"Read Aloud" is a Revelation

I knew the "read aloud" feature existed in Word, but I've been hesitant to utilize it. It's not that I've never employed it ~ I think I did with either my first or second novel, which I concluded was "great". 🙄 Since that time, though, I mostly forgot about it or figured it was just another gimmick.

But now that I've sort of lost track of all the plot points I created (there are a lot!) I really needed to know just how badly I messed up and/or turned the story into a confusing mishmash. So I took the plunge.

Wow! Read Aloud is an eye-opener! Hearing my novel has (so far) been lovely, mostly. The aural aspect of storytelling is completely different from reading the written word. I can't stress this enough. My initial worry was "flow"; not necessarily plot flow, but how the words blended ~ nothing abrupt; no weird sentence structures. I'm here to report that I scored an A on that.   

But I'll start with the nuts and bolts. What I remember from using the Read Aloud feature years ago was that the voices were very robotic. Maybe that's why I never tried it again. It was less like a human narrator than the robot from Lost in Space. If one is sitting down to listen to an audio book, they don't want to hear, "I-went-to-the-store." Happily, AI narration has since made giant leaps. I'm not sure how to choose different voices (I haven't needed to), but the voice narrating my novel is pretty spot-on for my needs. Obviously female, which is good, since the main character is female. She's got just enough "lilt" in her vocalizations to breathe life into the story. The only aspect "she's" incapable of finessing is word emphasis. When I write a word that needs to be emphasized in a sentence, I use italics. The emphasis on that particular word makes a huge difference in the context. My AI narrator doesn't recognize that, and just reads the sentence straight. I can live with it, seeing as how I have no choice. 

And a biggie I noticed right away is spelling a word correctly, but typing the wrong word. In one spot I meant to type "from", but instead wrote "form". Naturally, my ears picked up on that right away. I could have run the whole document through Spellcheck and that would never have been flagged.

Back to flow, in a plot sense, I was able to recognize some problem areas. I'd contradicted myself in a couple of places and had to go back and re-read to make sure I'd heard correctly. In one scene, a character the MC trusts vouches for someone by describing him as "honest", but that someone turns out to be anything but honest, and leaving that part in would have undermined the faith my MC had in the first guy. So, I changed it to let that guy off the hook. Now he simply "knows of someone" she can contact.

That wasn't my only contradiction. Character voice popped up, too. When I introduce a new character, I don't yet have a handle on them. I need to get to know them. MC's first meeting with the superstar had the star speaking in pretty run-of-the-mill sentences. Nope ~ wrong! Once I got to know Paula, it turns out that she's got a whole hillbilly vocabulary all her own, and not only that, but she's wildly profane. Thus, another fix I needed to apply.

Then there are the gaps. I previously blogged about readers seemingly needing to "read my mind", which, as it turns out, is not the ideal method for writing a book. Some of my passages were too sparse; they omitted important details, which the narration made clear. I quickly corrected them.

In fact, because of Read Aloud, I've been doing a lot of editing, which I intended to leave 'til the end. But I found a lot of hairline fractures I couldn't ignore.   

I've only brushed the surface of my story so far. It's going to take a long time for the narrator to read the entire novel to me. 

My best takeaway, though, is that it's good!