Gay Talese’s outline for “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” 1966, written on a shirt board.
If you haven’t read it, read it.
Read the article. It’s amazing.
what dOEs ThIS sOuNd like? — The Hairpin
This comments section IS SO INTERESTING. Do you hear a narrating voice in your head when you read? Do you “see” a film when you read fiction? Do you pick up writing or speech patterns? OTHER PEOPLE DO/DON’T.
Oooh, this is a really interesting topic. I don’t hear anything when I read, and I find trying to imagine it really disconcerting! As I’m sure is equally true when someone who does “hear” what they read imagines hearing nothing at all.
I almost never “see” what I read, including characters, which is part of the reason that names/nicknames are carry so much weight for me as a reader and a writer. The closest I’ve been able to describe how I read is sort of like a page-to-memory transcription, where my brain puts the sequence and meaning of the words into my memory without processing them as sounds or recognizing what’s being described as an image.
Another interesting question: how do you remember things you’ve read? If I’m trying to remember the specific words (like for the purposes of quotation), I generally see an image of the words on the page/screen. If I’m just trying to remember the sense of a passage, I can generally “see” particular actions or settings, and characters to a lesser extent, but still don’t “hear” dialogue as sound. I kind of just see the written speech on top of the image. (Basically, my brain is a Tumblr gifset, lol.)
i imagine things almost entirely in terms of language (like. if i try to imagine my dad’s face it sort of looks like my dad’s face until i sort of mentally zoom in on it and then it’s just the word ‘dad’ over and over again, it’s a little bizarre) so the idea of imagining texts in terms of images is a bit…foreign to me, because i imagine images in terms of texts anyway.
and the way i read is also unusual—i read in paragraphs; i’ll read the first and last sentence of a paragraph and then skim backwards and forwards over it until i get the gist of what’s happening. which isn’t particularly…conducive to audio imagination?
a friend once took a philosophy of mind class and one of the things that really stuck out to her was an exercise they did, which was to imagine a blue triangle and a red triangle at the same time. i can’t do it, unless i give them both some kind of signifier other than ‘blue triangle’ and ‘red triangle.’
oh and someone mentioned dreams!!! my dreams are all genuinely incredibly weird, and i’m pretty sure that they’re actually just disconnected images that i subconsciously attach a narrative to because my brain wants everything to be a narrative.
I am loving this conversation! Aside from being an innately pretty fascinating topic, I’m having fun envisioning different ways people are digesting my writing. After all, I try to write in a way that is pleasing for the way that I read.
Because I “hear” the words being read aloud when I read silently, rhythm is incredibly important to my writing, especially in my prose. In my mind, I have a particular set of beat patterns and inflections with which my writing is being “read”. One of the reasons I’m fanatical about punctuation in my writing (seriously, have you seen the number of semi-colons and em dashes I use?) is because I tend not to use it for grammatical meaning, but as a style guide to force the reader to read each sentence with the same beat structure I have for it in my head. Another side-effect of this is that when I write my drafts, I use a lot of place holders in sentences where I know the structure and number of syllables of the word I want to go there, but not the word itself. Here’s an example of what I mean from the Harriet/Peter fic I started writing and haven’t had a chance to finish yet:
‘There is nothing more maddening,’ said she, ‘than to question one’s own motives after the thing is gone and done with.’
Peter swiveled slightly at the torso, so as to bring to bear on the matter the full force of his perspicacious expression.
‘Well,’ he invited, making infuriatingly little effort to conceal the amusement on his lips, ‘let’s hear the gravamen, then. One hardly [ 1 ] the [ 2 ] without intending something in the way of exposition.’
Harriet frowned.
‘Damn, Peter!’ she invected, ‘I’m hardly as dramatic as all that.’
Where [1] is a three-syllable word with the most emphasis on the first syllable (and least emphasis on the middle syllable) and [2] is a one-syllable word. In addition to number of beats and emphasis on each beat, I also pay very careful attention to the distribution of sounds in a sentence or a paragraph. To zeroth order, you can think of this like managing consonance and assonance in poetry. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that I have sound-texture synesthesia: when I hear a sound, I feel an associated three-dimensional space taking place in (roughly) the space of my throat, ears and sinuses. Essentially, what happens is this: I read the words, I hear the words, I feel the space linked to those words. Therefore, “balancing” the sounds in my writing is literally like balancing a physical composition. I strive to create an aesthetically pleasing juxtapostion of sounds that are tall and wide; sharp and round; hollow and full.
That being said, all of this structure falls away if you are reading a paragraph the way poins describes above, for example! To a large extent, the characters and the plot will carry over between different ways of processing reading, but I feel like a huge amount of the details won’t translate (in a visceral way) to people digesting it differently.
I guess the larger point I’m driving to is this: is there some common ground at which we all meet when deciding whether writing is accomplished vs. unaccomplished? Certainly, there is a stereotype that no two people will agree on the “best” writing style, and these types of processing issues no doubt play some kind of role in that disagreement. But in this discussion, I’ve learned that a number of people who’ve said nice things about my writing (at one point in time or the other) have been processing it COMPLETELY differently—not only from me, but from one another! Is there some meta-pattern that links them all?
Like I said, fascinating discussion.
Oh, and don’t even get me STARTED on dreams.
