Hearing Your Work Out Loud Will Make It New

I have to admit, this AI tool is a game-changer for writers

Photo by Victoria Nezh on Unsplash

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It made it fun to encounter this work in a whole new way—with fresh ears. I was actually eager to get to my desk—for the first time in months.

Hello Loreates,

I’m writing today to share with you a game-changing tool, introduced to me by my good friend and tech-savvy advisor

Deborah Jones

. I will admit it’s an AI tool, and I avoid AI as much as possible. But the benefits of text-to-speech readers, which can read your own work aloud to you, make this technology too valuable for writers to ignore.

There are many of these apps to choose from. [We can all hear our stacks read aloud, courtesy of Substack!] A few alternatives are reviewed here. But most of these are designed for business, not for long-form literature. And I worry about privacy and security with some of them. The one that Deborah recommended is Natural Reader, an encrypted service used by the United Nations and the University of Chicago, as well as governments internationally.

Having tried this now for several days with a personal essay I’m polishing, I’m amazed. For me, it’s worth the $120/year to be able to hear as much of my work read back to me as I like. Know that I’m referring to Natural Reader in this post, which will unpack some observations, tips, and reasons you should consider listening to your own work, rather than just reading it yourself.

SAVE THE DATES:

Tune in to MFA Lore’s Well Published! Substack Live series with hot new authors and industry professionals about the truths and tricks of getting… well published!

• NARRATIVE NONFICTION- Live with Pulitzer Prize-winner Ed Humes, Monday, Oct. 27, 12 noon PT.

• AGENTS TODAY- Live with veteran literary agent Kimberley Cameron, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 11am PT.

Now hear this!

When I was a painter, I used to play tricks on myself to gain distance from my work. I’d study my canvas from the other side of the studio. I’d walk outside so I could come back through the door, as if seeing the painting for the first time. I’d step away and squeeze my eyes nearly shut so the brushstrokes blurred together and I could make out only the large forms and patterns of color.

With any art, distance reveals the overall shape of things, the sum impact of all the countless details that make up a piece of work. Crucially, distance gives the artist a sense of what an audience will experience on first impression. Why is this crucial? Because most audiences only get a first impression. If that glance doesn’t wow them, they walk on by— or quit looking.

With writing, it’s not so easy to gain distance from the page. We read one word at a time, and in a strong work of literature, every word is necessary. Skimming, outlining, or summarizing tends to strip the story of its heart and subtext. Hearing words read aloud is one of the few means writers have to step back from the page, to process their work more holistically.

The good news is that we humans are literally wired to process stories through our ears. Why? Quite simply, because we’ve been listening to stories for millennia longer than anyone’s been writing them. Oral storytelling predates written storytelling by thousands of years; the ancient listening skills encoded in our DNA make it far easier for us to make sense of stories we hear than those we read.

As anyone who’s ever listened to an audiobook will know, the sound of spoken words can also create a dramatically different impression than the same words read silently from the page. When we’re focused on the visual page, we’re paying more attention to the look of the words, their arrangement, the patterns we can see, not necessarily those that are audible. Even writers like me, who subvocalize while reading and writing, will not hear the content as distinctly as when the words are said out loud.

Most writers I know try to gain distance on their work by reading it aloud to themselves. Dickens famously used to act out his stories alone while revising them (he also performed them publicly). For me, the practice of reading my work aloud has always helped me catch false notes and awkward phrasings. But it has its drawbacks, too: