The Sound of Your Stories (January 2008)
The Sound of Your Stories
by Philip Martin
Director, Great Lakes Literary, LLC

There are few guarantees in writing advice, but one is that reading your work out loud will improve it. It is a surefire way to develop storytelling skills and ratchet up the readability of your work.

Listen for the Cadence
Cadence in literary terms is the rhythm or metre of a stream of words, how the flowing phrases sound on the ear. It is derived from the Latin, “to fall” – the rise and fall of the poetic beat or the inflection of the human voice. Listen to this passage from The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), by Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett), whose writings, according to Neil Gaiman, sound “like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible.”

The witch approached [the sword] and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets.

The cadence is that of a spell’s chant, told by a storyteller who uses repetition and run-on sentences to lull the senses into a magical state of suspended belief.

Another example of cadence: Seamus Heaney’s wonderful translation (2000) of Beowulf. In the following passage, Beowulf and his men have arrived on the Danish shores and walk from the cove to the hall of Hrothgar.

It was a paved track, a path that kept them
in marching order. Their mail-shirts glinted,
hard and hand-linked; the high-gloss iron
of their armour rang. So they duly arrived
in their grim war-graith and gear at the hall,
and, weary from the sea, stacked wide shields
of the toughest hardwood against the wall,
then collapsed on the benches; battle-dress
and weapons clashed. They collected their spears
in a seafarers’ stook, a stand of greyish
tapering ash. And the troops themselves
were as good as their weapons.

If spoken aloud, the words echo the clank of armor, the toughness of warriors. Heaney wrote in his preface, “It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words and to have some feel for how the metre might go, but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work.”

Think Verbally
In a 2006 interview with National Book Award–winner Richard Powers by Terry Gross for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Powers explained how he uses voice-recognition software to speak his book as a first draft. He noted that typing at a computer and speaking are different neurological activities. Typing, he notes, is “a highly artificial interface and extremely unnatural,” a bit, he says, “like a dog walking on its hind legs.”

Powers feels that speaking a draft allows him to write differently. “It allows me to think in terms of the music of the prose. I'm not constantly interrupting my memory to change from inventing a clause and then keying it in letter by letter, which is the exact opposite of sense and sound. Rather, I can hear my characters speak; I can hear the rhythm and the meaning of the passage that I'm working on. I can flow more smoothly directly from memory to composition. [. . .]

Powers notes that Flaubert had a place that he would go to and yell out his sentences “as a way of testing their authenticity and testing their music.”

Learn to Tell Tales
Many outstanding writers first told stories out loud. It teaches one to imagine, to realize the need to entertain an audience, to string sentences together, and sometimes to let the story find its own way.

Richard Adams, for instance, spun an emerging story to his children on a series of car drives, till they began to ask regularly for “the rabbit story.” It became the bestselling book Watership Down.

Roald Dahl spun tall tales to his children as he leaned against their bedroom’s doorframe.

Alice in Wonderland was created in 1865, in first draft in a boat, to entertain three children – the Liddell sisters, ages eight, ten, and thirteen – as Rev. Charles Dodgson and another minister rowed the children on a outing up the Thames near Oxford. To pass the time, Dodgson began a story about a little girl named Alice (the middle girl’s name), looking for an adventure. Pleased with the tale, young Alice asked Dodgson to write it down for her, and the reverend obliged with a manuscript that eventually became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Brian Jacques, author of the popular Redwall series, began it as a story for students at a school for the blind in Liverpool, where he delivered milk and volunteered as a storytime reader. For that audience, he knew he had to develop a style that would read well out loud: funny dialect voices, beautiful descriptive passages reminiscent of some of the loveliest elegiac moments in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and lots of swashbuckling action.

As a teacher, Philip Pullman told stories from the Odyssey & the Iliad to his students. He chose not to read the stories, but instead to “stand up and tell them the stories face-to-face,” which he did week after week, for twelve years of teaching young teens.

[T]he real beneficiary of all that storytelling wasn't so much the audience as the storyteller. I'd chosen – . . . [for] good educational reasons -- to do something that, by a lucky chance, was the best possible training for me as a writer. To tell great stories over and over and over again, testing and refining the language and observing the reactions of the listeners and gradually improving the timing and the rhythm and the pace, was to undergo an apprenticeship that probably wasn't very different, essentially, from the one Homer himself underwent three thousand years ago.

Improve Clarity
The intro to the 1786 edition of Gulliver’s Travels refers to Jonathan Swift asking two menservants whether they understood the meaning of passages read out loud to them. His desire was to ensure that his meaning was clear to the average person. Reading work aloud, whether to a writing group or to a spouse (ah, writing has fallen from a gentleman’s pursuit; so few of us have valets to wait upon us), is an excellent way to test a difficult passage or the opening lines of a story.

I find that when I read draft passages to my wife, they always get clearer, often before I even speak the words. I edit instantly on the spot, deleting and changing words as I begin to say them, ones that in a flash I realize don’t work the way I thought they might. I also know I can’t pontificate to a real person the way I can to a distant, imaginary audience of readers I believe to be enamored of every grandiose thought. Cut to the chase, writer.

Read your Writing Aloud
As writing teacher Peter Elbow notes in his intro to Writing with Power, 2nd ed., when we read aloud, “we learn about our writing with enormous efficiency.”

Specifically, he suggests:

Look for places where you stumble or get lost in the middle of a sentence. These are obvious awkwardnesses that need fixing. Look for places where you get distracted or even bored -- where you cannot concentrate. These are places where you probably lost focus or concentration in your writing. Cut through the extra words or vagueness or digression. . . . Listen even for the tiniest jerk or stumble in your reading, the tiniest lessening of your energy or focus or concentration as you say the words. . . .

Many outstanding authors write modest amounts every day, but also take the time to read their draft passages out loud. Robert Louis Stevenson began Treasure Island in a holiday cottage one rainy summer, cooped up with his family. After helping to make an elaborate treasure map with a stepson, he wrote chapters based on the map, which he read aloud to his family, who in turn offered many suggestions for plot and particulars. I myself recall reading that entire book aloud to a pack of children, one summer when I worked for a summer-school recreation program, on days when the beach was closed and we had to stay indoors. The tale is a rollicking grand adventure and, not surprisingly, reads well.

Reading aloud, to yourself or to a real audience – trains your ability to tell a tale and to hear the cadence of good writing. Rough or careless spots trap the speaker; wonderful passages tickle the tongue as well as the fancy.

I’ll close with a suggestion, this being written on Boxing Day 2007 (the day after Christmas), to go read Dylan Thomas’s wonderful short piece, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” And then promise to improve your own work by reading it aloud.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.


Copyright 2007 by Philip Martin, director of Great Lakes Literary, LLC, and series editor of The New Writer’s Handbook, an annual anthology. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact the author at www.GreatLakesLit.com. Any brief quoted passages from published works are used for the purpose of literary criticism.

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