I've been working on a longer post that's turning out to be more research-intensive than I expected. Ideas need to simmer and details need trudging up. Suffice it to say it will be full of pseudo-Celtic goodness for fans of Civ 5 to gobble up. In the meantime, some thoughts on my new-found media love.
I'm pretty late to the audiobook party, so what is revelation for me may be redundant for many. Since learning the ins and outs of Audible last month, and getting the app to sync properly with my phone, I have not been without a book. I listen to books while cooking, while (seldom) cleaning, while tramming it up on my way to work, while shopping, while exercising, while drifting off to sleep. Just yesterday I chose to walk home, despite grim weather, because it would triple my listening-in-transit time. Combined with my Kindle, I can honestly say I've never read so much in my life.
I have always tried to be an active reader, engaging as much with the writing as the story in any given book. Unsurprisingly, ingesting a book differently (omnomnom) makes me think about it differently. I have started to notice aspects of writing that I didn't always used to.
Here's what I mean.
I keep a writing journal (as every aspiring writer should) with a section for "prose to emulate," where I record sentences, phrases, images, and really anything I find stylistically impressive. The entries range from simple yet elegant, to rhythmic, to punchy, to startlingly beautiful, and some are just words I don't know or want to use more.
Entries noted while reading on my Kindle tend to look like this:
"...his hair was a soft brown tumble, and his eyes were brown as well, and bright with insolence."
I adore Martin's description of Loras Tyrell, simple though it is. "Tumble" and "insolence" aren't dazzling words but their employment here makes me downright giddy: "insolence" to describe eyes, rather than personality directly; "tumble" as a noun and not a verb. As well, Martin's use of "was" and "were" go against the ubiquitous advice that humdrum "to be" is as foul a thing as "thing" itself. Not so here, where anything more flowery would have distracted. Heh, flowery. Sorry. Nerd joke.
Meanwhile, here's an extract I noted from N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I've been listening to:
"The alcove suddenly seemed to stretch, its entrance moving impossibly farther away while I remained still. There was an in-breath of tension and then I shot forward as if from a sling. Walls flew at my face. I screamed and flung my arms over my eyes even as they passed through me. And then everything stopped."
The movement is quick, effortless, and almost visceral. I could feel the narrator being pulled by magic, and could visualize her believable body language. Yet I had to pause, rewind, and re-listen with care to figure out exactly how Jemisin had pulled it off.
Hearing a story read aloud tunes me in to the movement of a scene, whereas my reading eye gravitates towards striking images and word choice.
Of course, ours being a print-based culture, I feel like I am not conditioned to deal with some of the downsides of not having a tangible written story in front of me. I wanted to share a quote from Saladin's Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, but since I didn't copy it down in full, the thought of digging for it in the audiobook made my brain hurt. No matter how friendly I get with the Audible's interface I don't think audiobooks (or ebooks for that matter) will ever be as convenient for marking and referencing as printed books. Nor can they be displayed as trophies, worn and creased with repeated use, or as easily lent to friends.
Yet the balance of multiple formats offers something invaluable to writers, who can hone an ear for rhythm from some stories while practicing word-level awareness with others. I've come to view it as a crucial blend of skills. Not only is this mixed-media approach exposing me to different facets of writing, but it's also reminding me of the sorts of things people will notice in my own work. Now that I've got the hang of it, my tech-addicted brain always has a story orbiting somewhere around it, in one form or another.
*A million points if you can identify the book under my journal.
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| Audible app for iPhone, the bane of my checking account. |
I'm pretty late to the audiobook party, so what is revelation for me may be redundant for many. Since learning the ins and outs of Audible last month, and getting the app to sync properly with my phone, I have not been without a book. I listen to books while cooking, while (seldom) cleaning, while tramming it up on my way to work, while shopping, while exercising, while drifting off to sleep. Just yesterday I chose to walk home, despite grim weather, because it would triple my listening-in-transit time. Combined with my Kindle, I can honestly say I've never read so much in my life.
