Hearing words, writing sounds: examining the author's brain

Kamila Shamsie always revises her work by reading aloud, but AS Byatt looks for the rhythms of the page. Richard Lea goes in search of what happens in the brain when we write and read fiction

The novelist Kamila Shamsie measures out her life as an author in chapters, punctuated by a familiar ritual.

“Usually at the end of writing every chapter I’ll print out and read aloud,” she says. It’s something she’s been doing since university, she continues, citing the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, who told her “there are things the ears pick up which the eyes don’t”. As she sits on the lookout for repeated words, unexpected clunks or unwanted dissonances, it “feels like listening”.

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