Story and Medium
The Specific and the Universal
An unfortunate side effect of Tuesday’s Shelf Life is it reminded me about the “saying writers should read is ableism” discourse and now I’m irritated all over again. Therefore, instead of whatever topic you were going to get today you get this one. This happens a lot. Shelf Life is not much more than a map of my hopping, skipping, jumping thought process. I have too many thoughts so I put them here where people may read them or not as they choose. This replaces a previous method where I’d get fixated on something and send fifty “and one other thing” texts to the group chat in the middle of the night.
I just have a grotesque amount of thoughts all the time and I have to open the valve and let them out or else I’d never sleep.
I’m going to distinguish between “ability to read” and “read” because I’m a person who has the ability to read; I know how to read, I can look at words and know what they mean. My mental health situation, however, can make it challenging for me to read even though I know how. It’s a combination of ADHD that makes it hard to choose what I focus on and depression that makes it hard to stay motivated to do an activity. I read when I can and I don’t beat myself up when I can’t.
Question the first: Do you have to read to be a writer? No, you absolutely do not. You don’t even have to be able to read or write to be a writer. We have this little thing now called “speech to text,” where your phone or other device takes dictation for you. Before anybody gets all “well that’s not writing,” please be mindful that plenty of prominent writers through the ages have used dictation to write their manuscripts. It’s how John Milton wrote Paradise Lost. The difference between then and now is many people have access to a phone or computer that can do the voice transcription for free, whereas in prior eras you had to pay (or otherwise compel) someone to do that work.
In short: Dictating a novel aloud has always been an accepted method of writing. The only new part is using a device instead of, you know, a woman, servant, or enslaved person.
I know about this firsthand because at my first office job one of my responsibilities was transcribing correspondence for busy executives using a Dictaphone. Anyone born even thirty seconds later than I was probably needs to take a moment to Google that word.
Question the second: Does reading improve a writer’s writing skill? Yes, it absolutely does. Again, you don’t need to “be able to read” in the traditional sense to “read” a book. Listening to an audiobook is reading. Someone reading a book to you is reading. There’s nothing special about reading words with your eyes instead of your ears (audiobook) or your fingertips (Braille). Our brains react the same way regardless of reading method. You can read more about this in Deniz et al in the Journal of Neuroscience.
To sum up the above in a few brief points:
You don’t need to read, nor have the ability to read, nor even have the ability to write, to write.
Reading is a method of improving writing skill.
All reading is reading, regardless of the sensory organ we use to consume the text.
Even if you can read sometimes you can’t read (because of mental or physical health issues, lack of leisure time, or other reasons).
Every writer has a different threshold for how much time and effort they can and will put into improving their writing, and every writer chooses how they will spend that time and effort. While one person may write and only write—devoting all their efforts to practice and gaining experience—another person may mix writing with reading the fiction of their peers, reading books on craft, attending workshops, participating in critique groups, and so on.
Any mix that includes writing is the education path of a writer. The only requirement for being a writer is you write. No matter how much you read, study, and attend workshops, think about writing, and planning to write, you’re not a writer if you don’t write. (Discussed at length in No True Scotsman.) Writing is the bar to entry for being a writer. That’s it. Doesn’t matter whether you use a word processor or a pen or a Dictaphone.
Question the third: But why would someone want to write if they don’t like to read? I see this question come up whenever this discourse rears its head, sometimes in variations of, “But why would you write in X genre if you don’t like to read X genre?”
People have stories and we want to tell them.
Most people, even those who don’t read (using any method) or can’t, still consume stories. Novels and prose fiction are not the only stories out there that people consume. Movies tell stories. Video games often tell stories. Television shows tell stories. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books tell stories. Songs tell stories. People tell each other stories orally. I think you would be hard pressed to find a person who doesn’t consume story in any of those media.
Stories and storytelling are so baked into the human experience that our brains keep on telling us stories while we’re sleeping. Everyone has a story to tell, even people who think they don’t. Even the youngest children will start spinning little yarns as soon as they can form sentences.
Writing fiction, as it happens, has one of the lowest bars to entry of any form of storytelling and that makes it appeal to a lot of people. To write fiction—to accomplish the mechanical act of writing fiction, that is—you need only communicate your idea in words. You might write them down or you might dictate them for transcription but that’s all it takes.
