On Writing to be Read Aloud

Should the text be changed to suit the medium?

“You have a good voice,” they said. “You should make an audiobook.”

So I tried.

It’s harder than it looks.

Novels used to be written to be read aloud. They are, after all, a development of the ancient art of storytelling, an inherently social practice that is probably as old as language itself. Novels were even sometimes printed to be read aloud. My father had a copy of Pride and Prejudice in which the first few words from the next page were printed in the bottom margin of each right-hand page, allowing the narrator to read steadily while turning the page. I remember a night during a Nova Scotia power cut on which we all sat around the kitchen table by candlelight and took turns reading aloud from that book. And as I remember it, at least, we were all, adults and teens alike, without rehearsal, able to read smoothly and easily, so that it was a pleasant listening experience for all of us.

I expected to read my own books aloud with equal facility. I couldn’t do it. Admittedly, I am no Jane Austen. But I know my books like the back of my hand. I have read them dozens of times through all the trials and pains of composition, editing, and production. And yet I stumbled over words and the inflection of sentences time and time again. And on listening to the playback, I found still more issues.

Now, admittedly, listening to a live reading and listening to a recording are different. We make far more allowances for the former than we do for the latter, and I don’t simply mean that we are more generous with a live reader, I mean that the brain seems less aware of the flaws and hiccups of a live reading than it is with a recording. I presume this is because the live reading is a full sensory and social experience whereas listening to a recording creates a single focus on the sound that makes every stumble and pop a monumental distraction. But even allowing for all that, my books are harder to read aloud than the classics.

I am disappointed to discover this because I have always had a great fondness for reading aloud. My mother used to read aloud to us as children, and she was very good at it. Those are some of my earliest and fondest childhood memories. And the rhythm of prose has always been very important to me. It does seem that a large percentage of the population has no sense of prose rhythm, and that includes many writers and editors. My falling out with my was-to-have-been publisher had a lot to do with my trying to preserve the rhythm of my prose and them apparently not knowing what I was talking about. Prose clearly does not have to be rhythmic to be successful and enjoyable to many, and I have read lots of books where it is absent. But to me, it is integral to the work and I was not willing to compromise on it. I had assumed that if prose has good rhythm, it must also be easy to read aloud. Not so, it seems.

As I was doing my experiments in reading aloud, there were several places where I was asking myself why I wrote a passage or a sentence that way. Yet when I read them silently, they seemed perfectly fine. So apparently it is not the case that prose that reads well on paper must also be easy to read aloud.

Maybe that is where the long rolling cadences of 19th-century prose come from. They were written to be read aloud by writers who were used to the practice of sitting around a living room of an evening taking turns to read aloud to everyone present.

I don’t know when that habit of reading aloud faded. Evelyn Waugh has a scene in Brideshead Revisited in which Lady Marchmain reads Chesterton’s Father Brown stories aloud to her family and guests. Reading to the sick was a common form of mercy, providing both company and entertainment to the afflicted.

I suppose television killed these practices, just as radio and the record player killed the family singalong, but I wonder if the falling price and ever-widening selection of popular works might have contributed too. Everyone could read their own book, according to their own taste. Perhaps that contributed to the narrowing of literary taste that I have moaned about before. Worse, I think, is that it has led to increasing loneliness. The sick are now stuck in front of a television by themselves and the family seldom gathers to watch a show together. Each of them sits in a corner glued to different YouTube channels on their phones. No one has to adapt to or seek to understand the tastes of others. Creators, in turn, create for the tastes of individuals, not for a varied audience. Shared stories are the basis of human society and culture. But if we share stories today it is more often with strangers across the internet than with family and friends in our living rooms.

This all seems very sad to me, though I am guilty of it as much as anyone. However, one element of this highly individualized electronic culture has brought back the art of reading aloud in the form of the audiobook. Listening to an audiobook is not a social activity, but it is still receiving fiction narrated by a voice rather than reading it silently yourself. Perhaps part of the appeal is to at least hear the voice of another human being, even if they are not present in the flesh.

