I don’t remember when I first realized, that what I considered to be a final draft wasn’t really final. I had worked on the novel from sketch, to rough, to first, to second, to final draft, frequently with sub-drafts in between. I came to the point where I could do no more, it was done, I was finished, and it was ready for submission and publication.

Except that it wasn’t. It needed a lot more polish, fine details, little things. I learned this when I was giving a reading at a convention, of a novel which had been published and was available in the dealer’s room and on line. One typo could be forgiven, maybe, but there were more than that on those first few pages, some words weren’t right, and some were out of place.

Most readings at conventions are delivered as quickly as if they were being read silently, and often with little or no inflection. It sounds like the reader just wants to get it over with. I had been almost as bad. That bothered me, until I remembered what I had learned about reading aloud to an audience, when I had been a member of Toastmasters International. Most of our speeches were to be given from memory, but sometimes we read things aloud. 

Part of Toastmasters was getting evaluations from other members. A common comment for readers was to go more slowly. Of course. So I tried doing that for my next read speech, and I was more careful, as if I were recording an audio book. Or as if I were telling the story instead of reading it. I could feel the difference in the audience’s response.

I had tried to read my novel that way while at the convention, which was how I had found the problems. Later, I read the manuscript I had just finished that way, as if to an audience of interested fans, and I found typos, doubled words, missing words, misspelled words, bad phrasing, sentences or even paragraphs out of place, and on and on. And reading it aloud took longer than I had hoped, because it took time to fix all the problems I found. Sometimes I had to fix the same problem more than once. But when I had gone all through it, I was pleased with what I had accomplished. 

I had the experience, many years ago, while typing up a hand-written text, of being able to continue to read, and to type, while responding to something Diane was telling me. I was rather surprised by this. I had slowed down a lot, but I had done it all at the same time: read, write, hear, and speak. Amazing.

Years later I read an article about the verbal part of the brain, which turned out to have four different regions: reading, writing, hearing, and speaking. It vindicated my understanding of what I had done. 

Later I began to think that the writing region was also divided into hand-writing and typing. I couldn’t test it — left hand on keyboard, right hand holding a pen. But other writers have told me that their first drafts are frequently if not always hand-written, and sometimes their corrections are done by hand too, because they are thinking differently by hand than by keyboard. That is my experience as well. 

Reading a text silently uses only the reading region of the verbal part of my brain. Reading aloud also involves the speaking and hearing regions, which lets me become aware of things I would otherwise have missed. 

When I have finished what I used to think of as the ‘final’ draft of a story, it is so familiar that I am reading what I know, not what is actually on the page. I need to back off, and not just so that I can read it as if it were almost the first time. I now polish every ‘finished’ text by reading it aloud. It has helped a lot.

And I have learned how to read aloud three times, each with a different emphasis. I’ll have to get to that next time.