Skip to main content

Life & Wisdom Quote by Kevin J. Anderson

"Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen"

About this Quote

Anderson is smuggling a small rebellion into a seemingly mundane observation about keyboards. His point isn’t that typing is hard; it’s that writing, as we practice it on screens, is an unnatural bottleneck compared to the older, faster channel of speech. By describing typing as an awkward relay race (thought -> spelling -> fingers -> “randomly arranged” keys), he reframes the modern writing process as needless friction, almost a kind of self-imposed stutter.

The intent is partly practical and partly psychological. Anderson, a prolific genre novelist, is defending an approach many “serious” writers once treated as cheating: dictation, or at least composing aloud. The subtext is about permission. If storytelling is fundamentally oral, then speaking your draft isn’t lazy; it’s closer to the native format of narrative. That’s an argument aimed at anxious writers who equate artistry with suffering at the keyboard.

His phrasing does extra work. “Telling your story out loud” invokes campfires, radio dramas, bedtime tales - communal, embodied traditions - and positions digital composition as an eccentric detour. Calling the keyboard “randomly arranged” is a deliberately skewed simplification (QWERTY has history, not randomness), but the exaggeration is strategic: it highlights how arbitrary our tools can feel compared to the directness of voice.

Contextually, this lands in an era of speech-to-text and productivity culture, where authors are asked to output more, faster, across more platforms. Anderson isn’t just praising technology; he’s reclaiming storytelling as performance, reminding us that fluency and authenticity can live in the mouth before they ever reach the page.

Quote Details

TopicWriting
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Anderson, Kevin J. (2026, January 16). Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/telling-your-story-out-loud-is-the-way-human-103971/

Chicago Style
Anderson, Kevin J. "Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/telling-your-story-out-loud-is-the-way-human-103971/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/telling-your-story-out-loud-is-the-way-human-103971/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Kevin Add to List
The Power of Spoken Storytelling
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson (born March 27, 1962) is a Author from USA.

32 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes