performance time is a much smaller sliver. I'm drawing my hands together to indicate the much smaller time. For audiobooks, it's the same. It's like it's that same chunk all the time, you know? And so it makes us think that, well, if we're recording for a 7 or 8 hours a day, surely that's enough. You know, and it's a weird inversion because a little sliver of talking with a colleague about how they're setting up their schedule, about some new things that they're trying in terms of keeping an open mind about scheduling or some particular aspect of some vocal technique or some kind of other vocal sustainability practice. That's the small sliver that we use to fill the big chunk. That leads to all sorts of things about like trying to prevent burnout in a different way because we're producing rather than rehearsing.

Neil: But at the same time, it's like, it's a management skill that feeds the engine that you're driving off of in the first place. That is unique to audiobook because we're just we're making product all the time, and it's easy to get lost in that, as being I think that's what lends to burnout a lot of the times, because you don't have that luxury of rehearsing 5 or 6 times with in a consequence free environment. Like you do for theater, for example,  before you show the product where it's incumbent upon us to deliver almost immediately after we do our prep and things like that. You know, it's the that's the that's our marathon. And it's something that I've, I've come to in the way of like making finding that the technical foundation and the creative inspiration to make that kind of mode of practice work on a continuous level has, you know, it's different all the time, you know, and again, this goes to why why there's no one technique that works for you all the time. You need 5 or 6 different sets of technique to turn to a different moments when techniques one through four aren't working for you, you know? But this is the this is why, you know, or I'm trying to expand ones because I've, you know, like like scheduling one, for example, this year is the first time in like maybe 4 or 5 years, I felt that I've finally hit a good balance in terms of workload that is consistent, that is sustainable, but isn't killing myself, and while also taking time for life and for family and for and for other things that feed me, that make that sustainability possible.

Neil: But it took a really long time to arrive there. It took a lot of listening to way that other people were working and seeing. Does that work for me? Does that work for me? Does that work for my scheduling methodology to to arrive at it? But it's part of what feeds me. We this is obviously, in many ways a solo kind of endeavor. But we have a big resource, as are the creatives that are all around us all the time, that have such great ideas about how they're doing it. And not every work. Again, not every practice works for everyone, but plucking out those ones that work for ourselves and adopting them and seeing if they work, and if they do, great. If they don't, great. We'll find some other things. This a is a huge resource that I rely upon as well too.

Jennifer: So I love that. Well, believe it or not, we're actually at our final question. This conversation is just flowed in so many amazing, delightful ways. I can't believe that we need to wrap it up.

Neil: Oh yeah, the River analogy keeps going.

Jennifer: Yes, exactly. But I would love for you to share, Neil, some tip or resource that you use, or a tool that you use in your creative work. That is part of what helps make you awesome at what you do.

Neil: The way I always think about tools is that you are a tool, and to a certain extent, a resource is only useful to you when you've taken the time to learn how to use the tool. For example, like for for for dialect work. There's the IDEA website, the international dialects website. Now that is only a resource. And if you don't know, for those listening, don't know that that is it's just basically a regional database of accents and dialects from different places. And what's the way they set it up is that it's the same phrase, said by all these different people. And within that phrase is contained. It's sort of a nonsense phrase about geese and things like that. It contains all of the phenoms, all of the different kind of composites of that particular region's accent or dialect. Now, if you don't already know what to listen for, if you don't already know, what's that o sound or the OO sound? Okay, that's what they're doing for this accent or what was that? How did they do that consonant? Do they? Is that a glottal t or not? You know, you have to have done that kind of background work in order for that tool to be useful.

Neil: So in one sense, that's a specific tool that I would recommend for people to know. And kind of because I think that's a lot more practical for me on the fly sometimes than like than YouTube Accent challenge videos, which can be more comprehensive and for sense of musicality and are always good to kind of enhance whatever it is. But if I need to do that right quickly, it's trusting in the moment that the work that I have done will be there for me and won't simply vanish. And when I need to apply to apply it in that moment, it'll be there for me. And how productive it'll be or not depends on a lot of other factors, but I guess the tip is to know that if you've worked hard, if you've done the work, if you put in the hours, if you've, you know, you've scraped your knuckles a few times, that's all for a good reason. And it'll, it'll it'll be there for you when you need it to be there. But there's a lot of trust involved in that. And so I guess I'm, I'm kind of circling around it a little bit. But the tip is to trust how hard you've worked and to know that it's all there.

Neil: And sometimes it doesn't come quite as easily. Sometimes the inspiration of it doesn't make that connection. And whether or not you have a technique to bridge that connection or not depends on a lot of other things, but it's all there. That's kind of that's kind of the thing about what we know about our brains and how amazing they are. Everything you've done, it's in there somewhere. And the tip is to find ways for yourself to to access it, or to really define five ways to access it and trust that one of those five will work, will work for you. And whether you supplement that with a website that has a certain amount of information that you can find, or whether it's a friend you're talking to about it who offers a perspective that inspires you or offers you something practical, you'll get there. Trust that you'll get there. And oftentimes that that 75%, that's 75% of the game is is that trust. And allowing that to happen for yourself and allowing that to come, allowing allowing you to do the work to your own satisfaction in order to keep doing the work?

Jennifer: Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, words to live by as a creative. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us, and I cannot wait to hear more of what you have to share at the Thriving Narrators Retreat in August.

Neil: Really looking forward to the thriving. I keep I've been. We'll we'll have a we have a meeting in a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else is doing too, because again, that's like, what's what's what? I love about what we're setting up there is we're giving so many options to to the narrator's participating as well as to each other, you know, and so I want to know what everyone else is teaching and how they're teaching it, because I want to learn. I want to learn from them as well, too. And so, yeah, I'm just I'm looking forward to getting together and spending that time and thank you for having me and give me some space to work on down the river.

Jennifer: Absolutely. It's been a true delight. I really appreciate your time, Neil. Thank you.

Neil: Thank you so much.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I value each and every one of you and so appreciate that you choose to spend your time here with me.  I hope this episode gave you some hope for your own creative journey, and also gave you some practical ideas about how you can foster sustainable creativity in your artistic business. If you found today’s episode helpful and informative, don’t forget to subscribe using your podcast player of choice, so that you’ll always stay aware of future episodes. And I would very much appreciate any ratings and reviews you leave for me. Especially ratings and reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts are super helpful in allowing new listeners to find this creative little corner of the podcast world. And if you have a creative friend or colleague who you think would be interested in today’s episode, or any episode of this podcast, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! A huge thank you today to Neil Hellegers for taking time out of his busy schedule to share his experience and insight, and another huge thank you to my husband Arturo Araya, who handled all the editing of this podcast and made sure it would sound good when you listen to it. If you have any questions or comments for me, or if you’d like more information about the Thriving Narrators Retreat that’s taking place in August 2024 in Cincinnati, visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, where you can learn more about me, the coaching programs I offer, the upcoming retreat, and where you can reach out to me via the contact form. I’d love to hear from you.

The creative decisions you make in your work truly can support and positively influence the business side of your activities, and as you make sustainable business decisions, they can support and positively influence your creativity and your artistic process. As Neil described from his own creative journey, when you allow your creative inspiration to drive you to learn new artistic techniques and then use that information to make sustainable and supportive business decisions, you will drive further creative inspiration. Working in your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot spurs a beautiful cycle of sustainable creativity. I can’t wait to see what you create.