Document it – Breathing while reading

When I was about 10, I had a mandatory choir class. Most kids in that class didn't take it seriously, and back then, our choir director didn't allow us to sit down during the hour and a half that this class lasted. Needless to say, keeping about 50 kids entertained with singing classical songs for that long wasn't easy, but we often made it to the end of the year and the absolute emotion of singing a song like Carmina Burana, with an entire orchestra to back you up, made it Worth It TM.

Whether a choir of children was supposed to sing that kind of stuff is questionable, but at the time nothing was better than thinking your choir director believed in you to get the job done.

We were taught many things about singing, but we were taught in a very intuitive way, without all the techniques that actual Singing students were required to learn (Singing, as in the instrument taught in conservatories). We learned pitch, and projection, and, more relevant to the topic at hand, breathing.

Choir breathing often refers to the fact that, if you overlap voices properly, the choir is able to sustain a note indefinitely because each individual can break for breathing whenever they need, as long as they don't all do it at the same time. What I think is less known is that choirs are also trained to breathe at the appropriate times, all at once, so the break in the music still sounds natural. Much like editing, this is one of those invisible skills, only noticeable when you don't have it yet.

BREATHING IN MUSIC

You're probably thinking of the obvious - If you're belting out to Bohemian Rhapsody, you're taking a breath after pretending to call your mamaaaaaaa (uuuuu~ ). And although breathing in music is everywhere, not only in things you can sing, we're going to focus on those to make this simpler.

In music analysis, one of the first things they teach you to do is identify musical phrases. These are small fragments of the music that have, as the name implies, a meaning of its own. They are often divided in question/answer pairs. For example, think about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (yes, I'm still in a holiday mood).

The first sentence (Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer), if you stopped singing after it, would be the first 'musical phrase', and it would be the 'question'. You can tell because it ends... but it doesn't feel like it. The music hasn't resolved satisfactorily, and you're left waiting for the second phrase. The second line (has a very shiny nose), would be the answer, and you can tell by the way the sound goes down and resolves. The same happens with the third and fourth lyric lines, becoming another pair of answer/question phrases (and if you ever saw it / you would even say it glows).

If you're having trouble hearing this, try singing the music and stopping between the phrases without immediately following with the next line. For even more obvious pairs, try stopping singing between "Toss a coin to your witcher // o' valley of plenty", or "It’s the start of something new // it feels so right to be here with you", or "I wanna be the very best // like no one ever was". You'll notice that as you're finishing the first one, you're already subconsciously readying to start the next one, possibly even taking a breath in preparation. For something without lyrics, I'm sure the Harry Potter theme (Hedwig's song) is intuitively easy to break up in phrases, and here is an example of a parody song that uses those phrases to add the lyrics on top.

If someone was singing this and suddenly broke the music to breathe in the middle of one of these sentences, it would probably sound off to you, and you'd look up to see why they're so out of breath. It's immediately obvious when you're breathing wrong in popular songs, not only because you know the song, but because they're designed to be sing-able by everyone, and thus, sentences are kept short.

This is more complicated in classical music, as the 'lyrics' might not even be in your mother tongue, or even a language currently spoken today (sorry, Latin students), and the music is often a lot more lyrical. Then, it's more difficult to know where to break for breath, and singers have to study their pieces and often mark their breathing spots.

Interestingly, the symbol that musicians use to mark suggested breathing spots, is a comma. It looks like this:

THE MELODY IN TEXTS

At this point you might be wondering if I'll keep talking about music all day. I'll try not to. Let's move onto texts then.

How does knowing how to sing affect my reading?

Well, the thing is, texts have their own melody. I will talk more later about natural pauses in the sentence and clauses, but let’s focus briefly on the rhythm first.

A trick that writers hear often is to change the length and rhythm of their sentences, so it doesn't sound mechanical. Each author has sentence structures they favor, and for this reason, certain authors may be easier for you to read than others. This is perfectly normal, much in the same way as some composers are easier to sing than others, and some people tend to perform music pieces quicker and slower depending on their preferences. There is a recommended speed for music, the same way there is for reading, but at the end of the day, most people have a rhythm that's all their own, and that they enjoy the most.

If you look at the paragraphs in this text, you'll notice that variation in sentence length too. First, 15 words. Then 4. Then 5. Then 8, then a sentence that has 1 3 5=9 words, divided between commas. Then another long sentence that has 21 words.

Because I'm explaining something, sentences are longer than in dialogue, of course. All of this is to say, rhythm is certainly a big part of texts while writing, and not something that can be ignored while reading.

