Writing coaches tell you before you finish editing, you have to go through the ‘reading aloud’ stage. Newsflash: Book One is all read.
In the editing, I made another pass for the new crutch words. I made upwards of a hundred changes. Maybe two hundred. Honestly, I didn’t count. It was far too depressing as I discovered how many ticks and trips existed in the manuscript.
Then I took a third run-through using ProWritingAid. I made more changes, though far fewer than the last time. Maybe I’m getting this. Except: commas. Move on. The point is, I’m far more precise at this stage of my prose, it’s cleaner and clearer.
That completed my line edits. Only one stage left. The ‘reading aloud’ stage.
The Woods and the Trees
Writing coaches advocate you read the text aloud. It highlights the garbage you don’t notice on a silent read through. All those run-on sentences, clunky paragraphs, jarring word choices. And dialogue. You don’t know your dialogue works until you read it aloud.
On the set of Star Wars, Harrison Ford once told George Lucas “you can write this s***, George, but you sure can’t say it.” Makes you wonder what happened in the read-through?
For a novel, as much as a screenplay, dialogue needs some essentials:
- polish,
- compression,
- clarity,
- distinct voices.
Reading aloud is the ultimate quality assurance. As the author, you read it the way you wrote it. Until you hear it off the page, you don’t really know if it works on the page. All kinds of ear-jangling noise comes out when you read the text aloud.
Last Train to…
The ‘reading aloud’ stage is the last chance to excise the unsayable, the unnatural, and the irrelevant. Genre fiction is no place for literary flourishes, purple prose or rhetorical devices (like repeating lists of three!).
No fat, no embellishment, no losing the reader in page-long monologues. Dialogue contains the Greek dia – two (or more) voices in debate. Two simple rules here:
- the characters need to engage in a proper conversation, however one-sided the relationship may be,
- the conversation needs to advance the plot or character arcs in some way.
Reading aloud highlights the empty, valueless or directionless text. Do the characters say what they mean and mean what they say?
I made another stack of edits for empty lines and poor word choices.
And there are other ‘rules.’
Identity parade
The first ‘rule’ says the reader should be able to tell who is speaking without any dialog tags at all. If you take out all the tags, can you follow the dialog and identify who speaks each line? This speaks to the topic of distinct and unique character voices.
The trouble is a page of lines in speech marks is a script that comes alive only in performance. It ignores the interiority of the novel form,
This is one reading aloud exercise; remove all tags. It may test for clarity, but honestly, are you going to rewrite every line of dialogue to pass this test?
Simple Tags
I forget currently who made the rule; the only allowable dialog tags are ‘said’ and ‘asked.’ These two allow you to name the speaker whilst otherwise becoming invisible. Anything else draws attention to itself, apparently.
But I lean into dialogue tags and action beats within dialogue because beats and description add colour and depth to the characters in the dialogue.
I knowingly use way more than ‘said’ and ‘asked.’ My rule is; use wisely, add value and don’t go crazy with unnecessary tags that break up the dialogue with no benefit.
And what’s the proof of my rule? Reading aloud.
The Long and Winding Road
The major downside of reading aloud is the time it takes. But if you can’t invest the time to read like a reader, how do you expect it of anyone else?
The outcome? Reading aloud pulled out another stack of edits; not just deletions or re-phrasing, but some vital insertions. Some of these are so startlingly obvious, how were they missed in the previous passes? The point of reading aloud is you have to read each and every word, not skip over the text like a flat pebble.
And the upside? Occasionally you hit a line or a paragraph and think: good job, the pain was worth it.
Book One done. Two more to go.