My Uke Teacher Taught Me How to Edit My Writing

I uploaded my own voice to an app, put my baby in the stroller, and walked around Petaluma. What I heard was not good.

My Ukulele Teacher Accidentally Taught Me How to Edit My Writing

I have been playing ukulele for more than ten years.

I am amazing — according to me.

I can strum the chords, and I have made peace with it.

One lesson, my uke teacher introduced me to an app called Amazing Slowdowner. It does exactly what it sounds like. You upload a song, slow it down without changing the pitch, and suddenly you can hear every note you've been fumbling through at full speed.

I filed it away. Useful for music. Didn't think much else of it.

Then the pandemic hit, and I started competing at story slams.

Every month, I needed six to seven minutes of new material — memorized, performed, delivered without notes in front of a room of strangers who did not come to watch someone squint at the middle distance, trying to remember what comes next.

So at first, I tried brute force. I would read and reread until I finished memorizing it.

Until I remember the app.

It was the middle of the pandemic, so the only thing to do was walk.

I recorded myself reading my stories out loud, uploaded the audio, put my oldest daughter in her stroller, and walked laps around my neighborhood in Petaluma, listening to myself on repeat.

The streets were quiet.

My daughter was asleep within minutes.

And I had nothing to do but walk and listen.

I typically like everything I do. I am awesome.

But this time, I wasn't that excited. I actually hated it.

Wordy.

Stiff.

Full of phrases I would never actually say out loud to another human being.

Sentences that seemed perfectly reasonable on the page and were absolutely insufferable in the air.

I sounded like a wannabe literary critic.

I went home and started cutting.

Not dramatically — I wasn't throwing out whole paragraphs. I was swapping words. The long ones for the shorter ones. The impressive ones for the ones I could actually pronounce without slowing down. The ones I had chosen because they sounded writerly for the ones I would actually say to a friend over coffee.

Slowly, something shifted.

The writing started to sound like me.

Not me trying to impress someone. Not me performing intelligence. Me — the person who tells stories at dinner, who rambles in the car, who makes his daughters laugh at breakfast.

That's the voice that belongs on the page.

Your first editing pass has one job. Not grammar. Not the theme. Not structure. One question: Does this sound like you talking?

Read your draft out loud. Record yourself if you can. Walk around the block if you have to.

You'll know immediately when it doesn't sound right.

And once you know, you'll know exactly what to cut.

Happy telling!

-Carlos

P.S. I just updated my Story Frame cheat sheet — the full structure, the drafting sequence, and a prompt you can paste directly into any writing session. Reply letting me know you want a copy, and I'll send it to you.