As authors, it’s easy to become blind to problems in our own writing. After reading and revising the same pages again and again, our brains just start to fill in the rhythm, emotion and meaning we intended to add. That’s why awkward sentences, repeated words, and unnatural dialogue can so easily slip past us unnoticed. But as author and audiobook narrator Jimmy MacGregor discovered, these problems become much harder to ignore when you read your manuscript out loud.

In this week’s guest post, Jimmy explains how working behind a microphone changed the way he approaches his own books, from recognizing when dialogue doesn’t sound quite human to questioning whether a character’s emotions and distinctive voice have truly made it onto the page. In Jimmy’s experience, reading a manuscript aloud is one of the most revealing stages of the editing process, as it exposes weaknesses that silent revisions often miss, providing authors with a simple way to strengthen their work.

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I was an author before I became an audiobook narrator.

When I first got behind a microphone, I expected there would be a learning curve. Breathing properly, pacing myself, keeping character voices consistent, not making quite so many ridiculous mouth noises. All the things you suddenly become painfully aware of when there’s a sensitive microphone three inches from your face.

What I didn’t expect was for narration to change the way I write.

Because there is a fairly brutal difference between reading something you wrote and actually having to say every single word out loud.

And a microphone is NOT forgiving.

My brain knew what I meant

I think most authors eventually develop a strange kind of blindness to their own work. I know I did.

Whether it’s your first book or not, you read the chapter five times. Then ten. Edit it. Change it. Read it again. Procrastinate, then read it AGAIN.

Eventually, you’re not entirely reading what’s actually on the page anymore. You’re looking for things to polish, make more unique or just feel… better.

You know what you meant and your brain knows the rhythm of the sentence. It knows who’s speaking. It knows where the emphasis should be. If there’s a slightly clumsy bit, your eyes glide straight through it because you already read the better version in your head a hundred times.

Then you try to narrate something.

You can’t glide over anything.

Every. Single. Word. Has. To. Come. Out.

That’s where I started noticing things I hadn’t really thought about as an author.

Some words don’t work… aloud

There are sentences that look absolutely fine on a page.

Then you try to perform one and somewhere around the third comma you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.

There’s nowhere to breathe.

You can take a breath where one doesn’t naturally belong and risk breaking the thought, or keep going and hope the listener doesn’t notice the final six words are being delivered by a man whose lungs have officially given up all hope!

Long sentences aren’t bad writing. Some are fantastic to narrate.

But there’s a rhythm to spoken language that doesn’t always show itself on the page. Or it sounds brilliant in your mind.

It turns out this isn’t just something I’ve discovered from swearing at sentences in my booth. ACX has talked about the same problem, particularly how dialogue, punctuation and sentence structure can change once words actually have to be spoken.

Dialogue can be worse.

I’ve written conversations, read them back and thought they sounded perfectly natural.

Then I’ve actually said them.

Nobody talks like that.

We pause. We interrupt ourselves. We change direction halfway through a thought. Sometimes we answer a question with three words instead of delivering the beautifully constructed paragraph the author spent twenty minutes perfecting.

Dialogue doesn’t need to perfectly recreate real conversation, it just has to feel real.

My ears are much less willing to accept unnatural dialogue than my eyes are!

Then there are repeated words which I have a newfound hatred of. Not deliberate repetition, I mean the accidental ones that somehow survive every edit.

Reading silently, sometimes they disappear. Sometimes they even read well.

Behind the microphone, they almost taunt you. You say the word. Then you say it again. Then, four seconds later, there it bloody is again.

As a narrator, I’ll work through it. That’s part of the job. But even when you smash the line, the listener still hears it. Sometimes it just sounds unnatural to both tongue and ear.

That’s when the author side of my brain started asking why I was making someone work through it in the first place.

Especially when that someone might eventually be me.

Sometimes the narrator has to decide

One of my favorite parts of narration is interpretation.

A line can be angry, sarcastic, playful, threatening, terrified or trying desperately not to sound like any of those things.

Usually the context tells me and sometimes it doesn’t, leaving me to decide.

