Writing Tip #2: Listen to Your Novel

Listen to your novel—and I mean this literally!  Once you’ve written and edited your book to where you think you’re about ready to fling it out into the world, take a few extra days and listen to it being read aloud.  You will catch redundancies, extra words, and awkward sentence structures that your glazed eyes just pass right over on the screen or on paper. After all, you know what you mean already, and it’s hard to read it so closely. Trust me, it is invaluable to hear the words spoken aloud.

Brace yourself.  The digital voices that reads your book in their relatively-flat monotone are nowhere near as wonderful as those brilliant voice actors who will one day make your work(s) sound like near-poetry. Nonetheless, once you’ve steeled yourself, take your story for a walk—or listen while you do chores, pet the critters, paint a canvas…  You may very well need some therapeutic activity to get through it, but it will be worth it in the long-term for your book if not in the short-term for your morale! Keep in mind that the advantages for your morale are more significant in the long run.

Various programs will read aloud your writing for you, but I use my Kindle Fire’s text-to-speech function with my Word documents, for which I’m infinitely grateful.  Keep reading if you want the instructions on how to use this device to listen to your audiobook, but otherwise, good luck and good listening!  Please do share with me your experiences with other text-to-speech programs in the comments.

As for the Kindle Fire, sometimes the voice glitches, and I have to continually check to see if I really had a typo, or if it’s just the voice narration. It’s usually the narration, but I’ve also caught many typos this way, so don’t neglect checking.  It is a hassle, though.

However, for all that I disparaged the monotone of the voice, it’s actually quite remarkable how well the auto-narrator reads the text.  So many inflections!  The pitch changes, even, when she reads conversation, to distinguish it from the other text.  Really impressive, honestly.

The Kindle document is slightly troublesome to set up the first time, as you’ll need to go into your Amazon account and tell it to allow documents from your email address to go through to your Kindle.  Here’s the procedure (at this point in time):

• 1. Log into your Amazon account.
• 2. Click on ‘Account & Lists’ at the top right of the page.
• 3. Under ‘Digital Content & Devices’, click on ‘Manage Your Content & Devices’.
• 4. Click on ‘Preferences’ (it’s on a white bar header at nearly the top of the page).
• 5. Click on ‘Personal Document Settings’.
• 6. Scroll down to ‘Approved Personal Document E-mail List’. Under this you’ll see a link for ‘Add a new approved e-mail address’. 

Whew!  There you are. I think you can take it from there. Took me ages to figure all that the first time. 

Once you’ve had your own email address approved, you can e-mail yourself attached documents at the email address listed in 'Personal Document Settings' under 'Send-to-Kindle Email Settings'. I usually use my Word documents—I don’t believe it will even read a PDF aloud for you, though you can still send it to read to yourself. But the Word documents can be better manipulated—fonts altered, too. The reading speed can even be changed.

Oh, but the documents don’t go right through!  No, sirree. Amazon will send you an email asking if you want that document to go through to your Kindle, and you’ll need to approve that within a limited-time window.  I usually just stay in my email account after sending a document so that I can approve it, watching for that confirmation-request email from them (maybe check ‘other’ and ‘junk’ folders if you don’t see that email right away). 

Make sure your Kindle is connected to Wi-Fi or a Hotspot. Your document will very likely not show up right away, however. Mine usually don’t.  I often have to Sync my device (that’s under the ‘Settings’ app on the Kindle Fire, way down on the menu) and then turn off my Kindle completely before I can get it to show up (after I turn it back on, of course). It might take a few minutes and another sync or two.  The troublesomeness of this varies, actually. Sometimes it’s easy-peasy, and other times I’m frustrated as hell.  But it’s best to go into it expecting a bit of a hassle.

Now, originally on my Kindle Fire’s Home Menu, the Documents App was clearly visible right off, but for some reason Amazon has restructured my Kindle Fire’s Home Page so that I have to go into the Utilities Folder to find my Documents App.  I click on this, and my emailed documents show up here.

Once your document downloads and you pull it up, you can tap on the screen to see various options. At the bottom right, there should be a text-to-speech option with a little sideways-triangle ‘play’ button.  Tap it to listen!  The Kindle will scroll through the pages while it reads aloud, and you can actually sit there and read it at the same time as you listen. That might be a wise thing to do, but I generally just keep the Kindle nearby so that I can easily mark whatever needs fixin’.  You don’t even need pencil and paper.  You can find the spot on your document, press on the word to highlight it, and press 'note' to enter your correction or thought.  When you’re done for the day, I advise entering those edits as soon as possible, while you remember them.  There’s an icon at the top of the page that looks like a page with lines across it. I use that to instantly retrieve my notes and marks so that I don’t have to scroll through the entire book endlessly.  It’s scary, but I delete these as I go—do save your Word document often on your computer as you’re making the corrections—so that I don’t miss any in the endless-seeming list.

I usually don’t bother entering a note, actually.  I just use a color-coded system for the highlighters. Blue means there’s a redundant word, change one of them. Red means delete.  Yellow means ‘Pay attention; this is kinda weird’.  Orange means ‘Change this! What were you thinking?!’

You can also bookmark the text.  That option is two over from the ‘note page’ icon.

Okay, so that sounds like a lot of hassle, but it’s worth it to review your book in a different way.  You’ll be surprise how much you catch by listening to it.  And you might even enjoy the listen. I do on occasion.