Making the audiobook for The MineralTail nearly finished Justin Robertson off — a month of psychic carnage involving a barking dog, a neighbour’s new bathroom, and the unforgiving permanence of a recording that can’t forgive a fluffed line. Here, he traces audiobooks back to pub chat and fireside oratory, makes the case for never hitting rewind, and explains how the ordeal ended up teaching him things about his own book he’d never seen before.

Before the stone tablet, the printing press or the AI zombie module, there was the word. The guttural click-clack of the human tongue trying to make sense of a senseless world. We are thrown into existence mewling and confused, wondering why we have to suffer such indignity when the peace of non-existence was so much more relaxing.

That is why babies cry. It’s a cry of irritation mixed with a dreadful wonder. What the fck is this place, and who the hell are all of you? Isn’t that, in fact, a good description of all human culture? A scream of anger with just a hint of beauty. That piercing, heart-rending squawk is really a child’s first story. Even at the moment of birth, the human heart knows it must create myths and legends, because stories are the breath of life; without them, we are just broken marionettes.

Pub chat, gossip and the oratory of the travelling sage were how wisdom was spread before it was written down, so the audiobook is something of a throwback. A return to the authentic method of storytelling before writing and readers’ reviews. Audiobooks are great. I love them.

My advice when listening to an audiobook: never press rewind. Let the words run over and into you; let the first impression be the one that lingers. Just like our ancestors sat around the tribal fire, let the sounds of the human tongue captivate you. But under no circumstances ever consider recording an audiobook unless you enjoy particularly sophisticated forms of torture.

I’ve given a large number of public readings of my three novels, so I consider myself well-versed in the art of performance. But fck me, recording, editing and creating a soundscape for the MineralTail almost cost me my sanity.

There is no room for error. When reading in the wild, a slight mispronunciation or slip of the tongue is easily missed or forgotten; in fact, it can add a certain charm to a performance. Human fallibility is attractive, I think. But once you try to preserve the text and force it into some kind of permanent structure, any mistakes can cause your words to descend into sputtering gibberish.

Add into this potent brew of self-doubt and frustration a soupcon of Harry the dog barking and my neighbours having a new bathroom installed next door, and you have the recipe for a month of psychic carnage. So, patience and a slow, considered methodology were essential. It was a marathon, not a sprint; you had to capture a vibe and a flow and sustain it over days, not just a few minutes.

Short bursts of controlled thespian activity. Hand-waving and wild gesticulating, but in tiny stutters. Paragraph after paragraph until a pleasing entity began to emerge. The stress was worth it, though, and the lessons learned had an almost Zen-like quality. It was like a spiritual retreat but with more swearing. However, at the end of the process, I had a new appreciation of the book.

I found bits of narrative hidden in the text that I’d never seen before, I found humour in the strangest of circumstances and the whole thing resonated with a new clarity. Because stories aren’t really written by authors, the stories write the writer. The MineralTail told me its own story, and I just passed it on. I hope you dig it.