Read aloud, the unnecessary stands out

I am reading my book to my daughters. They seem to enjoy it, particularly the parts where I poke fun at seemingly invulnerable adult characters. Seeing a gruff adult turn all sappy, or a scary villain trip all over himself is funny to them. They like hearing the story and beg for more. I enjoy reading it to them.

As part of the writing process, reading it aloud to them really helps out. The grammatical errors become glaringly obvious as my mouth trips over trying to say the sentences out loud. Even more glaring, though, are the writing indulgences which prove completely unnecessary to the book. In order to keep myself going, I force a free form "write whatever hits your head" approach. If I get an idea, I write it down on paper the way the words form in my head. If I think something is funny, amusing or interesting I just go for it right away before I lose it. Sometimes I will even skip several chapters ahead just to get something written out as it hits my skull, although usually I capture the idea in notes (as an aside, my inner geek shows through, as I use SGML style markup to do it... like this).

The problem with this approach is that many ideas are distractions which might have seemed fun to me, but that really don't play a part in the movement of the storyline. For the kind of story I am writing, sticking to the action is critical to keep the audience's interest. I have read whole chapters that on reflection should be removed entirely with just the bare stitching need to fix the hole they leave behind. Some chapters I want to keep, but maybe move to later in the story, as they deal with character development that become important points of the plot.

I'm not saying anything new or novel here. I have read several times in articles by other writers that reading the story out loud really helps in the proof reading. It is just interesting to reflect on it now as I am doing it.