Another writer tip that applies to reading - shorter sentences are read more quickly. Not just in your head, but aloud. This accounts for faster pacing, and it's often used by writers to describe fast-paced scenes, like fights, or high-stakes situations. Just by the contents of what you're writing, you probably already would read these scenes in a certain way, but let's examine how the structure of the text itself can inform your pacing and breathing choices.

PUNCTUATION

Here's where I'm going to lose a bunch of people - I promise I'm not going to talk about grammar and "proper punctuation". I'm not even a native English speaker, it took me years to realize that the way English is punctuated isn't exactly the same as Spanish (and I assume, other languages have this issue as well).

Fanfiction is, by virtue of its medium, very accessible. You will find a lot of fics which don't have """prohpeh punctuatiohn""" (please imagine my fakest posh accent). However, this is something you can practice by reading fics written by someone with basic punctuation skills (often long-fics are good for this, because they're written by people who have spent a lot of time into their craft. Obviously, published books are revised by professionals, and can help as well). You don't have to read out loud or even record for what we're going to talk about just now, though you can, if that makes it more fun!

If you're someone who already had a habit of reading as a kid, regardless of whether you read out loud or not, this all might sound really obvious to you. If you have a background in theater, where you've likely learned to recite lines, this might also sound familiar.

Ignoring the less used punctuation types for now (semicolon where), most of them are used to indicate pauses in the text. Periods (.) are used to denote a finished sentence, and start a new one. Commas (,) are a shorter pause, used to denote that two phrases are part of a sentence, and have a common meaning. An English major will be able to explain all of this better than an ESL biology major, but — you've surely heard writers complain that they use too many em-dashes, and you've probably sympathised. They are useful! Or perhaps you've seen writers overuse ellipses... yeah. Same.

If you're listening to the audio version I've recorded to submit along this, because I don't have enough work on my plate, you're probably hearing the way I'm reading the different punctuation. This, again, might be intuitive to people who are used to reading or have been read to by their parents/teachers when they were younger, or consume a lot of audiobooks. Reading a text while listening to someone tell it to you is a good way to internalize what different punctuation signs sound like. If you've ever had the experience of having to copy down in writing something someone is saying and not knowing where to put punctuation because their sentences seem to run on forever and they never stop talking because it seems natural to them to add a million clauses to the same sentence — that's because punctuation is hard to hear, especially if you're not used to reading it alongside a spoken text. Another silent skill, punctuation.

Before I move on to the next part, let me use my last mega-sentence as an example of how you can add punctuation to a text that doesn't have it, or at least, add it to your narration out loud.

Clause words (or however you English majors call them) are key in dividing sentences. Above, I've used "and/because/and/because" in a single sentence. That divides the sentence into four 'phrases' (again, or however your English teacher calls it. I'm not actually sure of proper terminology in English). Anyway, upon encountering such a sentence in a wild fic, you could break up your breathing accordingly to read it as:

"If you've ever had the experience of having to copy down OPEN PARENTHESIS in writing CLOSE PARENTHESIS something someone is saying COMMA and not knowing where to put punctuation COMMA because it seems natural to them to add a million clauses to the same sentence..." After that I previously added an em-dash, making it visually obvious that you could break for a breath, but technically the sentence continues, with yet more punctuation to break it up.

Tying this back to music — each clause of the sentence is its own 'musical phrase'. They need their question/answer groups (full sentences, not just clauses), and your breathing and intonation will need to reflect that instead of just running through the sentence like I did the first time. With practice, identifying the natural clauses of a sentence, even without punctuation, will be natural.

Tl;dr: practice and internalize how punctuation sounds by reading a properly-punctuated text alongside a narration of it. Think about it as a melody, you can break it in certain places, but not wherever you want, and recognizing those places at first sight is a matter of practice.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DIALOGUE AND NARRATION

(And why different voices require different breathing styles)

Yeah, practice is great, and yeah, your English teacher already told you when to use an em-dash appropriately. But what about actual reading, you know, like podfics?

Alright.

So you've probably noticed that, even if you don't do character voices, narration and dialogue are fundamentally different. This is also very apparent when a writer doesn't capture a given character's canon voice — which isn't always easy, so this is not a dig at my writers here.

Let's break this down piece by piece for a moment.

The biggest difference is obviously that narration has what we call (or I call) narrator voice. A narrator has a range of emotion that is different from a character's range, because it's detached, to a certain extent. First person narrators incorporate a lot more of the character's personality and talking style, but it's still not the same. A narrator is a lot more descriptive, and because of that, your voice is calmer, like it would be if you were trying to explain something to someone. Essentially, you are. You're communicating setting (place and time), and you're communicating, excuse my french, le mood (... sorry).

