Public Readings from A to Z - Part 1 - How Much Should You Read

I've been asked more than once for advice about doing a public reading of your own work. This is something authors will frequently be encouraged to do as a promotional activity, and yet most of us get thrown into the deep end without a lot of guidance; small wonder that it can be a source of anxiety. If we wanted to be actors, we wouldn't have chosen a profession that mostly involves sitting alone at the computer talking to the imaginary people in our heads!

Actually, I love doing readings. And judging by the responses I've gotten, I'm fairly good at it: not a professional performer by any means, but good enough that I feel comfortable giving some advice. So I thought, "self, you should write a blog post about this!"

. . . nine posts that are also videos later, it turns out I have a lot to say.

Welcome to my miniseries on public readings! Or maybe a not-so-mini-series -- how many installments can you have before it isn't mini any longer? But don't worry. It isn't nearly as intimidating and complicated as it sounds. I'm just verbose, digging into the rationale behind various decisions instead of simply dropping sound bites of advice on you. You can find the video accompaniment to this post on Youtube.

• Part Two:What Material Should You Read?
  
• Part Three: Preparing an Excerpt
  
• Part Four: Practice
  
• Part Five: Pacing
  
• Part Six: Intonation
  
• Part Seven: Character Voices
  
• Part Eight: Live Performance
  
• Part Nine: Digital Performance
  

 

Let's start with figuring out how much you're going to read!

 

Step One: Find out how much time you'll have for the reading.

It boggles me how many writers don't seem to take this into account. I've been to group readings where one person hogs far more than their share of the time slot, or individual events where the author glances at the clock mid-reading and seems to be surprised by what they find.

Don't be that author. Plan ahead. And remember that the time you get is not the time you get.

If you have a half-hour solo reading slot at a convention, do you have half an hour to read? Nope. Because it's going to take a little while for people to clear out from the previous reading, and you want to make sure you're not the jerk whose audience delays the next author in line. You also probably want to leave at least a little time for Q&A. So if you've got a half-hour slot, that means you want roughly a twenty-minute selection at most. If it's an hour-long slot shared with two other authors, that's twenty minutes apiece, which means your own offering should be fifteen minutes at most.

If you have an hour all to yourself, does that mean you should choose something forty-five minutes long? You can . . . but unless you're really confident in your ability as a performer, I'd say not to risk it. Forty-five minutes is a long time to hold the audience's attention with a single piece. Most of the time you're going to be better off choosing two or three shorter bits, so that they get a few changes of pace along the way.

And if you're not sure how much time you have? Ask. The con runners or bookstore manager will be happy to tell you what they expect, so you can plan accordingly.

 

Step Two: Pick something the right length for the time available.

Okay, let's say you have twenty minutes for actual reading time. How much story does that mean?

The answer will vary somewhat from author to author, so the real answer here is that you need to figure out what it means for you. But my rule of thumb for my own events is that it takes me about five minutes to read a thousand words.

That isn't really accurate, mind you. I've been told I read with very good clarity, which partially makes up for my tendency to go faster than I really should -- but even then, if I get through a thousand word in five minutes, I'm probably reading too fast. But it has the virtue of being a number I can easily remember, so I use it as my upper bound, and then work downward from there. If I have twenty minutes, then I want something less than four thousand words long. Fifteen minutes means I'm counting down from three thousand words. Etc.

How do you figure out your own speed? By picking something whose length you know and reading it out loud. Time yourself. Do this several times, with several different texts, until you know what your own ballpark number should be. Of course this will also depend on how you're reading, so it will go hand in hand with the stuff I'm going to talk about in later installments, but for now, just bear this in mind.

 

Next time, we'll talk about

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Public Readings from A to Z - Part 7 - Character Voices

Welcome to part seven of my continuing series on how to do public readings of your work! You can find the video accompaniment to this post on Youtube.

• Part One: How Much Should You Read?
  
