Category: Quick Note

Thoughts on Fiction, Read Aloud

Reading to my Kids

The first time I started regularly reading books aloud in adulthood was shortly after my first son was born. Books for the under-three crowd aren’t exactly high literature, but that’s okay. Babies aren’t discerning consumers, and I wasn’t an amazing narrator.

Still, it was clearly valuable. My oldest could turn the pages and recite his favorite books from memory long before he could actually read any words. All of our children have become voracious readers, and that literacy is an asset in school and life. Plus…you know…it’s fun to read.

My oldest child is now a high schooler, and no longer interested in me reading aloud to him. My youngest is also losing interest, although he still listens occasionally, when we find a book that piques his interest. For now, my middle child is the one who asks me to read to her. She’s a smart middle-schooler, and we mostly read adult sci-fi novels. It’s a gift to be able to share the books that I enjoyed at that age, and revisit them through her eyes.

I know those days are numbered. I suppose I’ll miss it when I no longer have someone asking me to read to them.

Reading fiction aloud for 30-60 minutes most evenings has made me much better at it. I know to shift my tone to better separate external and internal dialogue. I know to adjust my voice to differentiate between two characters in conversation. I know how much space is needed to create a scene break. Sometimes I even know when I’ve gone too far with the bad accents and silly voices.

I’m no professional narrator, but I’ve improved through 15 years of practice.

Audiobooks

I recently made a conscious effort to start “reading” audiobooks. They’re going through something of a renaissance. Enabled by the same streaming and on-demand technology that has upended movies and radio, audiobooks have also helped fill a sizable hole in publisher profits left by the rise of e-books and precipitous decline of physical (and especially hardcover) sales.

Audiobooks also happen to fit well into our current culture, where it often feels hard to sit down and dedicate time to reading, but there are still plenty of opportunities to connect a phone to the car radio during commutes, or put something on the headphones while doing laundry or mowing.

For me, including audiobooks in my reading diet has at least doubled the number of pages I consume. Maybe more. It has given me more opportunities to try new authors without adding to my overfull bookshelves.

I’ve also been slowly noticing the ways that listening to a story alters the way I perceive it. I have a harder time keeping track of different characters and remembering their names. It’s much harder to skip back a chapter and reread something for context.

Stories, Spoken

When humanity was young, storytellers were part historian, part wizard, part priest. Stories were a way for us to make sense of a confusing and  malevolent world, to preserve knowledge and wisdom, and to build a shared worldview. For thousands of years, all stories were spoken.

Even in modern times, when the world is more literate than it has ever been before; even as a writer who most values the written word, there is clearly some special power in a story, spoken aloud.

Writing Advice

Some oft-quoted advice for writers suggests the value in reading your work in progress out loud.

“It will help you find the parts of your prose that sound off.”

“It will help you hear the rhythm of your words.”

“It will help you find your characters’ voices.”

“It will help you find your own voice.”

Like most writing advice, I think these pearls of wisdom will work well for some and not for others.

My opinion these days is considerably broader. As a writer, I think there’s value in consuming many kinds of stories in many different forms and formats, just as there’s value in writing drabbles, flash, novellas, novels, and series, composed by pen or typewriter or computer, or even dictation.

I think writing fiction is an activity where generalists and jacks of all trades excel. We open ourselves up to the world and gather as much as we can, so we can sift it for notes of truth to sprinkle on the page.

And I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least dabble in the original medium of stories, the only one that has persisted since before humans were recognizable as human: the spoken word.

What do you Want from Writing? — Quick Note

I’ve been reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and I was struck by one of his anecdotes. He had secured a limited edition 500-book print run of a novelette with a small press. To promote the release, he arranged an interview with Wired.com, and a quick blurb on BoingBoing.com. To get these, he worked with the publisher to provide a link to a free download of the same story in PDF—a link that would eventually be clicked 20,000 times.

VanderMeer’s description of the back-and-forth of promoting his story wasn’t what surprised me, it was my own reaction to it. My first thought was that it was a bit of a waste. Surely some of those people downloading the story would have bought a physical copy, right?

He was pleased with this result, at least partly because it led to other opportunities down the road. But I had to interrogate my own reaction. Why did the free download strike me, at least initially, as a bad idea?

The answer, of course, has to do with money. My thought was that this is a fairly successful professional author. Why give work away? The actual answer is complex: the high number of downloads led to later opportunities, the promotion helped sell out the print run, and the market for novelette-length work is very limited (and was even more so ten or fifteen years ago when this occurred.) However, my own reaction made me wonder if I’ve become overly-fixated on getting paid as a measure of the value of writing.

Like many amateur authors, I’ve spent years wondering what it would take to be able to write as a full-time job. Writing is a competitive field, and on the whole, not well-paid. It’s no surprise that so many of us become laser focused on seeking any opportunities we can find. But is that really why we’re writing? Does getting paid do us any good if it becomes the reason to write?

I realize these are not new questions. Artists have always struggled to find balance between art and commerce, and that isn’t getting any easier in a world hell-bent on commodifying art into “content.”

It’s good to sit down every once in a while and think about priorities. Is it better to be paid, or be more widely-read? Is it better to be published, or to improve your craft? Better to write in the format that has a market and a readership, or in the format that interests you? Are you motivated by making the stories you love, or the ones someone else wants to read?

In short, what do you want from your writing?