This ties into what I mentioned before about sentence length. If your narrator is using shorter sentences, the scene will flow quicker, and the emotion will be more present in the narrator's intrinsic voice. You might find yourself purposefully holding your breath while you read. "What if...?", "Oh, but wait!", "And then, they fell down on their knees.", "I screamed. The monster had seen me!", "The metal sang as he unsheathed his sword, both warriors lunging forward.", "They danced, and all he could do was watch. Watch as he lost her. Watch as she won him. Watch as they lost each other."

If, on the contrary, the sentences are longer, more descriptive, the scene will be more languid, perhaps quiet, and introspective even. In those cases, the narrator will become a lot calmer, becoming one with the setting and mood of it. Your character voices will be the ones to carry their personalities, and your narrator will be there to describe whether they're walking the path, stirring frog soup to feed their green child, or caressing their lover's face with a fingertip, praying they won't wake up while they stare longingly (especially if there was only one bed!).

So in this case, the difference between narration, often more focused on the setting, and the character voices, focused on the action, is pretty simple.

But what about the differences between characters?

I'm not talking about character voices as in the pitch and accent here. I'm talking about their style. The thing that makes you go "oh, this author really nailed the voice of X in this fic. I could hear it in my head while I read!". That kind of voice.

We've all had that one friend who could talk super quickly without running out of breath, or the friend who spoke for a full minute but added so many 'um's and 'ehh's that they barely got a sentence out. Characters do this as well. They rarely do 'um's because showrunners don't have time for those kinds of realistic interactions, but they will have specific ways in which they speak, and each will need a different breathing style. While this is intuitive to imitate for shows that have voice actors already associated with the characters, it's a bit trickier in written fandoms.

It goes, once again, back to punctuation — with a caveat. Now you're reading a line that is meant to be spoken. Narrator isn't meant to sound like you're talking to someone. Now, you have to remember to add the proper emotion to it, and if you're sobbing out a sentence, the breathing may change entirely, than if you were saying it completely deadpan, or trying to whisper it versus yelling it from a rooftop.

You have to consider setting as well. If your character is said to be running, their breath will be synced to their strides, and if they have just stopped running, their voice will need a minute to stop breathing in that sync they had before (what we call being out of breath).

But Lena, we already know this. We've all tried exercising at home during lockdown, we know about being out of breath.

Yes! But integrating the setting, the emotion in spoken words, and punctuation, can be hard, okay?

Anyway. Let's talk more about the physical aspect of reading and breathing, and move away from the realm of English majors, who I'm sure didn't like my attempt to sound like them.

Tl;dr: Narration is more descriptive, and encompasses setting and mood, mostly through sentence length. Dialogue is more reactive, and talks (ha) about the actions taking place, without stopping to describe things. Emotion is shown more in dialogue, but can permeate to narration as 'mood'. Breathing is once again dictated by punctuation but setting (from narration) can inform your breathing choices during dialogue, and emotion (from dialogue) can change your breathing choices during narration.

READING PACE AND BREATHING

We've already talked about the pace of narration and sentence length. Given that you break your sentences along the frame of punctuation, that's simple enough.

But what about your reading pace? I've always been told I speak very quickly, and that I read in a similar way. Spanish, my mother tongue, is a quick language as well, which doesn't help matters.

Adapting this to audio isn't as simple as it sounds. You may know that you have to speak slower so everyone can understand you (and if your mother tongue isn't English, chances are your English teacher told you to slow down so your pronunciation was clearer). But knowing that and doing it while you're enjoying yourself reading a fic, are two different things. It's difficult to remember all of this stuff while you're in the mood! ... the reading mood, though I suppose... well. Anyway.

To go back full circle for a second — This is actually easier to do when singing. The music sets the pace for you, and unless you're the only interpreter, you don't have the luxury of setting the pace or change it as you go. If you're solo-ing to mamma mia, you could speedrun through the music bits and sing at twice the pace. But you probably wouldn't, because certain songs already play a certain way in your head.

That's mostly how I try to categorize reading in my head. Certain 'moods' read differently. You'll speak faster the shorter the sentences are, and you will naturally speak quicker when a character is anxious. And the other way around, you will speak slower if your OTP is having a lazy morning in the sheets, or if the pining is so delicious that you want to make your listeners suffer through the 50K of slow burn in the best way possible.

If this analogy doesn't work for you, I have a more physical tip that you can try. Play 'Staying Alive' by the Bee Gees. This song is used when training to learn CPR because the rhythm helps you stay consistent while doing chest compressions (and also because, I mean. It's called 'Staying alive' XD).

