Listening
September 7, 2010
For my birthday I got a subscription to Audible.com and I’ve lately been listening to American Gods by Neil Gaiman, turns out to be a great choice for an audio book given how deeply rooted the whole narrative is in storytelling. I daresay you won’t find so many stories-within-stories this side of A Thousand and One Nights. I’m also given to ponder the age old advice of reading your own work aloud as an aid to hone the prose. I think listening to others’ prose may be just as useful. It engages a different part of your brain, and you absorb spoken words more slowly, so it strikes me that more of the author’s work is apparent. Or, perhaps more accurately, less of the author’s work is obscured by possibly hasty reading. I think, especially with a good reader, it enhances your awareness of what’s going on with the words.
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Excellent book and the reader does a good job. And yeah, American Gods was that book that blew my mind with “You can do that? Cool. I gotta try.”
The point about reading out loud and/or listening to your work being read is a great one. You take in the narrative and story in a different way. In addition to exchanging copies to review with fellow writers, I also recommend reading your work to a group of writers for feedback.