"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
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
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help 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.





