Work in Progress
Read Your Work Out Loud
The last thing I do before I send anything out on submission is to read it out loud to myself—which is what I’m doing now with my novel. I’m consistently surprised by the magic that happens when I do this. I can read a page twenty times in my head and it will seem perfect to me. Then I read it out loud once, and every error jumps out.
By errors, I don’t just mean typos or missing words. Phrases that show up in adjacent paragraphs, things I realize I’ve already said before, things that don’t make sense either emotionally or logistically. I can be perfectly happy with a chapter until I read it out loud and suddenly discover… I’m bored. My eye might convince me that not a single word I’ve written is superfluous, but my ear will beg to differ and will find all sorts of places to cut.
The first person to suggest that I do this was the wonderful editor I had at Thistledown Press for my first novel (she is now the publisher).
“You mean read the whole novel?” I said, aghast. “Out loud?”
“Yes.”
Of course it makes sense to read dialogue out loud. How can you really tell if the dialogue you’ve written is conversational until you hear it as conversation? The rhythm of the words, the flow of speech.
But I balked at the idea of reading my whole novel out loud. It would take too long. As I was soon to discover, that’s part of the point. Reading aloud forces you to slow down. It’s time well spent, and it’s not only effective for dialogue; it works for everything.
You can use Word to read your document back to you, but I prefer to do the job myself. While Word won’t accidentally fill in what isn’t on the page, the voices are robotic and completely bungle the rhythm of the prose.
Why this Technique Works
Our brains are tricksy, as Gollum would say, and either fill in what they expect to see or skip over what shouldn’t be there (such as repeated words). This is one of the many reasons why having someone else review your work before you send it anywhere is a good idea: they don’t have those expectations. They can only process what’s on the page. It’s amazing how often we writers think we’ve put things into our stories that in fact exist only in our head.
Reading aloud adds yet another level of feedback. Every time I do it, I expect to find nothing. That never happens.
Personal Work in Progress: Meditation
Why is this so hard? I know meditation is a good thing, and I know it makes me feel better when I do it every day, and yet… getting there on a regular basis has been something of a feat.
After my summer at McLoughlin Gardens where I meditated consistently, I realized something important: I like being outside when I meditate. So, in the spirit of James Clear’s strategy—if you want to create a new habit, make it attractive—I’ve started going outside to meditate. So far, it’s working.
There is one obvious obstacle to this plan: the weather. My hope is that by the time the rain returns, I will be so firmly entrenched in this new habit that I won’t mind taking it indoors.
That remains to be seen.
What I’m working on (besides the novel): My colleague and co-author David Griffin Brown and I are putting together two books for mystery writers. For a preview of some of the things we’re working on, you can check out this post.
Worth listening to: Mel Robbins’s inspirational chat with Wallace Peeples. That conversation is the reason you’re reading this newsletter.
Worth reading: Atomic Habits, by James Clear. Boy, am I ever late to the party on this one. I can’t believe it took me so long to pick up this book. In fact, I’m now onto my second read, since as soon as I finished it the first time, I immediately turned back to Page 1 and started again.