This leads me to ask, will the way we write change again to accommodate this trend? Has it already? I don’t listen to audiobooks myself. I’m too impatient. I could read the same material three times faster from the page. I did listen to a few classic novels in the car at the time when I had a regular commute. But I really don’t listen to contemporary novel audiobooks much. I have listened to a number of samples, as part of my study of the form, but listening to a full audiobook just doesn’t work for me.

But it works for lots of other people, and apparently I have the voice for it, if I could just solve some niggling quality issues. So I press on.

One of the things I have noticed about the sample recordings I have listened to is that audiobook narration is now considered a form of acting. The literature talks more about voice actors than narrators and the samples often feature highly dramatic readings with the narrator — or voice actor — acting out the dialogue like a play.

This is in contrast to the audiobooks of the classics that I have listened to, which tended to be a narrator “reading aloud” rather than “acting out.” Admittedly, I was using Libra Vox for my audiobooks, which meant I was listening to volunteer readers, not professional “voice actors”. And again, my experience is very limited and may not be representative. But still, it seems to me that modern audiobooks tend more toward the form of radio drama, while the classics tend more toward an expressive but undramatized narration. And, if I am not just badly misinformed on the state of the art, as I may well be given my limited exposure, this seems to me to have a lot to do with the way that novels are written.

There can be no doubt that movies and TV have had a huge influence on how novels are written today, and on the way readers expect novels to work and sound. I have read many novels, both published and unpublished, in which it was clear that the writer was writing down the TV show that they saw playing in their head. And, of course, every successful TV show or movie seems to have its extended universe of novels, which obviously aim to attract the audience of the original show, and thus mimic its style in a different medium. Given this, it would naturally follow that many novels would read more like a TV or movie script, and might therefore benefit more from being acted rather than simply read aloud as an audiobook.

I am old school in this. I like TV and movies just fine, but my first love is the written novel and I like my novels to be novels, not poor man’s TV shows. Which is to say that if I did listen to audiobooks, I would want them to be read, not acted. And I hope that the books I write would be the sort of books that would work when read rather than acted.

But this presents a problem because in many ways books today are written like scrips, even mine. Consider this passage of dialogue from The Wistful and the Good. The speakers are two sisters, Elswyth (15) and Hilda (12). It would take considerable acting skill to give them distinct voices. The best I could do would be to read it with appropriate inflection. I certainly could not make the voices audibly distinct. So the question is, how far would a listener get before they lost track of which sister was speaking? (It’s a long passage because the length of this sustained dialogue is relevant to the difficulty of the listener keeping track. But if you get the point, feel free to skip to the end.) As a reference, I am going to insert a recording of my reading the passage at the end.

Wishing to appease her conscience, [Elswyth] said, “After the letter is written, you should ask Leif to show you the books.”

“He doesn’t want to,” Hilda replied sulkily.

“He said he would. He won’t go back on it. There are some wonderful patterns in them. You could copy them in embroidery.”

“You don’t want me to.”

“I didn’t. I’m sorry. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to be alone with Leif in the play hall. I don’t want to kiss him.”

“Neither do I. But you could go to the ship. He keeps them in the ship.”

“I don’t like the ship.”

This scandalized Elswyth. How could Hilda care so much for beauty and yet not see the beauty of the ship? “You don’t like the ship? The ship is wonderful!”

“Someone would have to lift me into it. I don’t like that.”

“Not even Uncle Thor?”

“No.”

“After he was so wonderful to you yesterday? You were weeping in his arms.”

“I was tired, that’s all.”

“You should have gone to bed then.”

“Shut up! I don’t want to talk, I’m busy.”

“You’re not afraid of them, are you?”

“Everyone is afraid of them, except you and Father.”

“And Mother, and Whitney and Moira and Daisy.”

“Whitney is mad, and Moira and Daisy are babies. No one else likes them.”

“You just hate everybody.”

Hilda did not refute this claim. Silence reigned for some minutes before she spoke again.

“Do you want to marry Leif?”

“Because I was looking at a book with him?”

“I still think you were kissing.”

“I’m going to marry Drefan. You know that.”

“I think you want to marry Leif,” Hilda said, eyes fixed on her stitches.

