Reading Aloud

There is nothing better than reading your novel aloud and hearing your audience react to it. Well, maybe there is: your audience asking for more.

I love reading my story. I think it's the most entertaining book ever written, well parts of it. And

tomorrow I'll probably think the entire thing is a load of rubbish. Such is the swing of confidence of the aspiring author.

I am very lucky that I have an audience for my novel and I think that's probably why I chose the age group and genre that I did.

I remember once, I was reading a fantasy story I'd started to a group of children. When the toys woke up in the story, the entire room, about 200 children, gasped! I think that was my best author moment ever. That story unfortunately didn't go anywhere as is the way with books I write sometimes. I have a good start but I don't seem to get the middle together.

Hopefully I've cracked that with this draft.

I already read aloud to myself when I'm reading my draft copies. It helps me to pick up where the sentences don't flow, or where a runon sentence could be broken down into two sentences. It's not a perfect method and I do miss a lot of mistakes, but it's a little like doing some editing as I go along.

My own children are far too quickly approaching the age that I write for as well. I have been running ideas past my eldest child and he's reacted to my story. He was scared at the scary bits but he didn't laugh at the bit that was supposed to be funny so I will have to work on that a little bit more, I think.

I love rereading parts of my novel that I haven't read for a little while. I like to go back and read parts I'd forgotten.

Reading aloud also helps me to cut out the chaff. I repeat myself a lot. Sometimes even in the next sentence. Reading aloud helps me to see that a little more clearly and chop out the lines I don't need, or merge repeated sentences together. You can often find me muttering to myself that I've written that already once.

As I'm approaching the end of this draft, I'm about to start Act 3, I'll be doing a lot more of reading aloud. I'm really looking forward to it.