I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

One really simple trick to you know work on this as writers is I read everything aloud

that I write and if I'm reading something aloud and I'm bored with something I've just

written obviously the reader will be too and so then I start cutting that stuff.

That's Sarah Val and it's pretty hard to find her boring whether she's writing history

from a strange angle like writing about a vacation she took visiting the sites of famous

assassinations or observing our lives through the prism of wit on NPR's This American Life

or providing the voice for an animated film like the Incredibles. She's one of a kind.

Sarah I'm so glad to be talking to you because you know we talk mostly about relating

and communicating on this podcast and you do a lot of communicating you you you write you

speak you act and you write in different media I'm really curious do you have a theory

of communication that guides you some kind of way you have of thinking about how you communicate

that kind you kind of apply to various kinds of communication. No can I go home no I mean I

am a nonfiction writer and mostly I write about American history so generally the way I talk about

something is demanded by the subject matter so that's why a lot of times my tone is all over

the place depending on what I'm talking about you know if a woman's husband was just murdered

my tone can be kind of morose and sometimes I don't know sometimes things strike me as funny

but generally it's just always the subject matter to me that dictates how I talk about something.

I will say though I studied to be an art historian which means in graduate school I had to

read a lot of really terrible writing and the other thing I would say that I always try for is

clarity that's really important to me so you know well that's really right up the Arali because

we're called clear and vivid oh good clarity yeah I was pandering you're too I was pandering

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