“You want me to sail away to live in Norway? That would suit you, I suppose.”

“No!” Hilda said, vehemently. “You’re so stupid sometimes.”

“Maybe you want to marry Drefan.”

“No I don’t!” For the first time, Hilda paused in her work and looked at Elswyth, so great was her indignation.

“What’s wrong with Drefan?”

“He likes you. They all like you. It’s not fair. I want someone who likes me.”

“Someone will. Just wait till you grow up. They’ll all like you too.”

“Not as much as they like you. It’s not fair. I’m the one who looks Anglish.”

“It’s not as much fun as you think, having men staring at you the whole time. You’ll see.”

“If you don’t like it, you should cover your hair,” Hilda said, tugging on a corner of her wimple.

“If you want them to look at you, you should uncover yours,” Elswyth replied, tugging Hilda’s wimple askew so that a lock of her mouse-brown hair escaped and glowed dully in the sunlight.

“No.” Hilda tucked her hair back into place. “They won’t stare at me like they stare at you. They’ll say, ‘How neat your stitches are! How straight your seams are!’”

“I’m sure they’ll stare at you plenty.”

“I don’t want them to.”

“Really?”

“It just causes trouble. Father will find me a nice husband. Mother says he will.”

“Well of course he will. Mother will make him. Mother probably won’t be happy until Father finds you an ealdorman to marry.”

“Father found Drefan for you the year you were born,” Hilda said, mournfully. “He hasn’t found anyone for me yet, and I’ll be of age soon.”

“You should be glad he is taking the time to find the right boy.”

“I heard him telling Mother that he was going to talk to Edris about Baldwinn for Moira.”

“Baldwinn is too young for you.”

“He should find someone for me first, before doing Moira!”

“Well, finding someone for Moira is easy. All she needs is a man with ears. He’s taking more time to find someone just right for you.”

“Because there isn’t anybody right for me?”

Elswyth sighed. Hilda’s self-pity was impenetrable. She returned to her former ploy. “You should go and ask Leif to show you the books.”

“I don’t want to! And I don’t believe you care about the books either. I think you just want to kiss Leif!”

Here’s a quick recording of me reading this passage. I tried to do the appropriate inflection of the speeches but made no attempt to act the voices. Listening to it, I feel like I acted it a little more than I intended to. But the first question here is, is it easy to keep track of the voices or not?

There’s a certain craft to writing dialogue like this. You don’t want to put a dialogue tag on every line, because that would be tedious. And you do want to break up the dialogue occasionally with some action or gesture. The question is, what’s the balance? How much or how little do you need of tags and action breaks? Editors and writers don’t always agree on this. I tend toward a rather sparse style of dialogue, on the ground that if it is good dialogue, it should be obvious who is speaking, and if it is interesting dialogue, you don’t want or need too many distractions.

But keeping track of the speaker in dialogue like this is not just about what each is saying. The physical layout of the page is a huge help. Because each line of dialogue is a separate paragraph, it is immediately obvious when one person stops speaking and the other begins. The occasional speech tag helps keep the reader oriented in the exchange, but most readers can follow along several lines of an exchange like this without getting confused. At least, they can on paper or screen.

But what about when the text is read aloud? There is no audible representation of a paragraph break in a narrated text. There isn’t even an audible representation of what is dialogue and what is text. Yes, there are pauses, but unless we use Victor Borge’s phonetic punctuation, pauses are used for everything in speech — for commas, for periods, for emphasis, for rhythm, for indicating the transition to speech, and for delineating paragraphs. So what would a pause mean in narration? A change of speaker or another sentence by the same speaker? Yes, the change may be deducible because the second speaker is arguing the opposite point to the first. But that may not be obvious until the whole sentence has been spoken. This potentially makes it much easier to lose track of who is speaking, especially if the changes are frequent and rapid. I ask myself if I did more acting in my reading than I intended to because I subconsciously thought I needed to to keep the speakers distinct.

Which raises two very interesting questions:

1. When reading an existing story aloud, should you change things to make the story clearer, such as, for instance, adding additional dialogue tags or action beats into the text to help keep the listener oriented?

