Reading Aloud

Confession: The faults I hate most in others are the ones I see in myself.

Reading:

• Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Cora and the Sea"

I've fallen in love with audiobooks over the last eight years. It all started when I found myself driving for six hours a week, and the radio began to wear on me. I had only a portable tape player, but it was enough to get my started.

Now, more recently, I've discovered the joys of the iPod and the free audiobook rentals at the local library. It didn't take long to put two and two together.

I love hearing stories read aloud. That's something I enjoyed as a child. It's almost as if prose on a page is like clothes on a hangar. Reading the words silently is like visualizing those clothes on a person, but hearing a story read aloud is like seeing those clothes being modeled.

On the one hand, the model could be good or bad, and the clothes could suffer. On the other hand, halfway decent clothes can be made to look incredible.

I guess the trick is to write so that the vocal interpretation is kind of "built in" to the words themselves, in rhythm and cadence, so the silent reader can hear them in his head, and the vocal reader can read at best advantage.

Audiobooks

Confession: Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell ranks as one of my favorite books. I have never read it, only listened to the unabridged audiobook. Three times.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

Just the other day, I recorded a reading of one of my stories for the first time. As long as I've been messing around with audio, you'd have thought I'd have done it before now, but there it is. I recorded it, acted it out as best I could, and listened to it several times. It wasn't that bad.

The story I read was "Cora and the Sea," which presented several challenges. First, it is a first person POV from a woman's perspective, and I never know quite how much to act up the feminine side. Let me rephrase that. Whenever I'm reading aloud and I get to a woman's part, I do try to alter the tone of my voice to indicate the gender difference, not in a high pitched, squeaky, Mickey Mouse way, but more in the... well, I don't quite know how to describe it. But I've heard other male readers do the same thing in the same situation, so I'm not alone.

What I find myself doing is emphasizing the difference more in dialogue, even though the narration is from the same character's POV. But I used the same voice, if that makes any sense. Pretty much I'm just doing my best to echo that character's voice in my head, in whatever way I can.

After completing the spoken version of the first story, I did the same with "Black Pudding," only this time in a British accent. Now let me say this--my British accent is fucking awesome, and I've been told it sounds authentic by actual Brits who would have loved to find one more reason to ridicule me. So I'm confident it doesn't suck.

But there I was, trying to use several different voices in the context of that one accent! The POV character was a woman again, but there were two other female characters (although one had only one line) and two male characters. I gave each his or her own voice. And the thing is, I don't know how, except to say that those are the voices that I heard in my head as I was writing.

And I think that's why I like the idea of audiobooks read by the author. Some authors have the ability with voices

I'm arrogant enough to think I do

and some don't, but they all know what the characters were supposed to sound like. The great ones can render that into the way they present their material. I'd like to do that myself some day.

The subject comes up because I'm going to be on the program for a reading this August, for "Cora and the Sea." I'd like it to be perfect, so after revising the story next month, I'm going to practice, and practice, and rerecord the audio version, then listen to it several times so I can pin every nuance. I have ten minutes to sell that story to the audience, and I'm going to sell the shit out of it.