The reward of giving a reading

I did it! Today, I worked on the excerpt I read last night at the bookstore. I am back in the swing of writing and it feels wonderful! I put back the bits I had cut out for the public reading and added more material. It's richer now, better, I think. I wish I could read it again, now that I've improved it. Sent it out to friends for critiquing as I am eager to submit it to The Sun. I must be patient.

Reva

What I learned by reading out loud

I read at a bookstore last night for the National Writers Union. I agonized over which section of my book to read, deciding on one then changing my mind four times. I settled on the lesson about Elian Gonzalez (the Cuban kid whose Miami relatives refused to send him back to Cuba). It reads easily and is a familiar story but my students in China interpret it from the Chinese perspective which is pretty shocking. I also read a section in which I buy yogurt from a little street seller and am approached by Uighur men who want to tell me about their lawsuit. It sets up the reader to understand how Uighurs think the U.S. will save them.

Preparing for the reading gave me insights about my text. As I practiced reading beforehand, I saw phrases, even paragraphs that were distracting. They might be wonderful, such as the scene after the Elian Gonzalez lesson in which Ian tells me I’ll go mad in China. “You can go mad on God or mad on the bottle or simply mad.” It’s a great line but I didn’t want overload my audience, so I cut it out for the reading.

Within the book, it works. Books are roomy, there is space for extras, and the reader is already acquainted with Ian and his helpful, insane advice. But introducing a new character in a short read is treacherous, so edited it out.

The reading is over, but now I learned about editing sections of the book. I want to get short sections published. I have tried and been unsuccessful, now I understand I can’t just lift the section out of the book and let it stand on its own. It needs help. This little story about teaching about the legal case of Elian Gonzalez in China should be marketable with a little tweaking. I will do that today. Destination: The Sun magazine. It’s just their kind of story. Reva

Work

Whenever I finish a scene I'm really happy with, I read it over and over again to marvel at my ability to string all those images together. Some passages are like a pop-up book, where everything is amazingly clear. The work that is required for that is intense, though. I spend days on one word, whole sections are tied up with a sentence I can’t turn around properly while my characters lean against the walls, patiently waiting for me to get on with it.

And the work isn't just about the vocabulary, that way writers put precision in their descriptions. It’s also about rhythm. If the rhythm of a sentence is off, then the reader has to put on the mental brakes. The scene has a skip. Experience has been helping me find that rhythm more quickly, of course, but sometimes I feel like no amount of writing will ever make me a sixty-word a minute fiction writer.

Amy

Stranger than Stranger than Fiction

This past weekend the movie Stranger than Fiction showed up in my mailbox courtesy of Netflix. I had found the idea intriguing when I'd seen the preview--an completely ordinary IRS tax agent begins hearing a narrator in his head accurately describing his life AND foreshadowing not too subtly his imminent demise.

I had time to watch the film because I was doing everything but writing. I've been blocked since the writing group reviewed my last submission, not because of feedback but mainly because, as the feedback showed, I had strayed into (for me) experimental territory and I wasn't sure how to get myself back on the path of the story, which is to say how to get back to the business of killing one my characters.

The movie began comfortably enough with the poor dull IRS agent brushing each of his 32 teeth 48 times (24 times up and down and 24 times side to side) and the voice of the narrator (Emma Thompson) comes in and starts describing this and the man freaks out a bit and I thought, "Oh what a lovely way to not write...er, I mean entertain myself for a few hours."

Then cut to Dame Thompson, her toes over the ledge of a building tens of stories about the bustling city street. She jumps, but it's only imagined. She's a blocked writer trying to figure out the right way to kill her main character, the repressed IRS agent.

F**K! I can't escape it even here, even nestled in my leather recliner with the cool night breeze coming in the window finally after surviving the day's brutal humidity. For the next two hours I watch the tortured writer chew on the problem of her still-breathing character.

I didn't resolve what to do in the book but I resolved to calm down about my process. I'm as captive to my own relationships with my characters as that writer was to her relationship with the ill-fated tax man. Of course, she resolves her problem in 123 minutes. The wait for me seems a bit longer. ~ Victoria Tirrel