Audio Books and the Craft of Writing
Recently I got a new job. Along with that job came a much longer commute and much less free time. I’d already had trouble finding time to read, and the new commute took away even more of my time in the mornings and evenings. So for the first time, I tried an audio book.
I’d never really had a reason to use an audio book in the past. I can read faster than an audio book can read to me. I can get to the good parts, and skip around and reread sections when I get interrupted or distracted. But I discovered audio books are great for long commutes on the open road.
They have given me a reason to look forward to those long commutes. Often, when I arrive at the office, I’m not ready for the commute to end because I want to hear more of the current book. It’s been great because I’ve started to shrink my almost endless “to read” list at a steady pace.
Reading is also important to writers. One of my friends describes reading as filling the creative bucket that you empty when you write. The more you read, the more creativity you have. Also, the more you read, supposedly the better your writing will be.
But after a few months of listening to audio books, I think I’ve discovered another writing-related benefit that no one has mentioned to me. When we read silently to ourselves, we see the words. Sometimes we can hear the words in our heads as we read, but those words are colored by the brain’s ability to read faster than the spoken word. We skip or scan the boring parts. It becomes habit so we don’t notice we do it after a while. But with an audio book in a car, it’s much harder to skip sections while you’re driving (without skipping more than you intended). You are forced to listen to the sections of long dialog, the sagging middles, the endless descriptions… Hearing the words aloud has made me more conscious of how passages read – beyond how they actually look on the page. I feel like subconsciously I’m picking up more about the sounds of words and pacing, and I’ve started to notice some changes in my writing. I look back at things I wrote only a year ago and see significant ways to improve them.
Some people I know say they read their writing aloud before they submit it, but I’d never heard about how listening to audio books could help improve your writing. Maybe it’s just me. In the eight grade I took a test that told me I was an audio-visual-kinetic learner (must hear, see, and do to learn). Anyway, I thought I’d share the tip for other writers out there. Yay audio books. Enjoyment and working on your craft at the same time.
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