There is a big difference between an art and the life that it brings its creator.
If you start learning VO in a classroom setting you learn the art in isolation. You don’t yet bother yourself considering the life that such a career might bring you.
It’s an understandable deficit of classroom or academic training, where you are sheltered from outside distractions and obligations so you can focus on gaining competency of your art. You learn in a walled garden.
But what you can’t learn in a class is how this art lives in the world- the “lifestyle,” the ups and downs, the trade offs and pot holes, the people you are surrounded by (or have to put up with), the advantages or disadvantages, the characteristic challenges that this career might bring.
I think back on my decades-long learning adventure of becoming a voice actor. As I learned how to act, I also learned about the various forms a performer’s could take- and the life that brought.
I remember back when I was doing standup and there was a headliner who killed with his every set. But every set he performed to perfection exactly as his previous set without variation of nuance in his delivery. Before going on to his second Friday night performance, I remember him almost beside himself lamenting, “If was anything I could do- anything– instead of going back out on that stage and do that set again, I’d do it!” Then he strolled out and killed the audience again with another perfect set. Such an odd misery to be trapped in, I thought. A perfect cage of his own making.
I also remember another road comic displaying to me proudly how he lived out of his suitcase in his car’s trunk as he drove around America from gig to gig. Here were his clothes, his pills, his toothbrush…
It occurred to me that, while I liked doing stand up, and I learned a lot from it, that the life of a standup headliner- the highest level of stand up as far as creative status and money- didn’t really appeal to me. I realized standup comedy wasn’t an end station for me, it was a stepping stone.
I pivoted from standup and went on to try other forms of performing, zig zagging my way experimentally, eventually into a career in voice acting- a profession whose craft and lifestyle both suited me quite well. It was a process of discovery and learning and adjusting that lasted about ten years after I graduated.
The thing I wanted to point out here is that few beginners have a clear idea of the life that attends the activity they aspire to, the price of effort one must pay as well as the uncertainty of an actor’s life. You may have a fantasy of what it’s like to do the thing. But you may be surprised to find what kind of life that expertise brings with it.
Whether you’re training to be an actor or doctor or car mechanic- there is a life that the mastered activity brings with it, which may require its own acclimation and, in the end, may or may not appeal to you. It might be a suit that looks nice but doesn’t fit you.
You may want to do the thing. You may love it. But do you want to live that life?
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