Reading out loud

I once read something by Charlie Stross which made sense to me at the time, and in many respects still does. It was on the subject of reading one's writing out loud and the dangers of correcting the text as a consequence. I am paraphrasing due to dodgy memory, but his reason was that the cadences of written and oral speech are different and one should be careful not to confuse the two.

As I say, I take the point. And yet I do it and find it helpful. I do it for three reasons.

The first is that it helps me decide if a character's voice is sufficiently distinctive to enhance their individuality.

The second is that reading the draft identifies without mercy where the prose is flabby. My hypothesis is that if the writing is lumpy or tiresome or hard to read when spoken out loud, it will be similarly difficult when read in the reader's inner voice.

The third is that it is a useful way of checking my punctuation.

Catch up

Where has October gone?

I spent the first week, or thereabouts, in Canada on a short holiday and since then have been busy with real-world things. However, I finished that post-referendum story and am about halfway through a new vamp story, though not the Chinese one which will come later.

The post-referendum story was essentially flash-fiction and I bookended it by re-written things I first wrote in 2000-2001. Revisiting them was interesting and I re-wrote them by halving the word-count and generally tightening them up. It is around 3500 words. In my head it is a 75,000 word novel but 71,500 of those words are implied.

The new vamp story is mostly set in the USA in the early 1920s. I had to put it aside to get on with some work but the second half exists in my head so at some point I'll dump it all onto the page before revising it. I quite like it so far. I'll be in the USA in early November so I may get the chance to get it finalised in the jet-lagged hours in my hotel.