If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.
A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.
The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
A writer without a reader doesn't exist.
I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.'
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.