• Part Two:What Material Should You Read?
  
• Part Three: Preparing an Excerpt
  
• Part Four: Practice
  
• Part Five: Pacing
  
• Part Six: Intonation
  
• Part Eight: Live Performance
  
• Part Nine: Digital Performance
  

 

We're on the seventh installment of this series, and I'm only just now getting to character voices.

There's a reason for that. Many people leap to the conclusion that since they can't do a bunch of different accents and pitches, they'll never be good at reading. But the truth is that character voices are really just the icing on the cake. All the stuff I've discussed in previous installments -- picking your text, practicing it, attending to questions of pacing and intonation -- are the cake itself. And you can have really tasty cake even if there's no icing on it at all.

But if I want to give advice for readings, I should address this. So let's dig into it.

I'm indebted to Mary Robinette Kowal for teaching me the variables you can play with to create different character voices. I could already do this a little bit before I talked to her, but I didn't understand what sliders I was moving around to make it happen; she gave me the names for those sliders, and in so doing, made it possible for me to invent new "settings" besides the ones I already had. In short, the five things you can play with here are pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude.

Let's dispose of accent first, since I mentioned it already. Lots of people think this is important, but most of the time, it's one of the least important variables . . . and also one of the easiest to screw up. Even if one of the characters in a scene is British and the rest are American, I'd rather just have the American author say "by the way, this character is British" than put on a bad imitation of a BBC announcer. (Multiply that by a thousand if it's a majority-POC accent like Spanish or Chinese.) If you really, really need to use an accent, then visit something like the Speech Accent Archive and listen to samples, and search out instructional videos -- from people who actually know what they're doing, not some random dude on the Internet delivering an exaggerated movie rendition.

Next let's look at pitch, as that's the main variable people know to play with. Before you even get to the question of multiple character voices, it is a very good idea to create a slight difference between the pitch of your narration and the pitch of dialogue -- yes, even if the story is in first person. Along with the pauses I mentioned before, this microscopic shift signals the beginning and ending of direct speech.

What if there are multiple speakers in the scene? At the simplest level, it helps if you pitch your voice up just a little for a female speaker and down for a male one. The point isn't to "sound female" or "sound male" so much as it's to give the audience a way distinguish one voice from the other. This is especially useful when a bit of dialogue starts without a tag to tell you who's speaking. But don't take it too far: go low, especially without enough air, and you'll rapidly hit the vocal fry territory I mentioned before. Go too high, and you wind up in the falsetto register -- I most often hear that from male authors who try too hard to make their female characters sound girly. Most of the time, you want to stay in what specialists call the modal register, which is essentially your natural range.

But obviously that range has limits. And what are you supposed to do if you have, say, three female characters in one scene? Or just a large number of speakers overall? That's where the other variables come in.

Placement is hard for me to explain, because I don't have the technical vocabulary for it, but it's somewhat easier to illustrate: when you say someone has a nasal voice, you're talking about placement. I'm not sure if breathiness is officially part of this tool, but it certainly works as another way to distinguish two speakers. You can also put your voice far up in the front of your mouth, or shove it far to the back. This is an aspect I'm still working on mastering myself, and it's made more difficult by the fact that positioning and accent are actually linked: an RP British accent, for example, is very fronted, while a Midwestern American one is further back, and then some Slavic accents appear determined to sink your words halfway down your throat. But you can play around with this a bit, just by trying to visualize your voice being in a particular part of your head. It was very beneficial to me with the Lady Trent short story I read on tour, "From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review," because that one's done as a series of letters between Isabella and Mr. Benjamin Talbot -- but the final letter is from a different man, and I needed the audience to hear that immediately. I was able to do that by pushing Talbot further back while also kind of closing my nose (he sounds a bit like he has a cold), while Penburgh is further forward but open-throated (video here):

Dear Sirs — I will beg your leave to respond to Mrs. Camherst through the medium of your pages

versus

Dear Sirs — I was delighted to read last week’s leading article

There isn't a huge difference in pitch between them, but when I do it right, you know before the first sentence ends that someone different is speaking.

