Jason M. Jones

I’ve been trying to do double duty on my book. As I mentioned last week, with the first edit done, I’ve been doing a second one. This involves reading my book aloud into Garage Band and listening to the playback the next day. Because the book is a planned trilogy, I’ve also begun writing the second book during the morning hours with hopes that it won’t take as long as the first. After all, I know the characters now. I’m introducing a few new ones, but I’ve had them planned out for a long time, so hopefully, it’s a matter of rounding them out, which is quicker than developing them from scratch. As of now, I’m six chapters into my recording of the first book, and it’s going well. But I figured I’d pause here a moment to talk about the limitations of reading aloud, or perhaps more accurately, traps that reading aloud may let us fall into. It is, of course, generally agreed on that reading aloud is a decent way to edit work. What becomes evident in listening to your own work are clunky passages, turns of phrase that don’t work, places where your tongue trips over syllables. Obviously, if I didn’t believe this was useful, I wouldn’t be doing it. But there are some dangers in reading aloud.

For one thing, reading aloud doesn’t necessarily help in editing sentence length. Some of the best advice I received back when I started to take writing seriously was to write like I talk. I remember that advice fondly. I’d given a woman I was interested in the first few chapters of a novel I’d written (a novel I’ve mentioned here before), and her first response was that it didn’t sound like me. It was her nice way of saying the prose was stilted. “We can sit here, and you tell me stories of things that have happened to you, and in a few words, you bring to life people I’ve never met so that I feel like I know them. You should write like you talk. You should try to capture that.” And like most good advice, it cut the legs out from under me for a few days, a week or two maybe. It was hard for me to give up on the novel. But I recognized what she meant, and I started to try writing like I talked. Ultimately, it both worked and didn’t, however. You see, here’s the problem with adopting a conversational tone in your prose: run on sentences feel quite natural in conversation, but they don’t necessarily work in fiction. Too many and your reader becomes overburdened, out of breath. Yes, there are masters like Proust who can do it, who can carry a single sentence for six pages, but even then, the reader has to be dedicated to getting it. I’ve heard of students who’ve had to diagram Proust to get at the root of what he’s trying to say. But this is all an aside.

My first efforts after receiving this advice to write like I talk were quite frankly better. My stories had more life in them, they read more easily. And yet, when I brought them to my writing group to have them workshopped, the members of my group often commented on sentence length. The thing was, I was reading the stories aloud, much in the same way I’m currently reading my novel. I’d record them and play them back and they sounded good to me, which is where we come into the potential problems with reading aloud as an editing method: the eye doesn’t seem to process the text the same way the ear does. Now, I’m not a neuroscientist, so I have no idea why this might be from a biological standpoint. I’m only speaking experientially. This came to a head when the group was reviewing my story, “Human Hands,” which was later published in Ascent. “You might want to think about breaking some of these sentences down,” one of my friends said. “Like listen to this…” and she read one aloud. When she finished, she paused and reflected. “Actually that one sounds pretty good out loud.” But her point was made, and again, I grappled with the advice. Maybe, even if the sentences sounded good out loud, they didn’t work when a reader was reading them silently.

So for a while, I stopped editing by reading aloud. I looked at the page and tried to edit based on what the reader would see when they couldn’t hear it. I took a lot of the conversational sentences and broke them down, and my work improved. I don’t think it’s necessary to kill all the run-ons. In certain cases, especially ones where rhythm matters, they might be necessary. The same friend who recently provided edits on one of my stories last week, did a proscriptive rewrite of the opening paragraph (at my request) and hoped I didn’t mind (I didn’t). She mentioned that one of her colleagues had done it for her and she was taking almost every edit, which maybe has its merits. But for me, I have to assess all the changes on their individual merit, since too often when someone goes at your text like this, the cuts lose the rhythm, and oftentimes, when I return to a piece that has lost that rhythm, I’m unable to read it without reinserting that text to give it its rhythm back. Because even if there’s a difference between how the eye processes text and how the ear processes it, how it sounds is incredibly important to me. When I edit now, I’m trying to find the happy medium.