That made me look differently at my own writing. I don’t want to explain every emotion. Quite the opposite. I like leaving things underneath the words and trusting the reader to find them.

Yet there’s a difference between intentional ambiguity and simply not giving someone enough to understand the moment.

Narrating other people’s characters made me question whether everything I could hear perfectly in my head had actually made it onto the page, because the reader doesn’t have access to my head.

Neither does the narrator.

Probably for the best, really.

Being Scottish, I naturally think about accents a lot, particularly in my work as a Scottish audiobook narrator.

But characterization is much bigger than giving everyone a different accent.

Two people from the same place don’t sound the same. One talks quickly. Another chooses every word carefully. One owns every conversation while another almost apologizes for being part of it.

That’s character voice.

It gave me a fairly simple test for my own dialogue.

Take away the accent, description and dialogue tag, can I still tell which character is speaking?

Sometimes the answer has been no.

That’s normally a sign my editor or I have some work to do.

The booth has made me swear at authors

I shouldn’t probably admit this.

There have been moments behind the microphone where I’ve looked at a sentence and thought: Why would you write this?

Or I’ve attempted some ridiculous collection of words for the fourth time and silently questioned every decision that led the author to that particular sentence.

Then I go back to something I wrote myself and discover I did exactly the same thing.

Possibly worse.

It’s difficult to remain judgmental after that.

An author isn’t thinking about where I’m going to breathe when they’re caught up writing a scene at one in the morning and they probably shouldn’t be.

But I started noticing something, writing that flows naturally when spoken often feels better on the page, too. That’s when I stopped only noticing these things in other people’s books.

I started seeing them in mine.

So I read my last book aloud

By the time I finished my last book, Static Daddy, narration had got far enough inside my head that I couldn’t edit the way I used to.

So before I was willing to press publish on the manuscript, I read it aloud.

All of it.

Not silently while imagining the voices.

Actually aloud.

It takes ages.

It also feels slightly ridiculous sitting alone performing full conversations between people who don’t exist.

But I caught things.

Quite a lot of things.

Sentences my eyes had happily accepted suddenly felt clumsy coming out of my mouth.

Repeated words jumped out.

I changed dialogue.

I found places where I naturally wanted to pause but the sentence was fighting me.

There were lines where the emotion sounded perfect inside my head, but when I actually performed them?

Nope.

It wasn’t there.

Occasionally I got halfway through a sentence, stopped and wondered why I’d made it so bloody difficult to say.

So I changed it.

Not because I wanted to make the manuscript easier for a narrator.

I wasn’t trying to write an audiobook.

I changed it because hearing the words exposed things another silent edit hadn’t.

And I thought the writing was better afterwards.

Reading a manuscript aloud before recording isn’t some strange habit I invented either. Author’s Republic recommends complete read-throughs aloud when authors are preparing to narrate their own audiobooks.

The difference for me was when I started doing it.

I wasn’t preparing to record.

I hadn’t even submitted the manuscript yet.

It had simply become part of how I edited.

I don’t want a microphone dictating how I write. Prose can do things ordinary speech can’t. Sometimes a difficult sentence is exactly the right sentence. Repetition can be deliberate. Dialogue can be uncomfortable because the moment itself is uncomfortable.

Books are still books.

But reading aloud has become another editing tool for me.

A surprisingly brutal one.

I don’t think I can go back now

I expected becoming an audiobook narrator to teach me how to narrate.

That seems fairly obvious.

I didn’t expect it to change how I write.

My eyes can forgive repetition. My ears usually won’t.

My brain can supply the emotion I meant to put into a line. Saying it aloud tells me whether I actually put it there.

And my eyes can glide through an awkward sentence.

My mouth has to survive it.

With my last book, I read the whole manuscript aloud before I was happy submitting it.

I expect I’ll do the same with the next one.

Not because every book I write will become an audiobook, or because prose needs to be written for performance.

Simply because my ears catch things my eyes don’t.

It took getting behind a microphone for me to realize that.

I just wish I’d done it sooner.

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