Reading Aloud

Reading From Library of the Sapphire Wind

Last week, I revealed the deep dark secret behind why I prefer not to use voice to text for my writing.  This week, as promised, I’m going to tell you why doing a reading is always an adventure.

Let me start by saying that I have a lot of experience reading aloud, pre-dating becoming a professional writer, which is a career that comes with the expectation that authors will read aloud from their work at various occasions.  My first experience reading aloud came when I was reading to my younger siblings.  My younger sister is nearly eight years younger than me, so I read to her a lot.  Her favorite book was Fox in Socks.  To this day I can still recite the ending tongue twister with fair accuracy.  I started babysitting very young, and reading bedtime stories aloud used to be a routine part of the job.

Later, as both an English major and English professor, I did a lot of reading aloud.  Enter the publication of my first short story in the early 1990s.  With this came opportunities to do public readings and the revelation of a new wrinkle in my personal timeline.

I discovered that reading my own fiction aloud transformed the work.  One reason for this was because, as I mentioned last week, I’m a very immersive writer and even though I’m fairly good at coming up with different voices for characters, I certainly can’t make them sound like they do in my head.  Especially the first few times I read from a piece, even if I rehearse in advance, I find the sound of my voice subbing for the characters’ “real” voices startling.

The other reason reading aloud from my works to an audience requires me to shift my perceptions is because, like many writers, I use reading my work aloud to myself as a means of proofing the work and checking the flow of the prose.  This means that, for me, I need to have two different mindsets for reading aloud: the one that is hyper alert and critical, and the one that’s reading to entertain.

Sometimes separating these can be a struggle, because the two are quite antithetical to each other.  As a frequent listener of audiobooks, I have heard how a really talented reader can make an indifferent piece of prose much more entertaining.  Equally, I have heard readers maul the prose as written, completely changing the story in how they choose to interpret a character.

When I read to proof my work, I deliberately don’t perform it.  I focus on detail.  I mentally critique just about very word and make sure the punctuation signals how I want the emotional or informational content of the prose to be interpreted as the reader.  Needless to say, this would make for a terrible style when giving a public reading.

So, there’s another reason why switching to voice to text would be a challenge for me.  I’d do it if I had no other option, but right now, the idea does not amuse.