Writing a song requires some musical ability, or collaboration with people who do. A graphic novel or comic requires art skills or collaboration with someone who has them. Making a video game requires technical skills and software most people don’t have. Making a film requires a huge investment of time and money, and again you need the cooperation of other people who bring the skills you don’t have (like actors, musicians, camera operators).
But to write a novel, or a series of novels, or a short story, you only need yourself and some words.
Storytelling has universal principles. They don’t change depending on the medium you use to tell the story. For instance, all stories require characters. That’s true whether you’re writing a novel or making a video game (if that game has a story, not all of them do) or a movie. It doesn’t matter where you got your education in story, you’re going to know about these things: Character, setting, plot, conflict, resolution. Pacing, point of view, theme. A writer might not know that explicitly but they will know it intuitively from their exposure to story in any and all of its forms.
In addition to the universal principles of storytelling, different media have different principles and rules for telling a story using that medium. For instance, telling a story in a video game includes an element of interactivity and self-direction that is absent from books (except for Choose Your Own Adventure–style narratives). Telling a story on film incorporates visuals and sounds in a way that telling a verbal story on paper doesn’t and can’t.
Let’s devote what remains of today’s Shelf Life to considering a principle of storytelling unique to fiction and creative nonfiction writing (novels, short stories, memoirs, et cetera). If you want to write but came into your love of storytelling primarily through another medium, this is an area you may want to consider, focus on, or practice as you write.
Fiction writing requires attention to prosody. Prosody is a funny term because it looks like it comes from prose (prose-ody?) but it does not. Prose comes from the Latin prōrsus, meaning “direct” or “straightforward.” Prosody comes from the Latin prosodia (meaning the accent or rhythm of speech), a loanword from the Greek προσῳδῐ́ᾱ (prosōidíā), meaning a song, or the tone or pitch of a word.
Anyhow, when I say prosody I mean attention to the speech sounds produced by your writing were it read aloud. For instance, the rhythm of your text, the flow of stressed and unstressed syllables created by the order in which you place your words, is an element of prosody. Much of human emotion is communicated not through our words but through the speed at which we say them, the tone of voice we use, the timbre or pitch of our voice as we’re talking, the volume of our voice (loudness). When we’re writing text (as opposed to telling a story orally or on film using actors), we have to compensate for that lack of visual and auditory cue.
Part of the way that’s done is through modulating the rhythm of your text, sentence length, even word length. A series of short, direct sentences using simple, unornamented language, for instance, comes across like a staccato barrage, faster and more urgent than long, complex sentences with multiple clauses and three-dollar words. The reader can get through the short and simple sentences faster than the complicated sentences, which speeds up their reading pace and creates a sense of urgency. That’s a method you can only use in the prose medium. While other media may speed up the pacing in other ways, only with writing do you incite the reader to speed up their own pace.
Most people write differently than we speak. We tend to write more formally and speak more casually. When writing, we have the luxury of time to select words with care, whereas when speaking we can’t usually meditate on word choice. Writing is more deliberate and intentional, but this can cause writing to lose some of the rhythm and music of human speech.
When you read your own writing silently, in your head, you use imagination to compensate for things that might not be explicitly included in the text. For instance, inflection in dialogue. You might hear a character saying something a certain way in your head, perhaps so clearly that you can’t imagine any other reader hearing it a different way than you intended, but that’s your imagination filling in gaps. The reader’s imagination is going to fill those gaps, too, but maybe not in the way you intended.
Before you let your writing out the door, listen to it aloud with an ear for the prosody. Listen to the rhythms of the text. Listen carefully to determine whether there are places where the sentence length and meter is too repetitive, or whether there are sentences that drag on and on and get hard to follow. You can listen to your manuscript by using a text-to-speech reader on your device (most web browsers have these built in), or asking someone to read it aloud to you, or even reading it aloud to yourself.
Writing is different from media that include visual and or audio elements because writing may be read silently with the eyes or fingertips or aloud using a screen reader or human narrator. A single reader might read your work multiple ways: They might read a chapter from your book tonight in bed and then listen to the next chapter aloud tomorrow morning on the treadmill. You can’t read a movie silently in your head, or read a song on your e-reader (you could read the lyrics but they’re not the whole story).
Whether readers read your story aloud or silently, your prosody affects their experience. Put this tool in your writing toolbox, and make sure you keep it sharp.
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