Audrey

Here’s the best writing aid I’ve come across in a while: a program that reads your story aloud to you in a sort-of human-sounding voice. You can even export the reading as an mp3 file and put it on your iPod. Then you can pace around the kitchen listening to your story, and if something strikes a wrong note, you can fix it and quickly export another audio file. This has a few advantages over working at the monitor: You get more exercise. You don’t wear out your eyes as quickly. You’re more likely to catch typos, since your eyes play a lot more tricks on you than your ears (at least, mine do). You also get a better sense of what the story sounds like when read aloud. This is important to me, because I’ve been trying to focus more attention on writing stories that work well when read aloud. After some very cursory poking around on the net, I bought NaturalReader, which works pretty well. (Someone else may know of some better and/or cheaper alternative.) You have to choose from a whole list of voices. I finally settled on “Audrey,” a female voice with a British accent. Audrey sounded slightly less grating than any of the American accents, which is important if you’re going to spend hours and hours listening to her. She actually sounds (to me) a lot like Victoria Tennant’s character in L.A. Story, one of my favorite movies. That is to say, her voice is kinda sexy. I admit that on a few occasions I’ve succumbed to the temptation to use her voice for non-writing-related purposes — that is, having her say stuff like, “David, I can’t stand it anymore! I have to see you! Fly to London tomorrow. We’ll have tea and crumpets in bed,” just to see what it sounds like. Anyway, having the computer read your story to you works really well. Give it a shot. So far the only real drawback is that I think maybe I’m starting to fall in love with Audrey.