Reading Your Work Aloud

From first-drafting to literary events, reading your work aloud makes all the difference

The crime novelist Mark Billingham is also an actor and he reads his own audio-books; apparently, he doesn’t send his final draft to his editor until he has rehearsed and recorded the audiobook. In working out how it should be read, he also discovers which bits don’t work as well as they should.

I can’t think of a better illustration than this of the value of reading aloud at all stages of the the writing process. So this post is explores why it’s worth cultivating the reading-aloud habit, and how to do it.

Photo by Findaway Voices on Unsplash

Reading Aloud For Editing

When you read ‘in your head’ as the primary school children call it, your mind, knowing the wider context and how the sentence will probably go, will fill in what it thinks will be there: what that word should be, how the next sentence is meant to go. And we all know how wide of the mark predictive text can be - plus, of course, it’s the very essence of AI.

But when you must speak those words aloud, it’s other parts of the mind which must set the body to work, so reading aloud gets you closer to the experience of the reader, who doesn't already know what the words are.

Reading also highlights your animal sense of the aural qualities of language, and that’s something which never entirely leave readers, even when we’re reading print in silence. Writing which reads aloud always read better on the page.

• Meaning into sound: your brain must marshall teeth, tongue, lips, jaw, vocal folds and diaphragm into speaking the meaning. Those parts of the mind don’t predict, they work with what’s actually there, so they’ll alert you when they don’t know what to do:

  • Checking words: When your brain meets a typo or a literal it will say to your reason, ‘Huh? How am I supposed to say that?’.

  • Checking sentences: When your brain meets vocabulary, grammar, syntax or punctuation which doesn’t add up, it won’t know how the stresses, inflections or pauses should go orally, and it’ll let you know. Oddly, reading aloud often works for picking up homophones too.

  • Shape and rhythm: If your prose tends to fall into the same shape and length of sentence too often, this monotony is quickly revealed, because the sentences will all have the same rhythm and inflection. It’ll also show, if your sentences are too messily long, or to boringly consistently short.

  • Punctutation: Punctuation originated as a way of registering in writing how a sentence would have been spoken to make its meaning clear, in the absence of the speaker. As ‘reading in your head’ developed in the 17th century (yes, that recently), punctuation marks came to have a slightly separate life and set of rules for on-the-page sentences. But your brain-mouth-tongue system will often help you choose which punctuation mark should go where.

  • Repeats: Your aural memory registers what you’ve just read aloud: if you over-use a particularly noticeable word, use the same metaphor two pages running, or the same phrase very often throughout the book, your memory will alert you, even if your eye-reading didn’t.

  • Dialogue: If your characters’ voices are unconvincingly written the clunkiness will be more obvious when you voice them. If they're poorly differentiated, they'll all sound the same. For more on dialogue, click here.

  • Contractions: In both dialogue and narrative, you can’t beat reading aloud to discover when to contract do not into don’t and would have into would’ve, and when to let them stand.

  • Tongue-twisters: If you struggle to get your tongue round a sentence, chances are your reader’s mind will struggle too. Having said that, I’ve sometimes found that a sentence which works really well on the page, doesn't work when I’m reading at an event, and vice versa. I’ll edit it for events, just as I’d edit other aspects. But even when I could change the print version - say for the paperback - I’ll probably let it stand. Horses for courses.

• Speed: Reading aloud, you can’t skim, as your eye so easily can with a text that you know by heart, and may be thoroughly fed up with. To communicate it at a normal, readerly pace, you have to read what’s actually there.

• Getting someone to read your work to you can help you to experience it from the outside.

  • If your reader-aloud is human, they may give you useful feedback

  • Some writers I know even use the read-aloud facility of their word-processor though I find this lowest-common-denominator AI-driven reading tells me nothing useful.

  • What someone else reading doesn’t do is put your words through the ultimate mental-physiological stress-test of you reading it yourself.

  • Some writers record their own reading-aloud and listen back, again for the getting-outside thing, which could be worth trying, though when the words are so familiar, personally I find my mind wanders.

Reading Aloud As Performance

These days there are lots of places and reasons to find yourself reading your work aloud, so here are my thoughts about each. There’s a fuller post about this in the archive (£), so this is the condensed version

• Live event: bookshop or other literary events, festival platform, Zoom reading or launch. Keep each section short: four or five minutes at the max (there’s a reason parents read to children when they want them to settle for sleep!); for a whole forty minutes, just link them together with some chat and explanation.

• Social media: think clips rather than extracts. Plot doesn’t matter, atmosphere and excitement do. It’s more like a book trailer than an actual experience of the book.

• Recording: audio on Substack, podcasts, audiobooks. The audience is in control, so you can keep going, but remember they’re very likely to be doing something else as well. Unless this is an unabridged audiobook, in editing you may want to sacrifice colour for story, to keep them riveted.

Preparation for Reading

• Pick sections which have some dynamism, and where things have changed by the end.

• Edit:

  • cut things which are relevant to the larger story, but not to this scene.

  • cut a character who’s only there for one, irrelevant line.

  • cut dialogue if you don’t feel comfortable doing that accent.

  • tweak sentences which turn out to read well on the page, but not aloud. They do happen.

• Write and rehearse a two sentence, max, intro which explains what the listener needs to know to get the main point of the scene. They do know this is only an extract, and you’d be surprised what they’re not bothered about not understanding.

• Rehearse aloud, and mark up anything that you might not remember to do on the day:

  • tone and pace - and make sure you vary it to match the story

  • speed (nerves make most of us read too fast, especially in a big room or one with a boomy acoustic)

  • what kind of voice each speaker has, and their mood at the moment

  • any tricky pronunciations

• Work out what you want to read from.

  • Reading visibly from the actual book reminds the audience that it’s available to boy.

  • E-readers are a neat solution, and may be better than loose pages when there’s no lectern, but…

  • …there’s many a dead battery between home and audience and tripping over your own charging cable is not a good look on a platform.

  • There’s a lot to be said for hard-copy printout Plan B. Plan C can be having the same as a Dropbox file on your phone that you may be able to last-minute email to the organiser for them to print out.

At the Event

• Hide in the toilets and do some calming, lung-loosening breathing, then loosen your face and mouth muscles: hum, blow raspberries, do some tongue-twisters. This is a Voice, by Jeremy Fisher and Gillyanne Keyes, is a goldmine of information and exercises.

• Keep hydrated and sober, and eat to keep your blood sugar stable: performing is a body thing.

• Pour your water before you start.

• The more you can look up when reading, and make eye-contact with the audience, the better: rehearsing your head off is key to this, but having paper in the hand helps.

• Pro actors swear by bananas for reading audiobooks because they don’t dry your mouth or make it water; they also mark the text up like a musical score and learn to turn pages silently, or use a tablet). If you want to do your own audiobooks, or develop a podcast, there are plenty of experienced acting teachers who can help.

• Remember you’re not a professional actor, and you’re not trying to transmit theatrical magic. There’s a reason that many poets are not keen on how some actors read poetry, because actors are used to working hard to create that magic, whereas good poetry and prose are written to be self-sufficient: with these, the reader needs only to be a good, clear channel for transmitting those self-sufficient words - and when it’s you reading your prose or poetry, the extra authenticity and immediacy more than makes up for any imperfections.

Good luck! And enjoy it - readings are one of the few times we prose writers get to have a living, breathing audience responding directly to us.