Music has been shown to lightly influence heartbeat, and your heartbeat also influences your breathing rhythm. The rhythm in Staying Alive is naturally lively and syncing your breathing to it will help you set your own mood for a briskly paced reading, but not too fast.

If you want to record something slower, breathe in sync to slower songs. 60 bpm is pretty slow, I think, but you can go even slower, or quicker. Experiment with the way that breathing at certain rhythms helps you set on a particular mood, and how that influences your reading of a certain piece.

Of course, the setting of the fic itself might induce this mood for you. This is just a breathing tip you can use for practice, but you don't have to pull up your music library every single time!

POSTURE

(And not being able to fully exhale while you read)

I'm not gonna scold you, I'm not your mom. I've been slouching the entire time I've been writing this, right up until now.

The thing with breathing, and you may have heard this before, is that you can breathe from your chest or from your stomach.

If you're going "what" at this, let me explain. If you breathe, what part of your torso moves up and down the most, your ribcage, or your abdomen? If it's the former, you're breathing more shallowly, and engaging your diaphragm less than if it's the latter.

For singing, I was taught (not as a kid, but much later on, when I joined a choir for grownups!) that I should always have my pelvic muscles engaged, a bit like if you're sucking in your tummy. My choir director often tells us to "zip up" as if we were putting on a pair of jeans after Christmas dinner.

This also works well for reciting lines and projecting your voice, and of course, for recording. Regulating how much air you use as you speak is much easier if you're using your diaphragm instead of your intercostal muscles (the ribcage), and thus, it's a lot easier to make your air last longer.

To practice this kind of breathing, imagine wanting the air to reach your lower back as you're breathing in. Hold it there for a moment (you can also put on a belt around your waist to feel the expansion of your abdomen as you breathe, or simply hold your abdomen or your sides with your hands), then exhale slowly. When you start to exhale, focus on not closing your intercostal muscles, only the diaphragm/pelvic muscles! You'll notice your pelvic muscles tightening the longer you keep exhaling. Push it as much as you can but be gentle with yourself! Breathing is very much necessary. Once you don't have any more air, breathe in slowly again.

The trick is not disengaging these muscles, so when you breathe in, don't take a gulp of air. Breathe in with the same group of muscles. This takes practice, especially if your muscles are not used to this, but it's worth it!

Other tips that will help: keep your back straight while you do this, and if you can stand up, even better. It's easier to use your pelvic muscles that way. If you can't stand up, sit at the edge of your seat so that your back is fully straight, and your butt isn't fully flat on the seat.

Once you're bored with breathing, or disappointed in your own diaphragm and abdominal muscles (I know, me too), try to keep this in the back of your mind while reading. If nothing else, it will help you speak louder without hurting your throat as much.

If you often run out of breath in the middle of sentences, try this for deepening your air reserves, and don't forget about what I've been saying above. Punctuation and the natural pauses in sentences, once you're used to recognizing them, are your friends. Especially if you're recording, being able to reach them comfortably helps so much for later on piecing together a sentence that you've flubbed! Instead of re-doing the entire sentence each time, reach a punctuation sign or end of clause comfortably. Then breathe again, and keep going! An author's style might be so rambly that, even if you're breathing at your best capacity, it's just not a good fit for you.

But Lena, my problem is not running out of breath. I have too much air left after I finish sentences!

I've been there! Say, does this happen all the time?

If no — this might be, again, because the text is written in a style that isn't what you're used to. You have your own personal style, and certain authors will write in ways that, while pleasing to read in your head, might be difficult for you to speak aloud with your normal breathing. If you're saying things too quickly, this might also be a problem. Try reading the same text slower, and noticing the indicated punctuation so you have an idea of how the author read it in their own head.

If yes - this might be a different problem altogether, where you're not in the right posture for breathing effectively. Make sure you're sitting comfortably, if you can sit straight even better, and breathe normally for a while before starting to read. Focus on your own breathing rhythm until it's stable, and pace your reading along your internal rhythm. You might be trying to read too quickly for your breathing, or too slowly (for the opposite problem).

This is all I had for you today! Thank you for reading all of this (it's been way longer than I thought it was going to be!). I'm going to leave you with a small mom-friend advice (I know, I said I'm not your mom. I'm not. Still though!)

If you can't comfortably take a breath through your nose after exhaling normally, and you aren't sick, consider consulting your doctor for it. I'm not one, and the worst that can happen is that your doctor takes a look and it's nothing. Breathing is super important!

Happy breathing, and happy reading!