The Importance of Hearing Yourself Say It

I had the opportunity to do a reading of my work last week, and it was a memorable experience.

One of the reasons for that was that I had the chance to hear the extremely talented Sheree L. Greer read from her debut novel Let the Lover Be. Her prose is electric, and her delivery brought it vividly to life.

Then it was my turn to read from Dicing Time for Gladness. I've read my writing in front of people before — during innumerable college workshops, at awards ceremonies etc. — but this was the first time I had ever read something that had already been published.

In order to make sure it didn't run too long, that I wouldn't stumble too much and that I wouldn't feel rushed, I had already rehearsed the part I was going to read several times. But reading it out loud in front of a live audience of actual human beings who were listening and paying attention was a profoundly different thing, and it felt altogether fresh as I heard the words coming out of my mouth. Things I had not particularly noticed while practicing suddenly loomed large; details that had barely registered before became glaringly obvious. I found myself editing as I spoke: changing a word here, deleting a word there, altering the inflection slightly from what the punctuation on the page would suggest.

At the moment I thanked everyone and sat down, as the applause was dying away, my impulse was to go back to a blank sheet of paper and re-write the entire book. Later, after I'd had some time to process and assimilate the experience (and recover from the trauma), I went through the section I had read and noted the things I would like to adjust. The changes, in reality, were relatively few and relatively minor. They just seemed huge at the time.

Still, it was a harrowing learning process. One is, of course, never through with a novel. There is always one more comma to change into a period, one more adjective to remove, one more sentence to lift out of the middle of the fourth paragraph and drop in near the beginning of the third. Decades after the first printing, as a book is entering its fourth and tenth editions, the writer is still inevitably tinkering. But maybe that's not really the lesson here. Maybe the larger question is whether the events of the story feel generally right. Does the plot make sense? Are the actions of the characters consistent and plausible? Are the descriptions authentic? Does the narrative flow? Does the dialogue pop? Reading your work out loud, you should feel like you have nothing to explain and nothing to apologize for. That's what matters.

Since that night, I feel a new wave of awareness of my prose style that I can tell is impacting my work on Book II in the series, Crass Casualty. I'm definitely going to try to do more live readings in the future, now that I have been reminded how useful and valuable they are. So if you have an event and need an author to read, send me an invite. I hope you don't mind if I pause frequently to wield a red pen.