READING ALOUD HELPS catch those pesky typos and shifts in verb tense. That’s obvious. What if there’s a deeper meaning to crooning your fiction across the dining room table? I thought I would dig a little deeper and explain why I like to read my drafts aloud.
The word “writing” for me regarding fiction often has two meanings in terms of development of the story. One is simply the scribbling and organization of thoughts; that is, the characters, plot, narrative, organizational arcs, dialogue and thoughts of the writer. The other is the saying of what happened, in oral tradition, the further development of the story that can take place via speaking early drafts of prose aloud.
In one sense, the scribbling portion is the memory of things said and done via our character or characters’ recollections. It functions as Carl Becker once said history relates the past, as “the artificial extension of the social memory.”
This memory of everything said and done does not recall all of the experiences of our characters. It is a selective reconstruction of our characters lives. In the case of the novel I’ve written recently, Big Spoon, Little Spoon, it is a purposely imperfect rebuilding of the past (we can never capture all of our characters’ pasts though we need to be aware of them in great detail), and similar to historian Bernard Bailyn’s discussion in On the Teaching & Writing of History (1994) serves to “enlarge our own, personal experience and to orient contemporary issues, values, goals and behavior.”
After all, Big Spoon, Little Spoon is little more than a commentary on social ills in western contemporary culture through an interpretation via a fabricated history of the common child of California’s homeless river culture.
We need to understand the relationship between our characters’ reality of what happened—what’s beyond the story itself in the writer’s mind (all past events, circumstances and thoughts)—and what is actually represented in a verisimilitude, as Bailyn says about good history, the “closeness to fact of what is written about them [past actualities]. In other words, the bits and pieces we do tell of our narrator’s world must represent truth.
Don’t ever forget your characters have a past, and that your story, even if written in the present is a past recounted.
So what happens when we read aloud? Are we simply reminding ourselves of the truths our stories must represent? It’s far more complex. Sure, the saying of what happened helps us to hear our characters and our story speak. If the writing is the “artificial extension of the social memory” of our character, then reading aloud is our characters in action, the living and breathing of our story, where we can make characters come to life, theatrically, vividly. We must remind ourselves that our stories matter through reading aloud.
Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound . . . the reader has become deaf and blind to the world, to the passing crowds, to the chalky flesh-coloured facades of the buildings. Nobody seems to notice a concentrating reader: withdrawn, intent, the reader becomes commonplace. To Augustine, however, such reading manners seemed aufficiently strange for him to note them in his Confessions. The implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West.
Manguel goes on to say, “Augustine mused, ‘that if he read out loud, a difficult passage by the author he was reading would raise a question in the mind of an attentive listener, and he would then have to explain what it meant or even argue about some of the more abstruse points.’”
And isn’t this what the writer wants? To argue one’s own story? To rationalize, to clarify, to discover incomprehensible logic. No one wants an abstruse piece of fiction. Rather, we want stories so vibrant that readers emotionally react by turning pages.
Is there emotion in your voice? Are your characters coming to life? Or are you bored reading your own story?
If you’re finding more joy in silent readings of your stories you may never reach the next level. Your story may never lose its awkward verbiage. It may never learn to walk. In fact, it may never learn how to sing.
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Dear Nicolas,
I agree totally. My first books were read to me in school libraries filled with faded red bean-bags and dusty wood card-catalogues, and the sounds floated over the heads of my blonde and blued eyed, so diferent from my own, classmates and filled me with wonder; but I fear the social media may kill the spoken word by overexposing it, reducing it to 140 strokes of delusive aspirations.
I’m new to twitter and the effect it has on me, for now, is awe mixed with alarm: either everyone writes, or all aspiring writers, and only aspiring writers, twitter.
Mati
sorry missed an H: Nicholas!