 Hello, hello, writers. I'm Christine Kiefer, author of fantasy fiction and creative writing resources. And you are listening to the Well-Sturried podcast, where I share insights, encouragement, and actionable advice designed to help you craft sensational novels and build your best writing life. Always in 30 minutes or less, so you can get back to writing, of course. Ready for the show? Let's get talking. Hello and welcome once again to another episode of the Well-Sturied podcast. Today is Friday, January 17th, 2020, and today's episode is a little bit different than normal, in that it is an audio translation of a new guest post over on the Well-Sturied blog. Today's post is called Seven Ways Audio Can Make Editing Fast and Easy, and it was written by Dustin Maxey. Dustin is the founder of Edit Out Loud, which is an app that enables writers to listen to their manuscripts in progress and make revision notes that they can later translate onto their computer to make revision fast and easy. Dustin is also a fiction writer, a software engineer, musician, and a father of two. The tedium of editing his 130,000 word novel was the inspiration for Edit Out Loud. Not only is editing incredibly hard, but also difficult to set aside time to do. Not being able to listen to his novel while jogging, driving, or grocery shopping seemed like a missed opportunity. Out of that inconvenience, Edit Out Loud was born. If you would like to learn more about Edit Out Loud, you can visit www.editoutloud.com or you can follow along with the Edit Out Loud app on Facebook or Twitter at Edit Out Loud. But today's episode is no mere advertisement for Edit Out Loud, friends. This is a fantastic piece on how to use audio in many different forms and using many different techniques to make revising and editing your novel that much easier. So without any further ado, if you would like to read along as you listen in, make sure to head on over to www.well-storied.com-audio. Now let's get started. Are you an audiobook fan? Statistically, you're probably not. It's undeniable that audiobooks are picking up steam. Just look at how popular audible.com has become. Still, most people prefer reading for entertainment the old-fashioned way, according to research from the Pew Research Center. Say what you will about listening for entertainment. When it comes to editing a novel, listening aloud has definite benefits. Many reputable sources online point out the advantages of listening to or reading your work out loud, including one from pointer.org and another from the University of North Carolina, which are both linked for you in today's transcript at www.well-storied.com-audio, among many others. All that said, keep listening to learn the top seven benefits of listening to your work aloud. These advantages might just change the way you edit your novels. Benefit number one, make more time to edit. One of the biggest hurdles to editing is finding the time to do it. You have to put life aside and seclude yourself for long periods of time to make the smallest dent in a 100,000-word novel. However, using text-to-speech tools allows you to make more time to edit because you can listen to your novel while driving, jogging, or walking your dogs. Dustin finds that audio allows you to outpace physical editing sessions at a computer by tens of thousands of words a week, simply because you have more time to listen than to sit down at a computer. On some of Dustin's better days, he's been able to leverage text-to-speak to edit more than 50,000 words in a single day. But what does he mean by edit with text-to-speech? Really, he's talking about identifying errors that you will address later. It's a little too cumbersome for Dustin to type with smartphone keyboards, but editing his manuscript on a computer using revision notes he left when listening to his novel out loud makes physical editing sessions much faster and less tedious. As you'll see in benefit number six, listening straight through in a less stop-and-go format has additional advantages. But first, benefit number two, gain a new perspective. Listening to your novel can also give you a new perspective on your work. When you spend countless hours writing and revising the same document, your story can begin to blur. Listening is a more passive way of editing that allows you to enjoy your book as a reader, or audiobook listener in this case. Simply switching your manuscript's font or your editing environment can change your format enough to give you a new perspective. Audio isn't always required for additional objectivity, but when first researching the benefits of audio as an editing tool, Dustin spoke to a friend who makes a living as an author, editor and college-level writing tutor. His response confirmed Dustin's hypothesis. He said, It's a well-known fact that changing formats, listening to your work, or even changing the font can help you see it from a new perspective. The advantages are catching things you didn't before, whether those are typos, plot holes, or other story elements that need to be reworked. So, if audio isn't your thing, you can access many of these benefits by changing your format in other ways. However, in Dustin's opinion, audio is distinct in that it provides all the advantages listed in this article or episode. Benefit number three, catch plot holes. Along with a new perspective comes the ability to catch plot holes. Dustin identified many, big and small, while listening to his 130,000-word manuscript that he'd previously missed in physical editing sessions. In one scene, his main character was wearing jeans. A few paragraphs later, that character sustained a cut on his leg that would have been impossible when wearing long pants. Dustin says he must have read the chapter half a dozen times, but he didn't catch that detail until he listened to it. Plot holes are often easier to identify when listening to your manuscript because of the faster pace with which you can edit using the text-to-speech approach. For example, in the first chapter of his book, the antagonist shared in a kind and respectful conversation with the protagonist. However, much later in the book, Dustin shares that his characters seemingly forgot that interaction. That lost detail ended up having implications on the antagonist's goal and motivation throughout the rest of the story. During physical editing sessions, the first chapter and the 20th were always so far apart that Dustin never caught the contradiction. But it was more obvious when he was able to blaze through 100,000 words within a week since the first chapter was still fresh in his mind. Benefit number four, identify redundant words or sentence structure. Audio also makes redundancies obvious, though this is a benefit that any format change can provide. Dustin tracked the comments he left while listening to his novel and found that out of more than 500 comments, redundant was the most common one. For example, his novel revolves around dreams, which his protagonist often describes in great detail. In some passages, he'd end up using similar descriptions in two or three paragraphs in a row. Those things jumped out at him while listening, which later enabled him to vary his word choice for easier reading. Another redundancy Dustin frequently found dealt with sentence structure. Like many other new writers, he often used the same sentence structure again and again. For example, he often wrote several sentences in a row that started with he or his, which made for boring reading. These redundancies were painfully obvious to Dustin when he listened to his manuscript, so he tagged each of them for correction later. Benefit number five, catch errors your eyes miss. Audio can help you catch more errors in your writing. While sites like Grammarly are great for catching blatant typos and grammatical issues, they can miss more subtle mistakes. Sometimes those may be grammar errors like mistyping a word that can be grammatically correct, but doesn't work in your story. Dustin is a Grammarly user and there are two errors in the previous sentence that Grammarly didn't note. If you want to head over to today's transcript, Dustin encourages you to go back to that sentence and try to catch them. If not, you can paste the sentence into a free text-to-speech editor that he links and see if those mistakes are more obvious. Benefit number six, identify boring sections. Where a physical editing session sees you pausing often to identify, correct, and reread passages, audio doesn't stop playing other than when you leave a quick revision note. This means that boring passages in need of cutting or modification often jump out at you as you listen to your manuscript, whereas the stop-and-go process of physical editing can disguise sections that simply won't captivate readers. Dustin shares that he's attempted to quickly read through his manuscript in physical editing sessions, but that he simply couldn't help himself. If he saw an error and had the ability to change it right then and there, he was going to do it. But listening to your work forces you to work through your manuscript more quickly, experiencing your book as would a reader. Benefit number seven, get more feedback from beta readers. When Dustin first shared his novel with family and friends in written format, not a single one of them finished it. To Dustin, this made sense. Reading a 130,000-word novel is no small task. He shares that he began to wonder whether audio would make it easier for his beta readers to find time to read his book. Very late into the development of his text-to-speech app for authors, Dustin added the ability to share audio with beta readers. He found that, like himself, most beta readers preferred listening because it was easier for them to find the time to do so. They could finish his novel on their commute in less than a week. Sharing audio had the added security benefit of preventing beta readers from being able to steal his work. Even though they could see the content while it was read aloud to them, there was no way to copy anything in the text-to-speech app he built. He could rest assured that a potentially malicious beta reader wouldn't find it as easy as pasting text into their own document, changing character names, and claiming his story as if it were their own. Limitations of Text-to-Speech Apps Though text-to-speech app voices aren't exactly accomplished thespians, Dustin still found that the synthetic voices were easy enough to listen to that he was able to streamline his editing process and ultimately create a better novel more quickly. But other drawbacks made text-to-speech editing a little more difficult. Most text-to-speech apps are built for accessibility, not authors. If he heard something he needed to address when using these apps, Dustin could add a bookmark, but no details. And these bookmarks were only stored on his phone. When it came time to implement the mistakes he'd heard, he'd have to hold his phone next to his computer, find the bookmark text in his Google Doc, and try to remember why he'd added the bookmark in the first place. Was it a typo? A plot hole? A redundant word choice? Often he couldn't remember why he'd left the bookmark, so he'd just remove it, undoubtedly missing an error or opportunity to improve his book, which led him to Edit Out Loud, a text-to-speech app for writers. About a year ago, Dustin shares that he simply couldn't understand why there was no good text-to-speech solution for writers. Why was there no way to listen to a document and simply add comments when he found something that was off? What if he could even sync those comments back to his Google Doc or Word file, so he didn't have to hold his phone up next to his screen when reworking a draft? What if he could share audio drafts with beta readers and allow them to listen and add comments back to his source document? These questions served as the inspiration for Edit Out Loud, an iOS text-to-speech app built for writers that actually makes editing fun. The app allows you to listen to your audio document on your phone, sync comments and notes back to your source document, and share audio versions of your document with your beta readers so they can do the same. Dustin recently had the privilege of launching the Edit Out Loud iPhone app and the Android version is also on the way. So he encourages you to take a pass at your novel using it, as do I. If the app helps you anywhere near as much as it has helped Dustin, and as I hope it will help me as I check it out, then it will forever change the way you edit your work. Again, you can learn more about the Edit Out Loud app at editoutloud.com. I'll also leave those links for you in today's episode description. A big thank you to Dustin Maxey for not only writing today's article, but for giving me the permission to share it with you all here on the podcast in audio. I hope this deep dive into how audio can help us edit our work has really proven insightful to you. There is no one way to be a writer, of course, but I have the feeling that audio can help quite a few of us really revolutionize our writing processes for the better. But there's only one way to find out, right? So go explore. Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Podcast Writer. I hope you found it helpful to your writing journey. If so, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode and to give the podcast a quick rating and review. Doing so goes a long way toward helping the podcast reach new writers and lets me know that you're enjoying what I'm creating. You can also give me a shout out directly on Twitter at KristenUnderscoreKeeper. For additional guidance as you work to craft sensational novels and build your best writing life, be sure to head on over to www.well-storied.com where I share blog posts, workbooks, e-courses and other helpful resources for writers. Again, that's W-E-L-L-S-T-O-R-I-E-D.com. Thank you again for tuning into today's episode, my friend. Until next time, happy writing!