N.L. Bryar

Obi-Wan Kenobi said it best, “Your eyes can deceive you.” After actually listening to my book being read aloud, I can honestly advise, writers, edit with your ears at least once. Hearing your words spoken uncovers whole hidden worlds of errors, new dimensions of errors. (Errors you wished you found before you hit ‘Publish’ on your ARC campaign … as a purely hypothetical example.)

Listen and you’ll hear Obi-Wan say “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” Droids, word-choices, verb-conjugations, sentence rhythms, misspellings, … “Holy crap!” you realize. “These really aren’t the droids I was looking for.” Crappy metaphor, I know, except in this sense: that aural medium works the will of The Force.

I did an aural pass on my book The Curse of the Unholy Grail and now I can’t imagine writing a book without doing so.

But With the Blast-Shield Down, …

Some reasons your eyes can deceive you:

• More of a Big-Picture man: the nature of language is that a short gist — even a partial or corrupt one — always expands into one or more complex concepts, … such as the key conflict in your denouement scene. You, dear writer, mentally expand a gist to full authorial ideas, but your readers might be reading a CAPTCHA test.
• Curse of Knowledge: spoken language contains all kinds of helping prosody — intonation, rhythm, emphasis, emotional tone, sarcasm, attitude, etc. — that a reader has to guess at, while the author applies his intended prosody to his read. To the writer, their text jogs context. To the reader, some assembly is required.
• Selective Attention: focused on a task (condensing long prose, say), you miss other details (ctrl+x of one word too many). Target fixation lets mistakes slip into your midst like an Invisible Gorilla.
• Miller’s 7 ± 2 Law: only 5 – 9 details fit top-of-mind, more than that and things drop off. Who’s talking (mannerisms, tone), what do they want (superficially and in deeper conflict with the other scene characters), how are emotions playing out (in actions and words), what motif is getting repeated … beyond that, you might not retain some other kind of detail. And so, you miss your jarring mixed metaphor.

Doubtful still? Consider typoglycemia. That’s where, given just the first and last couple letters, word middles can be scrambled like an egg, and you’ll still understand the story!

The olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

True, you can mitigate your eyes’ deceptions. ‘Brilliant’, ‘flawless’ chapters will, for instance, surface absurd amounts of latent entropy after just a week alone in a dark desk drawer. Won’t reveal every flaw at once, but the series never converges. That’s how every week they find more digits at the end of π.

Your Reader Hears, And So Must the Writer

More subtle yet, sometimes you know the emotional inflection a phrase is supposed to have, but the stubbornly non-telepathic reader runs a different direction. Channeling my high-school drama teacher: “Mary is a good girl” (so don’t accuse her of thieving your cookies) vs. “Mary is good girl” (but watch out for Ginger) vs. “Mary is a good girl” (says the men’s room graffiti).

It’s a writerly sin to force people to go back and re-read something they thought they understood but later information proves wrong. If the read-aloud puts the interpretive emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble, (e.g. that Mary is delightfully uninhibited), consider a wording tweak to disambiguate.

The ear definitely picks up things that are a bit clunky despite being grammatically correct. Dialog keels over faster than a canary in a coal mine when fake or stilted words get released into the air. Like no one says “Joe” ten times in a one-minute exchange. Off its perch, birdie drops.

You might even pick up on a PoV-drift, especially if your narrator is trying to apply voices based on whose perspective the scene (should be) focused on. Can you also hear chloroform? (My book had none, so not sure 😉

Edit with Your Ears and Text-to-Speech

Okay, so who here actually knows someone with the patience to read your story aloud to you? Didn’t you already bank on all their goodwill as an alpha- or beta-reader? Now you’re gonna demand they get laryngitis making an .mp3 for you? Well, you can try to read your story aloud to yourself or to some other long-suffering someone. That still risks some of the myopia discussed above, but it’s doable.

Or then there’s text-to-speech.

I picked ElevenReader on Android. (I like ChatGPT’s voice-mode better, but it seemed to be making working-memory embeddings of every token ready to query later, so I’m not sure which service is puffing more CO2 into the atmosphere for my listening pleasure.) Allegedly, ElevenReader’s Free tier allows 10 hours/month (and at 1.2x speed, my novel might fit in one month). I found their sign-up too Byzantine to find the ‘free’ option, landing me in the paid plan for now.

