The Writer and the Reader
In theatre, there comes a particular moment – all the lines have been memorized, the blocking set, costume changes ironed out. The actors are edgy with the uncertainty of the final project because they’ve reached the point in which they need an audience.
Whenever I’ve been in a comedy, during the rehearsal process there are certain lines that the cast finds hysterically funny. When opening night arrives, they prepare themselves for the big reveal. They can’t wait to hear the audience laugh. And you know what? It doesn’t always happen the way you think. In fact, the laugh may come at a different moment.
In the play The Lion in Winter, Eleanor is hounding Henry about his decision to marry his lover Alais and have more sons. She starts cataloging all the way he is too old to beget another heir. “Suppose you’re daughtered next; we were – that, too, is possible. How old is Daddy then? What kind of spindly, ricket-ridden, milky, semi-witted, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limp line of things will you beget?”
Henry responds, “It’s sweet of you to care.”
In reading the play, I always found Eleanor’s line to be the funny one. In actuality, the audience laughs at Henry’s.
As an actor, you won’t discover that moment until you have an audience.
It’s the same for a book. Orson Scott Card wrote: “The ‘true” story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the book I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”
Recently I finished rereading – for the seventh or eighth time – Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddlemaster trilogy. Many of the passages are familiar to me, and yet I felt like I was encountering the story for the first time, picking up nuances that I had forgotten or never noticed before.
All art is a form of communication. No matter if the reader is coming to the text for the first time, or is reading it again, the conversation continues. The writer needs the reader to share in the dialogue. The reader needs the writer to start the ball rolling.
Whenever I’ve been in a comedy, during the rehearsal process there are certain lines that the cast finds hysterically funny. When opening night arrives, they prepare themselves for the big reveal. They can’t wait to hear the audience laugh. And you know what? It doesn’t always happen the way you think. In fact, the laugh may come at a different moment.
In the play The Lion in Winter, Eleanor is hounding Henry about his decision to marry his lover Alais and have more sons. She starts cataloging all the way he is too old to beget another heir. “Suppose you’re daughtered next; we were – that, too, is possible. How old is Daddy then? What kind of spindly, ricket-ridden, milky, semi-witted, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limp line of things will you beget?”
Henry responds, “It’s sweet of you to care.”
In reading the play, I always found Eleanor’s line to be the funny one. In actuality, the audience laughs at Henry’s.
As an actor, you won’t discover that moment until you have an audience.
It’s the same for a book. Orson Scott Card wrote: “The ‘true” story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the book I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”
Recently I finished rereading – for the seventh or eighth time – Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddlemaster trilogy. Many of the passages are familiar to me, and yet I felt like I was encountering the story for the first time, picking up nuances that I had forgotten or never noticed before.
All art is a form of communication. No matter if the reader is coming to the text for the first time, or is reading it again, the conversation continues. The writer needs the reader to share in the dialogue. The reader needs the writer to start the ball rolling.
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