Pacing we've already discussed to some extent, but don't forget it's a tool for characterization as well as general delivery. One individual may be (relatively) rapid-fire -- don't go so fast your audience can't understand, unless the viewpoint character also doesn't understand -- while another has long, wandering pauses. The actor Christopher Walken is very distinctive in part because of his idiosyncratic pacing. (I'm told he literally goes through every script and removes the original punctuation, then writes in his own.) Along with this, consider how sharply the character does or does not enunciate: two people can speak at the same slow pace, but one of them draws their words out, while the other bites them off with silence in between.

And finally, you can think of attitude as being the character's general mood or demeanor. We all know that a simple sentence like "What did you do?" can come across very differently depending on the mood of the speaker: curious, angry, resigned, and so forth. If you want a character to sound happy, try to make a happy face while you speak: eyes wide, cheeks lifted, and so forth. Furrowing your brow for an angry line will help you sound angrier. Obviously a given character may go through a range of emotions depending on the scene, but especially when reading only a short selection, thinking about the predominant attitude each character has gives you another tool for distinguishing them.

Remember -- the primary goal here is to help the audience tell one speaker from another. You don't have to be an Academy Award-winning actor to pull that off.

 

In the final two installments, we'll look at the performance itself!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/9Iq6uQ)

Public Readings from A to Z - Part 8 - Live Performance

Welcome to part eight of my continuing series on how to do public readings of your work! You can find the video accompaniment to this post on Youtube.

• Part One: How Much Should You Read?
  
• Part Two:What Material Should You Read?
  
• Part Three: Preparing an Excerpt
  
• Part Four: Practice
  
• Part Five: Pacing
  
• Part Six: Intonation
  
• Part Seven: Character Voices
  
• Part Nine: Digital Performance
  

 

Your performance is more than just the words that come out of your mouth. It's everything about how you present yourself to the audience, and thinking about that ahead of time can make the performance as a whole come off better.

In general, you want to look good. This applies to male-presenting authors as well as female, though women get judged more harshly if they show up in jeans and a t-shirt, and men are more likely to get side-eyed if they're wearing makeup -- even though male actors and TV personalities wear makeup whenever they go in front of a camera, because looking your best is beneficial for anybody, regardless of gender. If you're nervous about the reading, try to pick clothing that makes you feel confident and professional, whatever "professional" may be for your genre and audience.

If I'm not going to be emceed onto a stage by someone else and I'm just sitting there waiting to begin, I often try to chat a bit with whomever's in the audience while the rest trickle in. Small talk may not be every author's cup of tea, but I find it preferable to awkward silence. If it's at a con, I just ask generally how people's cons have been going; if it's a book tour and I'm traveling, I might comment on how it's my first time in X place or it's so nice to be back there again. Anything to break the ice. I'll generally wait until a couple of minutes past the official start time to begin, and then I'll speak more loudly, introducing myself (if nobody else is doing that), thanking everyone for coming, and telling them what I'll be reading. If I'm planning on a Q&A afterward, I tell them that up front, so that people know to be ready with questions.

Should you sit or should you stand? This is mostly a matter of personal preference, though sometimes it will be very clear that the venue expects you to stand at a lectern or podium. Standing often makes it easier to be energetic and expressive, and the simple fact of being on your feet while other people are sitting helps communicate that you're performing and they should pay attention. On the other hand, if you're uncomfortable with having their eyes on you in the first place, then there's no point in making yourself even more nervous by standing up if you don't have to.

Try not to fidget. You can use some gestures if you want -- if it fits the story and feels reasonably natural -- but you don't have to; your words are the most important part, and you don't want to distract people from them. Constantly shifting your weight, fiddling with your hair, or otherwise making unnecessary movements can wind up breaking the audience's immersion. (Which doesn't mean you shouldn't scratch your nose if it itches, of course. These things happen. Just try not to do it all the time.)

