The audiobook effect: How the rise of spoken stories is changing the way authors write

The literary world was recently astir with allegations of AI use for some of the award-winning submissions of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This led many to muse on the future of fiction in an age of AI. While some despaired that machine-generated slop was going to become ubiquitous, others, more hopeful, suggested that writers with unusual voices and prose cadences would be the ones to stand out.

However, another development has already changed the attitude of many writers towards their prose. The rise and popularity of audiobooks is making them alter the structure and pace of their manuscripts in several ways.

The challenge of the distracted listener

While there’s no need to be snobbish about those who prefer their prose spoken aloud, it’s evident that there are differences in the way audiobooks are consumed. When reading a physical book, you can pause, skim, or flip back a page if you need to. When listening to an audiobook, however, many are often driving, doing housework, or exercising. It’s been called an “eyes-free, hands-busy” audience.

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Anita Nair captures the issues in the introduction to her new collection of short stories, Why I Killed My Husband. Many of these stories had their inception as audio tales commissioned by Storytel. “It was a new medium for me and demanded a new way of writing,” says Nair.

The length of the stories apart, there were other challenges that she faced. To begin with: “While the plot was within the purview of literary fiction, the pace had to lure the listener in within the first couple of minutes.” The questions multiplied: “How much dialogue was too much or too little? And the characters? How many were too many?”

Nair isn’t alone in commenting on how the medium influences the way she approaches her writing, even when it comes to work that isn’t primarily meant for audio. Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy has been hugely successful in the spoken format, has said that for him, there was never a meaningful distinction between writing for print and writing for the ear. “I'm thinking very hard about the rhythm of each sentence as I write it,” he commented.

He reads his sentences aloud as he writes, listening for whether they fit together in a musical sense. For writers like Pullman, writing is about making clear what good prose has always required: making the ear the final arbiter of whether a sentence works.

Crafting prose for the ear

Others who have been commissioned to write audio-only narratives have reflected on how this changes their style. For Lucinda Berry, writing for audio isn’t just about translating a book into a new medium. “It requires rethinking how you tell the story, knowing someone is going to hear the words instead of see them.”

On questions of craft, there seems to be a consensus: shorter paragraphs, as well as dialogues that are easy to parse and which move the narrative forward. Structures that use flashbacks and time-shifts are also best avoided. Chances are that a listener who misses a plot detail while navigating a traffic jam will not rewind. The prose has to move forward, earn attention, and be specific.

This can have an effect even on work not meant for audio. Writers can find themselves using fewer adjectives, for example, or shortening sentences and, like Pullman, relying on the oral effect of prose instead of its appearance on the page.

From a wider perspective, of course, audiobooks aren’t a new phenomenon. For most of human history, orality was the norm. From Homer to Dickens, storytellers knew the power of the spoken word to move audiences. What writers are tackling now could well be a return to this oral standard.

At present, many of those concerned about AI-generated fiction believe that idiosyncratic styles will be the ones to survive. These, after all, cannot be easily generated by Large Language Models and are a far cry from standard AI slop. Audiobooks, on the other hand, encourage writers to be more precise and less experimental.

The two approaches aren’t necessarily opposites. An idiosyncratic style is what an author sounds like, and prose that’s audio-friendly is about how that sound is delivered. There will always be writers who push boundaries on both axes, but the most durable works may well be by those who combine them in compelling ways.