Using Your Ears to Edit
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“Don’t forget! You have your two best editors hanging on either side of your head,” I tell my WRIT 1301 students. I am met with a combination of blank looks and cocked eyebrows. “I’m talking about your ears.”
My students' eyes widen in disbelief. Some thumb through the syllabus to ensure this is, in fact, a college course, and eyes dart to the wall scanning the English diploma hanging there to ensure my name is actually on it.
“Our ears?” one of the braver students asks.
“Yes,” I nod sagely, “your ears.”
Writing to me is like swimming underwater. You know you’re making progress forward, but is it toward the shore or farther out to sea? You have to stop and pop your head above the waves once in a while to get your bearings. To me, that’s reading out loud to yourself. Your ears slow your eyes and brain down, activating your internal metronome that begins clocking the rhythm of your piece. Your tongue will trip over any stumbling blocks your writing professor or editor would circle in blue and label “awkward.” You might notice that you’ve been speaking on one subject for ages without actually saying anything of substance, as that little editor in your head starts sharpening their scissors. Snip, snip to that four paragraph description of your mother’s gingham apron that seemed so relevant at the time.
In addition to fiction, I also write for the theatre, so my words are often destined to be read aloud. At a workshop or table read, hearing the dialogue naked, out in the open, is the most transparent and brutal assurance about whether or not something is working. You don’t have to worry about killing your darlings because a whole room of actors and producers will do it for you. If a well-delivered joke doesn’t garner a laugh, it’s cut. If an actor stumbles over dialogue because, you then realize, this is simply not how humans beings actually speak, it’s rewritten. If eyebrows furrow during the monologue that is supposed to explain why the protagonist does the things she does, it's back to my desk to revise and talk it out with myself.
This is one instance in which I truly do practice what I preach. By this paragraph, I’ve read this little essay twice aloud and revised based on what I heard. And though this is by no means perfect, nor a work of staggering genius, it is better than when I started. Originally, there was a whole extended metaphor about how writing is like driving. The metaphor meandered on a pot-hole-laden road with a pair of shoddy wheels. Trust me, it wasn’t very good. So, I junked it. Swimming works better for what I mean to say, and my ears helped me realize it. This paragraph alone has moved three times within the structure of the essay, but I think it works best here. I’ll let my wife, my forever first reader, decide when I hand this essay off to her to proof. She agreed! So, here it stays.
Reading out loud to myself is my secret weapon as a writer, but not because I’m trying to keep it a secret. On the contrary, I practically scream, “YOU SHOULD READ IT OUT LOUD TO YOURSELF,” from the rooftops of the various buildings I teach in. But there seems to be resistance to this straightforward strategy because, ironically, it is so simple.
“It makes me feel dumb,” is sometimes what I hear from students when I ask whether or not they took my advice when I hand back a draft practically bursting with feedback.
“You wanna know how I was able to generate a lot of those suggestions?” I ask. “I read your paper out loud to myself.”
Some of the aversion to this method stems from the notion that this is what we do for children. And there we find the link to why it works. I don’t care how old you are, most people like being read to. No matter what age or level I teach—high school, middle school, professional actors, adult writers, grad students—they all settle in when I starting reading them a good story. In peer review groups, my writers must read their own work aloud in addition to receiving written feedback from the group as part of the workshop process. Because we have so badly beaten into submission our inner child, that little imaginer of worlds that lives inside all of us, it makes hearing our imaginings feel uncomfortable and self indulgent somehow. I assure you it is not. Yes, it’s hard to sit with our thoughts, with ourselves. Ask any therapist! It is especially hard when I ask my creative writing students to read aloud to themselves because it is such a vulnerable act.
But give it a try anyway. Tuck your inner child in, read in a one foot voice, and really make an effort to read the piece the way you imagine it in your head. Don’t just mumble through! That’s cheating. Plus, you’ll miss important pacing and editing opportunities. After all, if you can’t read your work to yourself, how do you ever expect to have the confidence to send your work off to the eyes and ears of others? I mean, isn’t that ultimately the point? To share our stories?