Use All Your Senses

The Business of Writing: Use all of your senses

One of the problems faced by writers, both first-time novelists and those with many books under their belt, is to come back to a manuscript after weeks away, and find that it’s not the same manuscript. It’s different, clumsy, lumbering, and some of the sentences are incomprehensible.

Nobody broke into your desk and altered your manuscript!

No, there was no malicious editor who broke into your computer and rewrote your breathless prose. And yes, it’s the same manuscript.

The difference is that when you originally wrote it, you almost certainly didn’t read it aloud when you’d finished that section.

One of the most common miscalculations which writers make is to think that what they’re written, and read to themselves, will be the same for a reader. Yet when a manuscript is given to an editor, their reading will not just be for the accuracy or the grammar of the work, but for its readability. Often, editors will read a work aloud so that the ear can hear what the mind is reading.

Which is precisely what writers should do when they come to edit their work. When you’ve finished a section, a chapter or the entire book, read it aloud. Close your study door, stand in front of a mirror or sit at your computer, and read aloud what you’ve written.

Why? Because there are aspects of our written work which are not immediately apparent when we read silently to ourselves.

When we read without speaking the words, our mind, our inner ear and our senses skip over grammatical errors, correcting them in our brains; we don’t hear how clumsy the sentence structure is; we don’t realize how clumsy is the word we’ve used, which could be much more musical in the sentence, than an alternative word.

These things are important, because a reader, unfamiliar with the sentence he or she is reading, will normally pick up on them and it will colour their enjoyment of your work.