Beth Kephart: A Voice of Her Own

I learned yesterday that UNDERCOVER will be made into an audio book and the news made me stop, for a moment, and wonder: What sort of voice will carry my Elisa, the protagonist of UNDERCOVER, onto a digital recording? Pitch, tone, inflection, emphasis—the way a story is read out loud defines (in that instant) the story itself. It tells listeners what matters, what is yet tender, what doors have been closed. It shapes perceptions.

It's important, I think, to write our stories and poems with an ear for how they will sound when read aloud. I keep my own office door closed when I work—not for fear of being disturbed by the world beyond my desk, but for fear of disturbing the quiet soul in the living room, who doesn't necessarily want to hear me reading my sentences out loud again, and again. Which is what I do. Which is what I am doing right now. Even with this blog I am testing the words as they might sound if someone chose to read them aloud.

I learned the importance of all this slowly, over time, by going to bookstores and listening to writers read their own work. I like testing my sense of how the words should sound against the way the writers actually voice them. I like looking for clues on the page as to how a passage is meant to be delivered, and then I translate what I've learned into my own work.

I think we writers owe our readers that. We need to remember that words are active, meant to be lifted from the page or the screen by tongue, throat, and air.

Beth Kephart
Author of Undercover

www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com