Wednesday, March 21, 2012

You Live, You Learn

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Every day, I learn something new about writing.  On the 300-plus mile trip home today, Marianne and I were listening to books on disc, one of which was the collection of time travel stories I mentioned the other day.  So I got to listen to my own story read aloud by somebody else.  Which is something I've never done before.

Something every writer learns early on is that reading your story aloud is a great way to review it just before final draft.  The mistakes pop out at you.  

But hearing your story read aloud by someone else is an entirely different game.  It left me wishing I  could rewrite the story from top to bottom to make it more subtle.  There were no mistakes in it -- I'm a good enough writer yo avoid that.  But hearing it in someone else's voice made me want to rewrite the thing from top to bottom to correct nuances of tone.

That's today's lesson, and it's a variation on something I learned long, long ago:  No matter how good a story is, it can always be better.

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1 comment:

Joe Stillman said...

Voice-over is as much an art as writing. There's a lot of emotional content in a person's tone of voice. How you translate that to the printed page is a mystery to me.

Composers face the same challenge in writing music and they have all kinds of tools in their notation system to convey their intent.