“The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length — no more and no less — or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and [and if too long] the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended — and then you can't surprise them, of course.”

– from ”How to tell a story and others” by Mark Twain

Beside pausing for dramatic effect, there is a second big reason for using pauses.

The material you are narrating is right in front of your eyes. Your eyes are reading many words in front of your voice, so you know where you are going before you speak. Your listener doesn't have the words in front of him. The listener has to hear your completed thoughts before it 'all makes sense'. When you don't pause, you don't give the listener time to absorb what you just said. The listener may feel that you are 'reading too fast', when that's really not the problem.

Recommended listening: If you can find a Ruth Rendell audiobook read by Nigel Anthony, listen carefully to his use of the pause. After each sentence, he pauses just long enough to give you the time you need to grasp what he just said.

The pause is one of the strongest tools you have for conveying meaning and creating an entertaining audiobook. For this group of exercises, I want you to mess up the length of the pauses on purpose. By shaking up your normal speech patterns, you will raise your awareness of those patterns.

Take your time when you do each of these. Pick one of your selections. Turn on your recorder, then start. Also, don't concern yourself with volume or pace as you do these.

• Exercise 1: Read out loud, without any pauses. Take a deep breath first. Imagine you are trying to say each syllable on the click of a fast metronome (on-tick the-tock click-tick of-tock a-tick met-tock tro-tick nome-tock). Try to approximate a normal speech rate, not slow.
• Exercise 2: Read the same selectdion again, this time with a brief pause after each word. Imagine a click of the metronome between each word for each pause.
• Exercise 3: Once more, but this time make some totally random pauses (such as every 10th word). Make some light pencil marks on the page ahead of time, so you will pause when you get to each.
• Exercise 4: Next treat every comma, semicolon, dash, and period as a pause point. Exaggerate each of these pauses. Don't pause unless there is some punctuation.
• Exercise 5: Lastly, pick out one word in each sentence. Read that sentence twice, first pausing before the selected word, then second, pausing after the word. Try doing this with short pauses and with longer pauses. Don't change your volume. Notice how that word become emphasized in different ways, depending on the position of the pauses and the length of the pauses. Work on this exercise a lot.