Reading Out Loud

"Ah-hoo! Werewolves of London," Warren Zevon- Werewolves of London

J.R.R. Tolkien read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy out loud to C.S. Lewis before it was published. I don't have a C.S. Lewis to read to, but one of the biggest revelations of my last year has been the utterly inimitable experience of reading my novel out loud to people, and what that means for my writing.

Put shortly: you really have to stand behind what you write when you read it to someone's face. The little voice in your head (which I've heard called the Inner Editor elsewhere on the blogosphere, and which, for the record, I am a fan of) that tells you when something is wrong gets a lot louder when your precious self-esteem is at stake. It's easy to tell yourself "Oh, that's okay, I'll come back and fix it later," when you're reading to yourself, even out loud. It's a lot harder to say that to a friend or a significant other. There have been a couple of chapters which I have had to stop reading and just say, "Okay, I thought this was ready for you, but it's not. Sorry. Can we try again tomorrow?" And that's a good thing.

You also get an amazing chance to gauge which parts of your story are interesting and which are boring. If you're reading to a room of people, you feel the atmosphere change. When it's good, they're on the edge of their seats, their eyes are wide, they're leaning forward, they get upset if you pause to fix a typo, and it feels great. When it's bad, they're looking around the room, checking their watches, yawning, fidgeting, and it doesn't really hurt so much as tell you, "Okay, this spot right here. This paragraph, this sentence, this word, is where I lost them," which is incredible. If you're only reading to an audience of one it's even easier (especially if that one is someone who'll snuggle up close to you while you read).

So once you're ready to edit your story, find people to read out loud to, no matter who they are. It's an invaluable tool that I think writers often skip nowadays in favor of the workshop approach, and that's a sad thing.