If you're reading an excerpt and the audience needs some context to orient them, keep it concise: don't tell them everything that's happened in the story up until that point, just the parts they need to know in order to understand what you're reading. And give all the context ahead of time; it drives me up the wall when an author pauses mid-story (sometimes even mid-sentence!) to tell me the character who just showed up is the protagonist's mother, or that earlier she got injured in a fight with a unicorn, or whatever. If I need to know it, either tell me before you start reading, or edit your text a little bit to slip the information into the story. Don't interrupt yourself!

Speaking of interrupting yourself . . . if you make a mistake, either keep reading, or if you feel it's truly necessary, just back up and fix it. Don't make a bigger deal out of it by apologizing or makings lots of faces -- that only compounds the disruption.

Decide ahead of time what you'll be reading off of. A printout? Tablet? Phone? Laptop? Bound book? I almost always read from a printout, even in our technological modern age, because I can set the font and spacing to an arrangement that makes it maximally readable, and because I can shift the top page as I approach the end, allowing me to continue onto the next page without a pause. They're also lightweight, so holding them for long periods of time isn't hard on my wrists. But they have the downside of potentially making noise, especially if your hands are trembling with nerves. I'd rank a bound book or a tablet as the next most desirable option -- but make sure you have the text already loaded on your tablet, as you don't want to find out the hard way that the room you're in has no signal. Laptops usually require a table or lectern to support them, and I think they tend to come across as a barrier between you and your audience. Phones are rock bottom, as far as I'm concerned; judging by what I've seen when other people read from them, the tiny amount of text that can fit on the screen at once makes them very sub-optimal, as you're having to constantly scroll and pay attention to the device instead of to your listeners.

And you do want to pay attention to your listeners if you can. The better you know your text -- you practiced it, right? -- the easier it is for you to look up from the page periodically and make eye contact with people in the audience. Not only does this help engage them, but it also means you aren't directing your voice down and into a solid object. You become easier to hear and understand.

If you have a microphone, I recommend using it. Yes, even if you think you're loud enough without it. While it's possible to project your voice to the back of a large room, it can be a strain . . . and in my experience, at least half the people who think they can project can't really, or forget to do so once they get going. Lots of people are a little hard of hearing, and you don't want them to tune out because they can't really understand you. But make sure the mic is positioned well, so that you're speaking into it even when you're looking down at your text, and you're not so close to it that every puff of air makes the thing crackle and spit. With many mics, the best thing to do is to place it not directly in front of you, but ever so slightly on the diagonal, so that your breath blows past it instead of into it.

Two tricks I got from Mary Robinette Kowal, who is an excellent performer: first, if you have two or three speakers in a scene, pick a direction for each of them, and turn your head slightly in that direction when beginning their dialogue. If you're doing different voices, as we talked about in the last installment, this helps remind you to switch, and it also gives the audience a visual cue that you've shifted speakers. And second, if you need to change volume to be unusually loud or quiet, change your distance from the mic. I don't mean lean away for quiet and lean in for loud; I actually mean the opposite, so that you deliver a soft whisper right into the mic, and a shout from a foot or two away. Even if what gets delivered to the listener's ear remains the same volume, the alteration in your voice will create the desired effect, without risk of losing or blowing out the mic.

Once your reading is done, try to signal that physically by closing the book or laptop, putting the pages down, or whatever suits your medium. With a short story the ending may be obvious, but if you're reading an excerpt from a longer work, it may not be; you want your audience to know it's time to clap!

At that point, thank everybody for listening, open up the floor for questions if you're taking any, clear out the room if it's time for the next author, whatever. Congratulations! You have survived your reading!

 

But this all applies to live readings. If your reading is digital, the advice for that will come in the next (and final) installment.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/o8i24i)