18. Read it aloud
Read these four sentences aloud. Make sure that in each case you put the emphasis on the underlined word:
What do you want?
What do you want?
What do you want?
What do you want?
Now read aloud some of your own writing. Listen to yourself carefully. If you can bear it, record yourself and play it back.
When I do this, I'm listening for two things. I'm
trying to spot the moments when I have said too much – where I
have laboured the point I'm trying to get across, instead of leaving
the reader's imagination room to breathe and work things out for themselves.
The second thing I'm listening for is fluency. I want to find the top-heavy
sentences, or the ones that drag on too long through
too many clauses …
Or I might find that two of the names I have chosen can easily be mistaken, one for the other ...
Finally, it's sometimes only when I'm reading aloud that I discover
how a character's pattern of speech – something that I have written
spontaneously – contributes to my mental picture of them. This
helps when I want to include those things in other parts of the book
and keeps them fresh in my mind.
