Writing to Read Aloud

 

I have just written a ghost story, Victoriana, for Hannah’s 3-Minute Scares.  I submitted it as a sound recording of myself reading it aloud.  All so very different to writing to a word count.

Hannah’s Bookshelf appears on North Manchester FM internet radio every Saturday afternoon.  Hannah Kate regularly invites writers to submit seasonal pieces (Halloween, Christmas, and others such as Lammas), and she also invites book reviews, all as 3-minute sound recordings. My piece was broadcast last Saturday (25 October) and if you missed it and would still like to hear it, it's on Mix Cloud.

When writing something to read aloud, elegant punctuation and formatting are not necessary.  Even spelling mistakes are allowable, because… ssh… nobody will know.  And, my bad habit of missing out words isn’t a problem, as I find I add them automatically when speaking it.  Of course, those who write by hand don’t need to type up the story at all.

I find the following ruses help:

• Use more commas, to facilitate phrasing, of sentences.
• Use bold, italic and underline, for the words I want to emphasise.
• Use lots of ellipses… in my text… to indicate pauses.
• Hyphenate, even words which are not normally hyphen-ated. This makes pro-nunc-iation of longer words easier and guards me against runningthemtogether. 
• Divide my piece into short paragraphs. This helps me keep my place when reading.
• Avoid parentheses – brackets or em-dashes – as these will confuse the listener who is not in a position to check meaning by looking further up the page.

Working out length is tricky.  There’s no substitute for reading it through aloud, repeatedly, and timing it using the stopwatch on my phone.  Approximately 400-450 words will amount to about 3 minutes read aloud, but this is only a rule of thumb.

Some words and phrases take longer to say than others.  Words with the same number of syllables cannot necessarily be enunciated in the same number of seconds.  Try saying ‘Ingatestone’ and then ‘Coggeshall’.  Different, eh?  Acronyms are especially time-heavy.  In my Victoriana story, I changed BFF (a useful term if I’d been on a word count) to ‘Bestie’.  Beware of words which syncopate when spoken – unfortunately, ‘Bestie’ is one of these.  Don’t worry at all about writing contractions, such as ‘it’s’; you’ll do these automatically as you speak.

Hannah’s Bookshelf site has a special recording button, which is easy to use, but I do many read throughs before hitting that button for the real thing.  On the first two or three, I stop whenever I see an error and correct it, but, later, I go from beginning to end without pausing, to check timing.  I also use read-throughs to plan how I will ‘act’ my words; this is a wonderful opportunity to put extra expression and drama into plain written text.

This will be my last More Than Writers blog post.  I’ve been doing it for over ten years, and I think it’s someone else’s turn now.  So, goodbye.  Although I shall still be around, at ACW events and on the ACW Facebook Group.

Rosemary Johnson writes flash fiction, short stories, novels and book reviews, and lots else besides, including recipes for her local church magazine.  She is the author of Wodka, or Tea with Milk, a novel set during the Solidarity years in Poland in 1980-1, and Past and Present, a collection of her short stories, was published by Bridge House Publishing, in June 2025.  In real life, she lives with her husband in Essex