Hearing Them Breathe

I really enjoy the song Thoughts of a Dying Atheist by Muse. When I listen to it, I get so sucked in that I start singing along. At one point, though, I become really aware of my breathing. There are a number of words which get held for a long time, so they require a lot of air. They also require tactical inhaling. You have to take a deep enough breath to sing the next part, but quickly enough that you aren't late on the beat.

I noticed that every time I listened to the song, I kept breathing in the same spot every time. Then my ears perked open. As it turns out, the singer was taking the exact same breaths in the exact same moments of the song. That made me really happy.

Studio albums sound really good. They have all kinds of effects and filters and can make it sound so clean and polished and supernatural, but in doing so, they can also take away from the humanity of the music. Hearing deep breaths in the music reminded me that this was real, that human beings were making this music and that they were just as limited by the laws of physics and physiology as anybody else (and that I was just as capable of singing along).

I like reading handwritten manuscripts for the same reason. You can see so much humanity in the words themselves: how they were written, cross-outs, breaks in writing style or writing utensil that indicate a break in the writing process and a return at a later time. Sometimes, even food stains can add more to the human who wrote the story.

Sometimes, though, all I want are the words. If the words are thoroughly encapsulating, then I don't need the story of their creation.  However, within the words themselves, I still want humanity. In your stories, don't forget that humans breathe, and that breathing is audible.