Audiobooks are more popular than ever, partly because they fit into our lifestyles, but also because great actors and readers can make prose come alive off the page. Here we'll learn to listen to our own writing, drawing from the sheer act of reading aloud in order to develop character, pace plot, and make our sentences sing. We’ll listen to exemplary performances, from Joe Morton’s rendition of Ellison’s Invisible Man to Morrison’s masterful delivery of Beloved, with a pit stop in the comedy club that is Lipsyte’s The Ask. We’ll attune ourselves to the grain of voice, the melodic contours of language, and the overlapping pulses of scene and sentence. Next, we’ll do writing activities that summon narrative voices for first drafts and in revision, or re-audition, as we might think of it, such that our stories will resound in readers’ inner ears long after they put them down.
Tim Horvath (www.timhorvath.com) is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and Circulation (sunnyoutside press), a novella. His recent work appears in Harvard Review, Conjunctions, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA and low-re... Read More →
