Adam Gopnik’s review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1 drills quickly to a truth about spoken language and written language, and the skill involved in creating the sense of speaking for readers. 

“[The] book… emerges now as a disjointed and largely baffling bore.

“This is a fault not of the editors but of Twain’s conception and, it must be said, of his dictated prose, which is slack and anti-rhythmic. Scarcely a single sentence in the whole thousand pages stands out to be admired. People who write by ear, as Twain did, are often really writing by eye; the variations in sentence length and syllable count, which give the effect of speech, depend on seeing the sentences set down. Left to our own devices, we all speak sentences of about the same length and style.

These differences are much on my mind since I’ve begun creating digital stories, but in the opposite way. Traditional digital storytelling begins by writing a 200-word (+/-) narration, then you reading the story into a mic, putting your narration into a video-editing program and adding images and background music.

What happens, though, is that as soon as you start to read your story out loud, you begin to change the words so that they aren’t reading words, but spoken words, with a spoken rhythm.

Adam Gopnik’s writing style in his own autobiographies — my favorite being Paris to the Moon — reads like a relaxed conversation. So I wondered as I read The New Yorker this morning, how Gopnik’s books sound when they are read out loud.

When you’re retired, you have time to indulge your wonderings, so I dodged into Amazon and found a five-minute clip from the unabridged Audiobook ($30). I listen. Amazon doesn’t say who is reading Paris to the Moon; it is easy to imagine that it is Gopnik…or David Sedaris, whose voice and cadence sound about the same. This is not quite a compliment, because I’ve found that listening to Sedaris’s humor gets boring pretty quickly, even though Sedaris, like Gopnik, is a great read.

Now I’m really wondering. How does Nora Ephron sound? Great! Funny without straining. A performance. I’m listening now to a 10-minute segment from the unabridged Audiobook ($10) of I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman. Is it Ephron herself? I don’t know and I don’t care. The woman sounds like I think Ephron would sound — and, even though I can keep up this wondering indulgence all morning, I need to stop and get some writing of my own done.