She’s Write About That – How Does That Sound? (Vol III)

Hello, everyone and welcome to the third installment of She’s Write About That, a weekly blog where Jennifer Hudock and I offer two unique views on the same writing topic. This week we’re discussing the merits of hearing your work out loud.

As most of you know, I am a little beyond the halfway point in the podcast of my novel Trapping a Duchess, a near hundred-thousand word historical romance that centers around a family of aristocrats in Regency-era England.  When I sat down to write TAD, I had no expectations other than I would end up with a completed work that would be an example of the type of romance I – and my co-worker Angie – would enjoy reading.

That was it.

Once completed, I handed it off to my first readers (and a couple of family members and friends) and began fleshing out Novel 2.0.  Six months later, I needed to reference TAD for a character/plot point for Novel 2.0, read a few chapters and realized something:  I had grown as a writer.  Now, I know most of you are staring at this blog with That Look on your faces, the word DUH! forming on your lips (if you haven’t already said it).  After all, the phrase practice makes perfect wasn’t born for nothing.  But I hadn’t just grown, I had grown in leaps and bounds.  And I realized that the passing of time had afforded me an opportunity to fix TAD’s problem parts.

But where to begin?  I had already read and re-read the novel so many times that I couldn’t see the forest from the trees.  I decided to post it on my blog and tossed the idea out into the Twitterverse, where exists a group of unbiased folks who have no problem saying “that is the dumbest idea ever” and meaning it with as much love as a family member.  What came back, though, was an even better suggestion:  Podcasting it.

Now, I have to tell you that, in this age of zombies and horror novels, the thought of podcasting an historical romance sounded as crazy to me as finding a billboard and broadcasting it one line at a time via those little orange dots.  Of course, once the seed was planted, there was nothing I could do to stop it and in the end, I figured screw it…I’m gonna do it! I figured if historical romance wasn’t people’s thang, then they didn’t have to listen.

Which brings us to the topic at hand:  Hearing your story out loud.

Podcasting has been a phenomenal tool for me, not only because I get to take another pass at a story I love (one chapter at a time, which has been WONDERFUL), but it forces me to hear the story I’ve written. To wit…

Point The First:  The accuracy and readability of your work’s narrative language.  TAD’s historical setting demands that scenes and the movement therein be described using words and phrases that fit the time period.  This seems plain enough, yet even after several re-reads and edits, I still find an occasional rogue description completely at odds with the setting. After all, since cars had not yet been invented, it hardly seems fitting to use the stench of an exhaust pipe to relay my character’s reaction to a caustic smell.  Yet that was exactly one of those things I found when recording a recent episode.  How did I miss it?  Easy…the lobes of the brain used to process information do quite a bit of “filling in” when reading silently.  The eyes send the word “singing” to the brain, which matches it with the word “sing” (often dropping the suffixes).  Since an additional lobe (where lives Broca’s Area) is accessed when reading aloud, so is the meaning reconsidered and/or reinforced.  Errors such as “he saw” versus “he was” (neither of which would be caught by the spell or grammar check function in your word processing software) are made obvious to you, the writer who likely has most of his/her novel memorized.  Read your work out loud…listen to what you’re relaying and make sure it flows and makes sense.

Point The Second:  Development of character growth and transitory movement.  It’s amazing the nuances of a character that can be missed with only silent reading.  Imagine this:  your character is a reticent sort, quite uncommunicative and stingy with her dialogue.  When she does speak, her words are sparse and rushed.  Yet every time she opens her mouth, she’s angry and yelling.  Yes, there is a chance that she’s just an angry, bitter pill that never has anything nice to say, but it’s more likely that there’s a different word that can be used to describe her vocal entrance.  When reading my work aloud, I have run across everything from bizarre comparisons to movement that is not only unnatural but downright impossible.  It is so, so easy as writers to want to choose a typical cluster of words in an effort to move a character from a place of inaction to one of action.  But hearing these transitory phrases out loud offers an opportunity to experience these movements in a different light.  You never know…you might even find your characters doing something completely different – and far more interesting – than what you had them do originally.

Point The Last:  Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.  The language we use to describe movement is very different from the way we speak.  “John made the long walk to the store” is a narrative describing what John did.  But when two people begin to discuss John’s antics, it is doubtful that the answer to the question “where’s John?” would contain a similar string of words.  Hearing your dialogue out loud can work wonders in making it seem more natural.  For TAD, the nature of the setting wants for proper, often formal, presentation.  As a result, I find that narrative formality sneaking into the exchanges between characters, causing the dialogue to ring false.  Additionally, I have found that hearing all the “he said, she saids” and other extraneous words provides the perfect opportunity to streamline, which is the quickest way to get from the stuff to the good stuff. 

The bottom line is that reading your work aloud can offer amazing insight into every aspect of perfecting the story you are trying to tell.  And now you have another tool to add to your box of writing goodies:  Think it, love it, write it, hear it. Go, go, go!

But don’t just take my word for it…check out what Jennifer Hudock has to say, because you can bet your bippy that She’s Write About That!