Anecdotes from the Residency II
On the seventh day I rested. Oh, wait, that wasn’t me. That was from some other story. Anyway, on Day Seven were student readings. I’ve never really read any of my own work aloud before, so, in keeping with my throw-myself-in-the-fire approach to the residency, I volunteered.
Naturally, they asked me to go first. Gee, no pressure or anything.
I was not expecting student readings, so I hadn’t brought anything specific to read. What’s more, I only had five minutes, which sounds like a lot, but only really comes down to six to eight hundred words or so. Well, this assumes that one wishes to speak clearly and slowly enough to be understood. With a voice as deep as mine clarity should never be taken for granted, so I wanted to err on the six hundred side. I quickly decided that the opening of my novel-in-progress would be my best option, and began practicing in my room when I could find a few minutes.
Fortunately on Day Six some of us gathered for a practice session, which seemed to go pretty well. I read a different piece for the practice, although I didn’t know why I wasn’t practicing the piece I would be reading.
I figured that out at noon on Day Seven, some seven hours before the reading itself, when most of my afternoon would be spent in classes. You see, there is a drawback to studying craft while preparing for a public reading – you find yourself seeing problems in your writing that you hadn’t been aware of.
It wasn’t bad enough that I had three different characters speaking in the scene, which would be tricky enough for my first effort aloud. It was worse than that. I was practicing in the mirror when it suddenly struck me that my opening scene was flat – it began following action instead of during action and thus had no sense of urgency or anything compelling the reader’s attention. This felt intolerable, and I was scheduled to expose these flaws to a room full of people in a few hours. Because of afternoon classes I wouldn’t have time to re-write it either. I madly scrawled notes toward a fix to this problem and cast about for something more suitable to read.
Nothing speeds editing like urgency. I found a suitable moment from chapter two, trimmed it to about six hundred fifty words, read it over twice and hoped for the best. It went over quite well, all things considered.
