My wife and I are audiobook narrators (her more than I) and I was curious if you write with that potential in mind? Some phrasings really are a challenge even for the best narrators, though when read silently they may not seem difficult or hard to understand. Also, I've read some well known writers suggest to read what you write outloud. I think Stephen King even suggested in his book, though I may be getting it confused with another. Anyway, I was just curious whether it was part of your process and/or if you thought it would be helpful or would get in the way (I'm a beginning writer).
I don't think about the audio aspect, no, and yeah sometimes when I read my stuff out loud to my husband, I find the sentences harder to read than I first thought lol. It's not a huge concern for me though because books are primarily read. However, it might be smart to keep the audio aspect in mind when writing, since audiobooks are quite popular these days.
Yeah, it is a growing trend and with ACX and Kindle it is growing even faster with all the Indie books going that route.
We read out portions of our novels at our writer's group, and it certainly flags up problem areas. What is most interesting is when we give our work to somebody else to read out loud, instead of reading it ourselves. The other person doesn't know what's coming, so they can only work with what's actually on the page. It's very helpful. No work is ever likely to be harmed by making the sentences flow more easily.
I am actually getting ready to do this with the next round of revisions. I have someone who agreed to go over it with me line by line out loud. As a writing consultant for a community college, I read papers out loud with students and they find this very helpful. I can imagine it will make a big difference in how well a novel flows. That is a great idea to imagine how it would sound as an audio book.
I do, but in later drafts. I've been working on a story right now and I realized I'd created a bit of a tongue twister. In one paragraph. Visually it looked fine and the verb was excellent but when you read it out loud there was a stumble. I had to ditch the excellent verb for a plain one but the sentence became clearer and cleaner.
