JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #70
September 23, 2021
Sometimes when you listen to someone read a text that you can read along with them, you’ll notice an interesting phenomenon. People change and rearrange words as they read aloud, despite the fact that the words are printed right there on a piece of paper. It’s even more stunning when authors and writers do this with a story that they have themselves written and revised and agonized over. Obviously there’s something going on in the brain, between the interpretive faculty of language and the processes of speech production, a kind of translation between meaningful symbols that wind up offset, not quite lined up. Sometimes, these adjustments can change meaning in subtle ways.
When we read, the specific words on the page can become invisible behind the meanings in our minds that those words engender. I remember I was at a resort in Orlando a few years ago when I noticed a plaque with five lines of text that was missing a word. I remarked on this, but the person I was with couldn’t see the mistake, even after a dozen or more readings, even when I narrowed it down by saying the word was missing from the last line of text. When I finally showed them the error, it became obvious to them, but up until that moment, their brain had reflexively filled in the missing word so that they couldn’t recognize its absence.
I think it’s useful for writers to develop the skill of noticing the words on the page rather than relying on our natural tendency to fill in expected meanings. It takes practice, I think, and we’ll never be perfect. No matter how many times we read a manuscript, we’ll inevitably miss something. I know that I lose the ability to see the words on the page after I’ve read something twenty or thirty times. At that point even the meaning gets garbled.
But when we force ourselves to slow down and take note of every word, and we practice so that it’s automatic, we gain the ability to pay closer and closer attention to our prose and the effects that slight adjustments can have in the fictive experience for the reader. We have a better capacity for editing and revising because we can see the errors, the missing words, the duplicated meanings, the slightly disjunct wordings that have the potential to lead the reader astray. By training ourselves to read slowly and carefully, to pay attention to what’s actually on the page rather than what we expect to be there, we can learn to become more subtle writers.
Next: What is a Story?