I have always tried to be an active reader, engaging as much with the writing as the story in any given book. Unsurprisingly, ingesting a book differently (omnomnom) makes me think about it differently. I have started to notice aspects of writing that I didn't always used to.
Here's what I mean.
I keep a writing journal (as every aspiring writer should) with a section for "prose to emulate," where I record sentences, phrases, images, and really anything I find stylistically impressive. The entries range from simple yet elegant, to rhythmic, to punchy, to startlingly beautiful, and some are just words I don't know or want to use more.
Entries noted while reading on my Kindle tend to look like this:
.JPG) |
| From George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, Kindle edition. Converted to chicken scratch by Yours Truly.* |
I adore Martin's description of Loras Tyrell, simple though it is. "Tumble" and "insolence" aren't dazzling words but their employment here makes me downright giddy: "insolence" to describe eyes, rather than personality directly; "tumble" as a noun and not a verb. As well, Martin's use of "was" and "were" go against the ubiquitous advice that humdrum "to be" is as foul a thing as "thing" itself. Not so here, where anything more flowery would have distracted. Heh, flowery. Sorry. Nerd joke.
Meanwhile, here's an extract I noted from N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I've been listening to:
"The alcove suddenly seemed to stretch, its entrance moving impossibly farther away while I remained still. There was an in-breath of tension and then I shot forward as if from a sling. Walls flew at my face. I screamed and flung my arms over my eyes even as they passed through me. And then everything stopped."
The movement is quick, effortless, and almost visceral. I could feel the narrator being pulled by magic, and could visualize her believable body language. Yet I had to pause, rewind, and re-listen with care to figure out exactly how Jemisin had pulled it off.
Hearing a story read aloud tunes me in to the movement of a scene, whereas my reading eye gravitates towards striking images and word choice.
Of course, ours being a print-based culture, I feel like I am not conditioned to deal with some of the downsides of not having a tangible written story in front of me. I wanted to share a quote from Saladin's Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, but since I didn't copy it down in full, the thought of digging for it in the audiobook made my brain hurt. No matter how friendly I get with the Audible's interface I don't think audiobooks (or ebooks for that matter) will ever be as convenient for marking and referencing as printed books. Nor can they be displayed as trophies, worn and creased with repeated use, or as easily lent to friends.
Yet the balance of multiple formats offers something invaluable to writers, who can hone an ear for rhythm from some stories while practicing word-level awareness with others. I've come to view it as a crucial blend of skills. Not only is this mixed-media approach exposing me to different facets of writing, but it's also reminding me of the sorts of things people will notice in my own work. Now that I've got the hang of it, my tech-addicted brain always has a story orbiting somewhere around it, in one form or another.
*A million points if you can identify the book under my journal.
I have over the last few years also had occasion to become rather an audiobooker - I have an assembly job that allows me to listen to headphones while I work. So I'm listening for full work-days at a time, and I don't have the ability to stop and note things down. While it doesn't allow me to absorb a lot, or note down and study wording or turns of phrase (which I regret), I think it does emphasize a big-picture view of the work and of an author's body of work. As one who would generally focus on the micro-level, it's a good shift of perspective.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, if you haven't run across the sites librivox.org and archive.org, you should check them out. Librivox offers out-of-copyright, volunteer-recorded audiobooks for free download. Of course, since it's volunteer-based, some of the readings are better than others, but still... free! And it's got some good searching and browsing tools. Archive.org is also free. It includes everything on Librivox, plus a great deal more; and it conveniently offers a zip file of each whole work (which I haven't found on the Librivox site) rather than making you download each individual track in a work. Its searches can return more irrelevant results to wade through than Librivox, though. Generally, I go to Librivox to see if works in a certain genre/by a certain author are available, and then I go to Archive.org to download them.
I'm having so much fun messing around on these websites. Thanks! You do sort of have to know what you're looking for before you search, but it's great to have such an enormous repository of free stuff. It will be a nice resource to use in between Audible credits.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Audible, if you use it on a smart phone or ipod, you can easily place bookmarks with a touch of the screen while the audible app is showing. Might be something to think about if you want to get back down to micro level listening during a long shift :)