In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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Do you think podcasting is going to somehow influence the short story, and if so how? More dialogue? Less? No weird formatting or wordplay or epistolary work? For example, over at Star Ship Sofa, they recently had Jack Vance’s “The Moon Moth” and I’m sure listening to Josh Roseman’s wonderful narration/singing (the story involves a planet where speech is sung instead of spoken) is quite a different experience than reading the original.

I can see that happening, but probably not for everyone–it’s likely only to affect people like yourself who really find podcasts interesting. I think the biggest area that might be influenced would be just in the rhythm of the language. One of the best things you can do as a writer is to try to read your work aloud, to make sure that the sentences flow properly, because it’s very easy to construct a sentence that might be grammatically correct but isn’t really the easiest thing to parse. I’m sure people like Neil Gaiman consider his prose so that it will sound just as good on the page as it would being read aloud.

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