When I first completed my novel, I couldn’t wait to show it off. My husband agreed to be my first reader, a good thing, since I can never seem to find my own mistakes. At one point, he tapped his finger against a sentence. “Read this.”
“Somehow, Mary managed to remain calm,” I read with confidence. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Read it again.”
I read with more feeling. “Somehow, Mary managed to remain calm.”
“Again.”
“Somehow, Mary managed to remain calm.” I no longer identified with Mary.
“Really read it.” My husband seemed to lose his calm as well.
“Somehow, Mary managed to remain…” My dyslexic brain caught on. “…clam.” So much for trusting my word processing program to catch all my errors. And oh, the mistakes abounded—in direct proportion to my embarrassment.
I edit a lot of other people’s work and hear it over and over, it’s virtually impossible to catch all of our own mistakes. That’s why I have a new first reader. My Kindle.
I email my work to him (I prefer the male voice) and he reads it back to me—flaws and all. I take notes of words I’ve misspelled, left out or repeated. He’s great at helping me find redundancies and letting me know if my dialogue is strong enough to carry the emotion I’m intending.
How, you might ask?
- Create and save your document in Microsoft Word.
- Attach your document to an email addressed to username@free.kindle.com (make sure you replace username with the user name you have on file at amazon). Type the word “convert” in the subject line (without the quotation marks). Leave the body of the email blank.
- When you are connected by wifi, it will automatically download your document to your Kindle. Note: not all Kindles have a text to speech function.
It happened recently, one of those fabulously brutal critiques in which a friend labeled the darling of my story a cardboard cutout. The advice from my writing group, “Find out who she is before editing further.”
