Or is that ‘reading allowed?’ I’m all but done with my first draft of Hemo Sapiens, so I’m recording is chapter by chapter so I can listen to it. Listening uses different cognitive processes beyond the obvious sensory apparatus, so one catches different sorts of factors.
For me as an example, it helps me to capture pacing. When I scan my own work at this stage, I’ve read it so many times, it’s difficult to read critically. I sort of just gloss over the words in a perfunctory manner. Maybe that’s just me, but…
What I do is listen whilst I read along—sort of like in grade school: read silently whilst someone reads aloud. This is what it gets me:
- Clumsy phrasing. It felt ok when I wrote it, but doesn’t read particularly well.
- Repeat words written nearby. I try to avoid placing the same word in the same paragraph or to close in adjoining paragraphs. In this case, I used and character’s surname name near the end of a paragraph and then at the start at the next, It really caught my ear, so I changed the later one to a subject pronoun.
- Spelling. Yep, spelling and grammar checkers still miss things. For me, some of my dialogue it either text-speak, BRB, or truncated, ‘That ain’t for nuttin”, so I often Word to ignore spelling until I’m ready. Though it isn’t necessarily revealed by the audio portion, I tend to track audio word by word, whilst I tend to read in paragraphs.
- Typos and wrong words. Listening along yesterday, I noticed that I missed a pronoun change resulting from removing a male character and expanding a female character. A remnant ‘his’ needed to be amended to ‘her’.
- Dense (or sparse) paragraphs. This is also about pacing. When listening, one can pick up that a passage just drags unnecessarily. It may need to be written, or it might just need to be broken up or re-punctuated. If it feels too fast that it might give the reader seizures, perhaps toss in a few dialogue tags or descriptors.
Perhaps I could come up with more, but these make my top of mind list.
I use ElevenLabs AI speech synthesis to convert my content from text to speech. I’ve written about my ElevenLabs wish list before. For the plan I use, I get 100,000 characters per month and can exceed that limit by purchasing 1,000 word blocks. I don’t the overage to be cost-effective, so I’d only ever use it in a pinch. The next plan is for a 500,000 word block, but the economics don’t work for me there either. Usually, it’s no big deal. Unless I am using it to narrate a novel, I just wait for the month to roll over and I can pick up where I left off. Fortuitously enough for me, I recorded 11 chapters yesterday before i ran out, and my plan refreshes today, so easy peasy.
ElevenLabs charges by the character, not by the word, which does make sense, but it’s not how I think about writing. I tend to think in terms of words or pages. When they say character count, they mean it—punctuation, quotes, and apostrophes, spaces, and carriage returns. I have discovered ways to reduce spaces, but you need to be careful, because it also uses punctuation to control some elements of prosody and delivery. For example, if you remove all of the commas and full stops, the delivery will be a ramble. For those who still double-space after double stops, this will cost you. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly frugal, I remove the carriage returns. They don’t seem to have any effect on the output, and it saves characters. It wouldn’t make for a great reading experience, but the AI doesn’t care.
Ridley Park 