2. If you are writing with the idea that the story will be read aloud, either in a drawing room of an evening or as an audiobook, do you write differently to make the text easier to scan and perhaps avoid passages like the above that rely so heavily on the physical layout of the page for their clarity?

Given my thesis that earlier works were written to be read aloud, I decided to look at Pride and Prejudice and see if there were similar long passages of largely untagged dialogue. And, of course, the novel begins with just such a passage, immediately following its immortal opening lines:

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

“Do not you want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife, impatiently.

“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

“What is his name?”

“Bingley.”

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh, single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? how can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome? You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

“Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”

“I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go—or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better; for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley might like you the best of the party.”

“My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”

“In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”

“But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood.”

“It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”

“But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account; for in general, you know, they visit no new-comers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him, if you do not.”

“You are over scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls—though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.”

“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others: and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.”

“They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied he: “they are all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters.”

“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.”

“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”

“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.”

“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them all.”

Sure enough, here we have a passage of sustained dialogue with very few dialogue tags or action beats. And it is, I think, easier to read aloud, and to follow when heard, than my passage above.

For comparison, here is a quick recording of me reading this passage:

To my ear at least, keeping track of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in this recording is easier than keeping track of Elswyth and Hilda in the recording above, and I did less “acting” in this reading, not deliberately, but perhaps becuasue I did not feel the same subconscious need to dramatize that I did in reading my own passage.

Well, you might say, Jane Austen was Jane Austen, and you are not. This point I will freely concede. But my question is, to what extent is this due to greater skill and art on Miss Austen’s part, and to what extent is it due to a difference in design? In other words, was Miss Austen consciously writing to be read aloud in a way that I was not? And if so, was that because it was the style for novels of her time to be written like this? In other words, is it because her ear was attuned to a different style of narration than mine?

Apart from a few instances where word order is different from modern vernacular, Miss Austen’s sentences seem to roll off more predictably than mine, such that the person reading aloud is less likely to get to the end of a sentence and find that they have inflected the first part incorrectly. On the other hand, her dialogue is not entirely realistic. It is a bit of an open question if people of the time really spoke like this (there are no recordings of their drawing room conversations), but I find it doubtful. They may have been more formal than we are, but not, I think, as stylized as this. It is hard to imagine these sentences occurring in normal conversation in any time period. And yet you can read them aloud, straight up without rehearsal, and rarely stumble over the inflection.

One clear difference between Miss Austen’s dialogue and mine is that most of her speeches are significantly longer than mine. Mine chops back and forth rapidly, which might be more natural, but certainly does not make for easy tracking of the speaker, especially when hearing the passage read aloud. Mine seems to hurry the reader along, while hers seems to invite a more leisurely pace.

I tried rewriting my passage with longer speeches and less snapping back and forth. But while I could do a little of that, I found that I would have to change the entire setup of the scene to make it really work. For one thing, Hilda doesn’t want to talk and Elswyth is trying to draw her out. To make Hilda’s speeches longer, I would have to put the scene into a different time and place, one in which Hilda did want to speak.

In fiction, everything is about how you set things up. I would have to change the setup of the scene before I could change the form of my dialogue. I would probably have to change the style of the book generally, making all the dialogue and the prose more stylized in order to make it flow more easily off the tongue and into the ear.

To date, my experiments in reading aloud have taken the form of creating YouTube videos for individual chapters of The Wistful and the Good. The latest one is here:

I think the narration in this is an improvement on my attempts at the first chapter, but I still don’t think it is up to the standard of a professional audiobook. I have been doing some reading on the subject (do first, learn afterwards is my credo). What I have learned so far is that I should have stood up to record, rather than sitting, and that I should have prepared a script for the narration with special marks to indicate pauses, inflection, and emphasis and to mark the speakers in dialogue. I’m going to do all that and try again.

But the question of writing specifically for reading aloud still interests me. Listening to a story being told is different from reading for yourself. For one thing, when you read for yourself, you take in a whole sentence at a gulp and digest it whole. You invest it with inflection and emphasis after the fact. When you listen, though, the sentence comes at you bit by bit, already inflected. You have less work to do to decode it since the narrator has done some of that for you. On the other hand, if you do get the direction of the sentence wrong, as you can sometimes do when reading for yourself, you don’t have the opportunity to stop and read it again. The reader drones on and the missed sentence means you have lost the flow.

Meanwhile, the person reading aloud is doing that work for their listeners, and it can be difficult work, particularly if you are trying to read with a steady cadence. You have to inflect the words as you read them when you haven’t seen the whole sentence yourself yet. If the sentence goes somewhere you were not expecting, you may find you have read the first half wrong and then stumble and have to start again.

This is why readers need to rehearse if they are to do a good job. I was taught that a good reader develops the habit of looking one sentence ahead of what they are saying aloud so that when they start to pronounce a sentence, they have already seen the whole of it. But this is not easy, and a long complex sentence can make it impossible. When I try to do it, it results in long pauses between sentences that I then have to cut out in editing. Perhaps this is normal for all audiobook readers. This, I suppose, is why audiobook readers are advised to prepare a specially marked-up script. It may also be why there are special software tools for identifying pauses in a recording.

Can the writer make life easier for the person reading aloud, and for the person listening, by avoiding writing sentences that may cause such difficulties? Can they change how they write dialogue to make it easier for a listener to follow? Can or should an audiobook narrator make changes to their text to help avoid these problems?

If I were reading Pride and Prejudice aloud, I obviously would not change a word. I suspect I would have no reason to. But I am at liberty to change my own words. I’m not going to do a wholesale rewrite of my existing books, but what would you think if I made minor changes in the audiobook version to make the narration clearer? I just listened to the YouTube recording linked above and counted 16 places in the dialogue where my ear wanted an extra dialogue tag. My eye would not have needed or wanted them on the printed page, but I’m convinced they would make the audio recording easier to follow.

The passage that really scares me, in this regard, is the opening of Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, in which Isabel is telling a story of which the protagonist is also named Isabel. Isabel’s dialogue contains phrases like “said Isabel”. The punctuation keeps it straight on the page. But the challenge of making it clear when reading aloud daunts me.

Some of the sources I have read on this seem to regard making any changes to the text as anathema while others regard it as a basic necessity. Some sources call for eliminating most dialogue tags and leaving it to the voice actor to express every voice differently. That strikes me as a fundamental difference between an acted audiobook and a narrated one, with the printed book sitting between the two. In other words, a narrated audiobook needs more dialogue tags, a printed book fewer, and an acted audiobook still less. I can quite see that if you are acting a book and giving each character a different voice, then having to switch into your narrator voice to say “Hilda said” and “Elswyth said,” at the end of every line could become a tongue twister, and difficult to listen to. On the other hand, in a book simply read aloud, those tags would probably just slip by, usefully keeping the reader oriented without disturbing the flow.

But if so, does that imply that the text should be adapted to the medium? In writing my next novel, I definitely intend to spend more time from the beginning thinking about how it will sound when read aloud. I may make reading the text aloud part of my regular writing and editing process. I may even record the reading and listen to the recording, just to see how it works.

How that may change my style or the way I construct the story remains to be seen. And the question of whether I will make any changes between the audiobook script and the print/ebook version is also very much to be determined. One source even recommends writing your audiobook script first, as your original draft, and then editing it to create an ebook later. My first reaction to that suggestion was to cry heresy. But then I thought, is that so different from consciously writing a novel to be read aloud? Isn’t it basically the same thing?

I really would like to hear from you on this subject.

• Are you an audiobook fan?

• Do you prefer an audiobook to be acted or narrated, or does it depend on the book?

• Do you think the text of the print book is sacrosanct and ought to be read word for word in the audiobook, or should the script be adapted to fit the medium?

• For this purpose, do you think that the acted and narrated audiobook formats should be regarded as different media with different rules and styles?

• Given the growth of audiobooks, do you think it makes sense to write for audio first, and then adapt the audiobook script for print?

• And if you think writers should write for audio first, do you think modern authors could usefully imitate the conventions of the 19th-century novel in pursuit of that end?