Charity shop trip turns up six new audio CDs. Because they were free with newspapers, shop can’t charge me for them…though I give them a donation instead.
Audio CDs – or story tapes as we end up calling them, showing our age – have become a small obsession in the last year or two. Mine, that is. Partly because they’re easy to track down, partly because you get such good narrators on many of them.
Tamsin Greig on fairy tales. Simon Callow doing The Twits. David Tennant doing the Hiccup the Viking series. Lots more besides.
One of my little ambitions is to get to read stories for a living – because I adore reading aloud. Children’s books especially, but others can be good too. I don’t think it’s about fame, necessarily – it’s the mouth feel of delicious words, puns built in, choosing voices for characters and so on.
Lest I seem to be straying too far from the self-imposed subject matter of writing, reading aloud what you write is a great test of whether it works or not. We’ve grown accustomed to blogs being conversational, and a lot of good web writing is in this vein, but it applies to more.
Lots of newspaper columnists write in this way. Children’s books need it in particular because they are so often read aloud. Poetry needs to be heard as well as read. I dare say you could apply it to much quoted conversation in fiction too – would someone actually say it like that? Does it feel real?
How to hone it? Talk to someone. Listen to them in return. Sit on a bus, or a train, or near someone on their mobile, for a few minutes. You’re not eavesdropping, you’re finding out how they use language. What they say. What they don’t. What’s understood.
One of the most wonderful phrases to say aloud is ‘Once upon a time…’ Why would you not want to continue?