ElevenReader actually does a fairly decent job, for a computer. It even intones and paces emotionally pretty well, such as when it sees cuss words comin’.

It was ElevenReader who surfaced the lead-vs-led example above.

Writers and their Love/Hate of Grammar-Checkers

Having exhausted my self-publishing budget on a cover-designer and a developmental editor (technically, a less in-depth ‘manuscript evaluation’ — which still costs a bundle), I had to hope copyeditor and proofreader functions could be done on-the-cheap. Weekly stints in a dark desk drawer aside, I was relying on my software toolset.

I wrote in Scrivener then added in ProWritingAid (PWA) as the grammar-checker and started making targeted passes through the doc. It’s running constantly, so I’m using PWA a lot during creative phases, too (and I mostly like it).

Computerized grammar-checkers, however, do have their downsides. They spew out tons of false-positives, actively seek to destroy your voice (a regression-to-the-mean thing, I guess), suggest pablum rewrites that weaken originality or emphasis or style or lyrical rhythm, or in some cases the sense of an expression.

The checker emits handy blue underlines where it deems a fix might be needed. You can click to accept their correction. There’s also an ‘Ignore’ option, but I find that if I touch anything else in the paragraph, PWA will revert everything in that paragraph to un-ignored.

The inline hints are nice, but they are easy to miss, especially if stopping to verify and correct would tear you out of the creative flow.

Better to generate reports with all the issues in one big punch-list. With PWA in Scrivener, you need to select multiple scenes at once into a combined ‘scrivening‘ view, then tell PWA to generate a Grammar and Spelling Report on this. I.e. process a chunk at a time. Too big a chunk, PWA complains. I found this just enough workflow friction to disincentivize me from doing it as often as I should’ve.

And, as mentioned, the reports are overzealous, so I click ‘Ignore’ a lot, again adding just a bit of friction that discourages me from doing proofreading sessions.

(I also have the French keyboard layout installed on Windows, and sometimes PWA gives me French grammar violations within my English writing. Ça me rend chèvre!)

Can the text-to-speech experience catch everything PWA-diligence would have? No, and so I’m not uninstalling PWA, for sure. But read-aloud was a way easier pass to complete and wonderfully complementary/supplementary.

Proofing Software Is Not There Yet

… But Neither Are Authors Themselves

Someone told me (possibly a proofreader) that even professional authors write an average 2,500 mistakes in a 100,000-word manuscript, as caught by copyeditors and proofreaders. Yikes! Maybe it is plausible an infinity of monkeys coud write Hamlet, … given the addition of proofreader.

What that depressing stat points out, though, is that no writer can be trusted to fully edit/proofread their own work. Oh, they can play that role against another writer’s work; it’s way easier attaining the necessary detachment to do that. But, self-surgery isn’t so easy.

This error-rate stat, if true, robs me of some indignation over PWA’s endless gripes (although I need to see a study on the overlap between human- and software-caught bugs). But it makes it less surprising my ARC went out with flaws, for which I hope my reviewers will forgive me.

Unfortunately, I’m kind’a hearing they won’t. Anecdotally, other writers are claiming ARC readers (folks who are given a pre-release version of a book totally for free in exchange for writing a review) may not even select a book if its blurb has a typo (humanities vs. humanity’s, say … hypothetically, of course). Paying readers forgive even less.

Which Leaves Us Where?

Given a finite publishing budget, which defects require another human brain, and which can I economically attack with tools and process?

For Book One, I had hired a developmental editor, but I’m not sure I would do that again for Book Two. (The first foray, I think the cost was worthwhile due to what it taught and what confidence it instilled. An amortized, though rather pricey, investment in self.) Book One’s ARC going out with silly mistakes (country homicide vs. county homicide, etc.), well that just stings. Bad.

But compared to a developmental editor, by hiring a proofreader, I’d have tons of cash left over, possibly to devote to ads, which feels like Book Two or Three might justifiably benefit from.

Or I admit to myself I’m spending money on a fun hobby, not a lucrative, genre-fiction ‘side-hustle’, in which case I stick with ProWritingAid, dark desk drawers, and edit-with-your-ears passes. Your circumstances may suggest a different stack of swiss-cheese.

Through comments my way; I’m sure you have thoughts.