About stories, and listening

(just some Monday morning thinking)

I don’t think fiction audiobooks work. For me, at least.

In preparing the ground for The Devil’s Sound, I listened to a lot of fiction podcasts, audiobooks, and full cast performances of fictional works.

My interest was in how serialised fiction works in an audio space. How, and specifically with attention to storytelling, narrative is presented and the medium itself is made use of.

Let me explain, or digress. A book is a material object (don’t get me started on eBooks, that’s for another day). When I’m reading it, I make use of that materiality. I can re-read, easily. I can skip back and check a fact or a name, confirm any detail. I can see how much of the overall object is left. I can measure progress against that object. I can.. (you get the idea). That materiality is part of the narrative. It’s foundational to how we read, and understand what’s going on. It’s how we relate to story.

Audio is different. Obviously. The medium itself is inherently more submerging - if I’m engaged to any degree, I’m conscious of the story as a set of voices, or a single voice, of the production and the effort that’s been put into the design of a space that really only exists for me, in that moment.

With audio, if I’m unsure about a detail, then I can rewind (honestly, who does that with any regularity) if I think I’ve missed something, but (and this is the significant bit) there’s no signifier as to where I might find the answer to a question. No latent memory of ‘just a couple of pages ago’, or longer. It’s possible that if I was paying attention to where I was, I might recall what I was walking past, or where I was driving when I might have possibly heard what I think I did, but the audiobook isn’t going to help me find where I was that way either.

Real life is distracting though. It’s possible that I could find the time to listen without anything else going on around me, but those moments are rare. I listen on the way to somewhere. I listen on my way to work, and when I’ve got a short walk. Twenty minutes or so is about right, personally speaking.

And in that listening space, I found the degree of attention required to engage with fiction to be unattainable. I just couldn’t do it. Maybe that says more about me than I’m comfortable with, but it was consistently true. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ soundtrack and audio production for the audiobook of Bunny Munro couldn’t bring me into the story. I was being distracted while trying to distract myself. I was lost inside a story, in the worst way, constantly trying to find my way back to the plot, or to who was speaking.

I didn’t have agency. I didn’t have anything to grasp. I wasn’t attending to the story, the story was running along quite happily without me, and couldn’t care less whether I was there or not.

Your milage may differ, but that’s why I’m interested in making work that demands engagement, that needs you to be aware where you are, and what’s happening.

This is part of a book. Honestly.

Endnotes

A couple of things that were once just digital and are now objects:

I picked up a copy of C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows at one of our local bookshops (we’re very lucky, we have two within walking distance) this weekend. Totally an impulse buy, but the intro copy made me think of qntm’s There is No Antimemetics Division. Drawn and remixed from Sam Hughes contributions to the SCP wiki, it’s one of the most formally daring things I read last year, and comes recommended.

The Essence is the most fun I’ve seen Dave Hutchinson have in ages.

And I did mostly design a book last week. If anyone was wondering.