This comments section IS SO INTERESTING. Do you hear a narrating voice in your head when you read? Do you “see” a film when you read fiction? Do you pick up writing or speech patterns? OTHER PEOPLE DO/DON’T.
It will probably not surprise anyone who has read my writing that I both hear and see everything I read. All the time. This (and some other reading issues) combine to make me one of the slowest readers I know. But I remember a very high percentage of what I read, so maybe it balances out in terms of utility?
Interestingly, I don’t hear what I’m reading in my voice, but individual characters’ (or narrators’) voices. I think this is an aspect of why I write good dialogue, or why I enjoy doing fanfic parlor tricks. In some ways, it’s an act of curation as much as creation: run the dialogue again in your head… does the character sound like him/herself? Yes? Move on to the next line.
Despite what he said, Jane knew this was why Paul wrote: without a book, he was cut off from the others, pacing alone in an empty room.
But just as there is a sadness in being alone, the knowledge of something beautiful—just out of your reach—is one of life’s most agonizing cruelties. That was the danger of writing a book. That was loneliness. Not to write was merely isolation.
This was a hard question, Jane admitted to herself as she walked down the sidewalk in the sad, suburban darkness. She thought about her old apartment and wished that she were there, among the buildings. They would have comforted her. She would have taken solace in the peeling paint of an old windowsill or the clean cut of a new high rise against the skyline. At the very least, they would have given her something to think about beyond the intolerable ugliness of being lonely.
Did buildings feel lonely?
Well, of course they didn’t. They were made of concrete and steel and marble and plastic, and these things didn’t condescend to feelings. But to put it another way, was it lonely to be a building?
How odd, in all her years photographing architecture, it had never been a question of any importance to her.
A building didn’t seem lonely. Tall buildings were surrounded by other tall buildings. Even small buildings were filled with the people for whom they had been built to fulfill a particular purpose or function. Purpose was good.
Warehouses and abandoned buildings were full of things, too: mysterious boxes, broken machinery, the nests of animal squatters. Surely to be full was a precaution against being lonely.
But Jane was not so sure.
Paul had said that he was full: full of people, full of places. And yet, at that moment, he seemed the loneliest man alive.
For the first time in a very long time, she thought of the faceless men. It had been so hard for her, when she was young, to be constantly discovering and being deserted by their fellowship. But Paul, she secretly suspected, had been asked to endure something far worse.
He, too, knew a version of the faceless man.
They didn’t pass on the street or make eye contact across a car on the train. They certainly never spoke. Paul was the only one of his kind in all the world. His fellows were scattered throughout the centuries, communicating through messages coded in the pages of books. They called out like solitary wolves, separated from one another across the canyons of time.
On a bright September afternoon, when Poppy was in the fourth grade, Jane sat in the printing studio with the windows open, listening to the birds in the tree outside.
It was one of those timeless hours, where the sun freezes between the yellowing branches and the whole day takes on a twilight quality. The earth pauses momentarily in the last throes of summer before its dramatic swing into the bosom of winter darkness
Jane was working on a small batch of books which had been commissioned by the wife of a local professor of Arabic Language and Literature, on the occasion of her husband’s sixtieth birthday. Jane had been recommended to her by an associate of Paul’s. She had been assured that Mrs. Hayes was the perfect candidate to print an art house edition of T. E. Lawrence’s masterpiece, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
This meant a close and tedious reading was required before any design decisions could be made.
Jane put down the book and walked to the window. She wished that Paul were there. He was much better at this sort of thing. But he was off for the weekend at a conference in Milwaukee. He had driven up Friday morning and was due back that night. Poppy was staying with a friend from judo class, leaving Jane alone in the house. Alone with her thoughts, alone with the twilight, most of all alone with the unfinished book.
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She was sitting in the middle of the floor with all of the papers spread out around her. It was 3:38 am when I came home and I had expected to find her asleep.
“What does it say about me that all of my protagonists are smokers?” she asked as I sat down across from her on the couch.
“That you’re saving a lot of money on an expensive fictional habit,” I told her.
She frowned.
“My main characters aren’t all me,” she said. ”They’re much more likely to be somebody else.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her.
“Like who?” I asked.
“People I’m attracted too,” she said without hesitation. ”I have this thing I do,” she confessed, leaning on my knees, “Every time I’m attracted to somebody new, I have to figure out how to write them. I want to study all their facial tics, learn to imitate their body language, copy their speech patterns. I want to pinpoint all the things that drive me crazy about them.”
“Doesn’t that take the mystery out of it?” I asked.
“Maybe a little,” she said.
“Then why do you do it?”
“So I can call them up whenever I feel like it,” she said. ”So they belong to me.”
“Now that,” I said with certainty, “Says something about you.”
Hackney Shed by Office Sian in London, England.
Hi Neil. Your blog about fountain pens reminds me that I’ve always wondered where on Earth authors who handwrite their work find the courage to re-type everything afterward so it can be printed. Now I’ve grown up I’ve realised they probably don’t. In my mind, either they scan their work and a smart software does that for them, either they have very, very dedicated professionals that do that. I can’t be the only one to wonder. Could you please put an end to our wondering and tell us how it works?
You type it out, changing things on the way, and making the work better. It’s called “a second draft”.
Indeed. No one wants to read my notebooks. Ever. I promise.
