For the last two days I have been reading my draft novel aloud. It was not at all what I intended when I planned this week’s work. But I realised just yesterday that it might be a good idea.

So what happened yesterday? Well I went to Oxford to have lunch with two writer friends. That meant about an hour on the train. It’s not long enough to open my laptop and continue with editing my present ms. So I thought I would take a casual look at an ancestor draft.

This was more out of curiosity than anything else. I have been writing this book for some years now, as regular readers of this blog will probably have guessed.

I settled into my seat, opened my Kindle and began to read, as if it were a book by somebody else. It worked like a dream.

An Old Trick Remembered

And no, I wasn’t reading aloud on the train. It was very, very crowded, with people standing all the way from London to Oxford. I think someone would have lynched me.

But just reading silently showed me how very uneven it was. There were several long runs where I slipped from page to page without even noticing. (I met my friends beaming about that, I can tell you.) But when I didn’t — oh dear! Something would throw me out of the story and I would stare at the screen, baffled as to what had tripped me up.

Image by Chen from Pixabay

I pulled out my trusty notebook, without which I never travel, and made a note of the details for further consideration. The lunch was very jolly, a real mood changer, after my increasing despair over my slow editorial plod through the present book. It took me back to happier days, when writing was fun and… and…

… and I would read the stuff out loud all the time.

I often voiced my characters aloud while they were arguing, or trying to negotiate. And when it came to editing, I would regularly read narrative passages aloud. I even recorded them sometimes. How on earth had I forgotten that?

The moment I got home, I opened the current draft and began read aloud.

From Page to Speech

Of course, I was out of practice. I stumbled a lot. And felt very self-conscious. So self-conscious, indeed, that I even did an Internet Search for advice on reading your novel aloud.

The most helpful one I found was by Jane Messer, mostly about preparing to do a reading in public. Anyone considering doing just that may find it really helpful.

She had me at the first paragraph. “We cringe at the thought of it, of having to speak and hear our own work.”

Um — yes. Even in the privacy of my own study, with nobody else around except a supremely bored cat. It felt wrong somehow, like asking for a book above a whisper in a library. Or shouting in church.

And then, metaphorically speaking, I heard my lunch companions. “Oh for God’s sake, woman. Brace up!”

Gulp. It took a bit of time and rather a lot of tea, and I couldn’t face recording myself. But in the end I did it.

Reading My Book Aloud Too Fast

One of the reasons I stopped reading aloud, I think, is that it is very time-consuming. As the book got more dense, and more characters demanded that their story got an airing too, my writing process became more feverish.

Indeed, more than once I speeded up so much I just gave up and went back to skim reading on the page.

Image by Jakub Luksch from Pixabay

This time I had to slow myself down and then pace myself. Again, Jane Messer’s advice was invaluable. “The recommended reading speed for audio book narration is 150-160 words per minute. In practice, this means that a 12-point font, double-spaced A4 page of narrative will take about 2 minutes to read aloud.”

That, I thought, should be doable. Using a kitchen timer and a lot of self-control, it was.

I’ve got used to it now, I think, though time will tell whether that pace has stuck. And goodness, it has been revealing.

Reading My Book Aloud Gives Me…

… an amazing amount of reassurance. Truly. This has been a real surprise to me and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for it. When the words flow, they’re not just easy, they’re a positive pleasure to read aloud.

I’ve even made myself laugh a couple of times. Woo hoo!

… a sense of the shape of a scene or a series of scenes as a whole. Reading aloud shows me if, for example, tension is building steadily and the pace accelerates to a climax. It can be easy to miss this when you’re editing the micro level.

Reading My Book Aloud Reveals…

… mistakes! Put in the wrong name for a character? The ear picks that up so much more quickly than the eye. Who knows why?

… what’s boring – like all the stuff you, the author, needed to be certain about to make the plot feasible but will make the reader’s eyes glaze over. (Says the woman who’s been looking for train timetables between Freiburg and Stuttgart in 1937. Yes, it was not only boring but also irrelevant. It didn’t matter to the plot what time the character arrived.)

… what’s missing. “With one bound Jack was free” won’t do. Some readers will start to argue that he was handcuffed to a radiator and, even if he managed to pull it off the wall, it would have made a hell of a noise and brought in hostile reinforcements.

… disconcerting shifts in Points of View – in 1st person narrative as well as 3rd person. I once wrote a short story in which the cheery female narrator was startled by the expression on the face of a man who was still in the room upstairs.

Image by squarefrog from Pixabay

… consistent character in dialogue. This is a big one. Sometimes it can affect the whole plot.

Several times I have started off by saying, “he wouldn’t say that,” just because I thought it felt wrong. Eventually, of course, I realised that he wouldn’t say OR do the thing it preceded, and half my plot fell apart.

The first it time happened, it was less than a week before my deadline and seriously scary. But, even though it cost me a couple of really late nights, I was much better off reshaping the plot before my editor got her hands on it.

Detective Super-Nasty doesn’t take in next door’s washing when it’s started to rain, even though he would have found the faint remains of bloodstains, if he had. The Editor in question was a lovely woman. But she would never have let me forget that.

Sophie