Listening to the Music

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I've been blogging about how to make any piece of writing more literary.  This week, it will be about just general writing advice. One of the most important steps of revision is reading aloud.

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First off, when you read a piece of writing aloud, you can listen to the rhythm of your writing.  If it's good, it will read smoothly.  Probably, your first read-aloud will be about cleaning up the language, fixing mistakes.  If you can read aloud with someone, they can listen as well and catch confusing bits.  This is the step during which you may hear overwriting (she trotted on her horse can be cut to just say she trotted), redundancies, incorrect usages, and other issues not caught by your grammar/spell-check.

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As your actual writing smooths out, you can start listening for other things, not just to avoid sounding bad but actually to make it sound good.  Keep in mind that even unrhymed poetry or regular prose can become poetic when you pay careful attention to sound.  You can enhance assonance and alliteration, or achieving unity through using similar sounds, when the events of the story are going well. You can also use longer sentences and chapters.  When things start to be intense, you can use harsh sounds, short sentences, and short chapters to make the prose mimic events of the story.  Cut out as many adverbs as is possible when you can use a powerful verb instead. Why walk angrily when you can stomp instead?  Experts say use said, whispered, or shouted as much as possible instead of other dialogue tags and cut out adverbs in dialogue tags because dialogue tags are just for making it clear who said what.  Are there places you can use an action instead of a dialogue tag?  If you have a program like Autocrit or Grammarly, these can help with your editing and proofreading. 

Once your language sounds good, and the prose is as strong as you can get it, you may be ready for a writer's group and/or beta reader, someone who can give you feedback.  Few people can succeed in writing without a good reader who can give them feedback.  You're getting there. You can do this.