When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I had the good fortune to study under one of the giants of American broadcasting.
His name was Norman Corwin.
To most people today, that name means very little. To those who grew up during radio’s golden age, however, Corwin was close to royalty.
He was the man whose words could stop conversations across America. Families would gather around a wooden radio cabinet, the lights would dim, and millions of people would disappear into worlds created entirely by sound.
One afternoon Corwin walked into our classroom and talked about writing.
Not structure.
Not plot.
Not character arcs.
He simply spoke about the act of writing itself.
His lecture was titled And Then I Wrote.
I’ve forgotten many lectures during the last sixty years. I have never forgotten that one.
Corwin taught us that writing wasn’t merely the arrangement of words. It was the creation of experience.
Years later I discovered Marshall McLuhan, who explained something Corwin instinctively understood.
Radio is not a visual medium.
It is participation.
Television gives you almost everything. Radio gives you almost nothing—and therefore gives you almost everything.
The listener becomes the set designer.
The costume designer.
The cinematographer.
The special-effects department.
The audience doesn’t merely watch the story.
They finish creating it.
McLuhan called radio “the theater of the mind,” and I have never found a better description.
A whisper heard through headphones can be more intimate than the largest motion picture ever filmed.
Perhaps no one demonstrated that better than Orson Welles.
In 1938 he frightened America with The War of the Worlds. Tens of thousands of listeners became convinced that Martians had landed in New Jersey because radio possessed an astonishing power: it sounded real.
Years later life played one of those strange little tricks that it occasionally enjoys.
For a time I lived at 880 Hilldale Avenue in West Hollywood.
One afternoon I found myself meeting Orson Welles.
I wish I could tell you we spent hours discussing radio, Shakespeare, Citizen Kane, and the future of storytelling.
Memory isn’t always that generous.
What I remember is something much simpler.
I remember standing there thinking that this man had permanently altered the history of storytelling.
He had proven that imagination could sometimes be more powerful than images.
Then television arrived.
Radio slowly surrendered its audience.
Families stopped gathering around loudspeakers and began gathering around screens.
For decades it appeared that radio drama had become a beautiful fossil.
And then something unexpected happened.
The internet quietly reinvented radio.
We gave it a different name.
Audiobooks.
Podcasts.
Streaming audio.
The technology changed.
Human nature didn’t.
People once again began listening while driving.
Walking.
Cooking.
Flying.
Falling asleep.
Exactly as they had done generations earlier.
The theater of the mind returned.
I didn’t fully appreciate that until I finished writing Wings in the Dark.
Like most novelists, I spent years reading every sentence silently on a computer screen.
Everything looked fine.
Then the manuscript became an audiobook.
That changed everything.
For the first time I wasn’t reading the novel.
I was experiencing it.
Passages I had admired suddenly sounded awkward.
Others became unexpectedly funny.
Moments that seemed merely pleasant on paper became deeply emotional when spoken aloud.
The rhythm changed.
The pacing changed.
The story itself changed.
I rewrote entire sections after hearing them.
Then I listened again.
And rewrote them again.
Somewhere during that process I realized something surprising.
I wasn’t polishing the audiobook.
The audiobook was polishing the novel.
After writing for more than sixty years, I had accidentally discovered a better editor.
The human ear.
None of that would have happened without a remarkably talented young narrator from Pakistan named Iqra from Fiverr. He is a genius in the world of 11LABS
Like every creative collaboration, our project included occasional misunderstandings, revisions, and moments of frustration. That is the nature of creating anything worthwhile.
What impressed me most wasn’t perfection.
It was persistence.
Chapter by chapter, revision by revision, he helped transform thousands of printed words into living conversation.
He wasn’t simply reading a manuscript.
He was performing it.
Every narrator leaves fingerprints on a story.
The challenge is to leave fingerprints without leaving fingerprints.
The best narrators disappear.
They allow the listener to believe the voices have always existed.
I believe Iqra accomplished that.
Today I find myself doing something I have never done with any previous novel.
Instead of asking friends to read it, I am asking them to listen.
About fifty friends—writers, filmmakers, professors, accountants, engineers, airline pilots, and ordinary readers whose opinions I trust—have received invitations.
My instructions are wonderfully simple.
Don’t spare my feelings.
Tell me where you became bored.
Tell me where you laughed.
Tell me where you wanted to stop listening.
Tell me where the story lifted you off the ground.
If enough intelligent listeners agree about something, they’re probably right.
At eighty-four, I have finally learned that criticism isn’t the enemy of creativity.
Silence is.
So this experiment continues.
Perhaps Wings in the Dark will remain only a novel.
Perhaps one day it will become a film.
Perhaps it will simply find a few thousand listeners who discover it while driving to work with headphones on.
Any of those outcomes would make me smile.
Because after all these years I’ve come to believe that storytelling has traveled in a great circle.
It began with one human voice speaking in the darkness while others listened.
Technology changed.
The voice never did.
Norman Corwin understood that.
Orson Welles proved it.
Marshall McLuhan explained it.
And somewhere along the way, after writing books for most of my life, I finally learned it for myself.
Sometimes the best way to write a novel…
…is to listen.
One final thought.
If you ever doubt that sound can be even more powerful than pictures, try a simple experiment.
Go to a crowded movie theater.
Wait until the most dramatic moment in the film.
Now imagine that, without warning, someone turns off the projector.
The screen goes black.
For a few seconds the audience murmurs.
Someone laughs.
A few people complain.
Everyone assumes there has been a technical problem.
The next evening, show the very same movie.
This time leave the picture on.
Let every image continue to unfold exactly as before.
But turn off the sound.
Watch what happens.
The audience doesn’t simply become disappointed.
They become restless.
Annoyed.
Almost angry. Certainly hostile.
Within moments someone is marching out to find the manager.
Why?
Because we don’t merely watch movies.
We hear them.
Dialogue.
Music.
Footsteps.
A heartbeat.
A whispered confession.
A door opening in the dark.
Those sounds carry emotion in ways pictures alone rarely can.
The eye gathers information.
The ear delivers feeling.
We like to think of movies as a visual medium.
They aren’t.
They are an audio-visual medium, and if one partner is doing more of the emotional heavy lifting than we usually recognize, it is often the soundtrack.
Perhaps that’s why radio never really died.
It simply waited for technology to give it another name.
Audiobooks.
Podcasts.
Streaming audio.
The theater of the mind never disappeared.
It was only waiting for us to put the headphones back on.
Perhaps Norman Corwin knew it all along.
He called his lecture And Then I Wrote.
Sixty years later, I finally understood what he meant.
And then…
I listened.
Norman Corwin understood that.
Orson Welles proved it.
Marshall McLuhan explained it.
And somewhere along the way, after writing books for most of my life, I finally learned it for myself.
Sometimes the best way to write a novel … is to listen.
And that dear reader explains why so many hot novels sell four times as many audible versians as hardcovers.
Listen here to my latest, virus free:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EuXszOEDQqoRfaP8YZq3b86MSyLbvKmd/view
