I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Humans have been telling stories since they could speak, and for most of our existence, storytelling has been an oral tradition. The written story is a relatively new phenomenon, since cheap publishing and widespread literacy are also relatively new phenomena. I wish every book was put on audio, preferrably read by the author, though there are some actors that do a fine job (and there are plenty of others who don't).

Currently I'm listening to Paul Auster's Oracle Night. It's all right. I've been a fan of Auster's for a while now, and I like his meditative, if sometimes ponderous, style.

But one of the things that's always interesting to me in audiobooks is what I'll call "misplaced modifiers", for want of a better phrase. Typically this refers to a dependent clause put in the wrong place in a sentence, and English teachers love pointing out the sometimes humorous results of such a mistake, e.g.:

John gave the dog a bone, which then growled at him.

Since modifiers typically modify what's closest to them, in this instance it sounds like the bone is growling.

Okay...so in prose, sometimes an author will modify some aspect of the scene, or the way dialog is spoken, after the fact. Here's an example:

"What are you doing here?" a voice said from somewhere behind Nancy. "What" was prounced "vut", as if the owner of the voice was a villainous Nazi from a bad movie.

So first you read the dialogue. You imagine it in your head, then you read that it wasn't pronounced the way you imagined it. So perhaps you reimagine it. From then on, that character's dialogue now has that sound to it, but that initial time the description followed the actual utterance.

I noticed this a lot when listening to Stephen King's stuff. So the person reading the audiobook apparently had to read through the book at least once before performing it, and maybe had to do several takes on sections containing such passages.

Another thing I've noticed is writers adding in some detail to a scene after you've already got a mental picture in your head. They may mention a moustache on a character that you've been with for a couple of pages, jarring you when your mental picture doesn't match up with this new feature. This is actually a bit of lazy writing, I think. The former is not nearly as bad as the latter, though.

This reiterates why a writer reading their stuff outloud while revising is such a good idea. You'll catch this sort of stuff, when you might not have thought of it otherwise. Anyway, don't know why I brought this up, other than that I've been noticing it a lot, and it's been bugging the heck out of me.