Day 41 – Audio Changed My Writing

This post is getting into the weeds of writing style a bit, but at least it will be short. EDIT – It went longer than I expected.

When I first decided to jump into the deep end of the fiction pool, I read On Writing by Stephen King. If you haven’t checked it out, and you’re interested in the craft of writing, I highly suggest it. I learned so much from that book that I had to go over huge chunks of it multiple times. Like most people, I only knew the vague basics of punctuation. When it came to dialogue attribution, among other things, I was an amateur. At best.

Still am, honestly. I’ve always been a voracious reader, but I never paid attention to the actual design of the stories. I didn’t analyze them, just read them.

Once I digested many of King’s teachings, I started down my own path. I developed a different style, approached things from other angles. My writing and his are very different now.

One of the biggest changes to my style happened when I started producing audiobooks. Hearing someone else read your words aloud is a real game changer. I noticed a lot of quirks that I didn’t care for.

There are the obvious things, like word choices, that everyone picks up on. When you use the same unique word twice in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence, it sounds weird. That last sentence had ‘same’ in it three times. When heard during an audiobook, it stands out like a sore thumb.

I focused on varying up the language because of this.

Action is obviously a big part of my style. Listening to fight scenes play out through someone else’s voice helped me hone that part of the craft. It helped me dial things in as far as description and the pacing of the battles.

Dialogue changes came too. I always prided myself on solid dialogue, but I noticed something when listening to other authors’ audiobooks that really stood out to me. Characters that always use someone’s name when speaking to them is really annoying and incredibly unrealistic. If Lance is talking to Cass, he doesn’t call her Sally every other sentence.

How many times do you use your friends’ names when speaking to them? Almost never. Usually, it’s to get their attention, and that’s about it. Try it out now. Start calling the person beside you by their name over and over. They’ll think you lost your goddamn mind.

It sounds bizarre. Don’t have your characters do it.

The biggest change though, was dialogue attribution. After reading On Writing, I adopted King’s use of said and asked with dialogue. When reading in paper or ebook, said and asked basically disappear. Your brain flies over them, attributing the tags to whichever character is speaking, and you move on.

In audio though, you hear 37000 uses of said and it becomes repetitive. And very aggravating. It’s anything but invisible… err, inaudible?… to the listener. Fortunately, this is an easy fix. I use action by the speaking character around their dialogue.

“You suck,” Cass said. “A lot.” becomes “You suck.” Cass flipped him off. “A lot.”

Not a massive change, but it makes the audiobook listening experience a lot better.

There are a bunch of other minor changes I made, such as more aggressive phrasing at the end of chapters to operate as cliffhangers, that are just stylistic choices you’ll have to decide on for yourself. I highly suggest you either record yourself reading your work, or have someone else give it a go, so you can listen back to it. I bet you’ll hear a lot of things that you’ll want to change.

Today, I edited 3 chapters in Decayed. It should have been 4 or 5, but one of them was very long and pretty piss poor. A lot of massaging went into that one. I’m heading into the final confrontation now, so we’re almost there!

See ya tomorrow.

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