Almost every book of advice on writing will tell you to read your work aloud. I find lots of advice to be either incompatible with my wonky process (yes, I can draw a plot graph but it never seems to help) or completely impossible (write my entire book again, from scratch, for the second draft? I don’t think I’ll live that long), but this one has always rung true.
There’s nothing worse than doing a public reading and discovering halfway through a sentence that a) you’ve used the same word three times and you didn’t mean to and b) the sentence is quite awful. Note: this is why you should always practice and edit in advance.
My current writing project is reading the entire second draft (all 124,000 words of it) of the Witch Novel out loud. To my relief, it doesn’t seem to suck. I’ve had to had a number of notes (wait, am I capitalizing that? How many years pass between event A and event B? Am I sure? Didn’t Erzabet already tell Vedette about this?) but that’s normal. I didn’t write the book in order, so some of the ghosts of the narrative guesses or clues I put in each new section are still there to be pruned.
I just finished Chapter 35 of 42, so the end is approaching. I found myself getting quite dramatic with this one, gesturing wildly and hunching over my computer. It was quite fun. I’m a pretty good reader – I once recorded all of Cold Hillside in VoiceRecord Pro – and I like doing it. Even if I did always choke up at the end of Hiroshima chapter, which was one of the sections I often read for Blood & Chrysanthemums. I’ve done readings for two of the flamenco shows I’ve been in (if you need someone to lend a bit of cynicism to a paean about Spartan women, I’m your girl) and my teacher has already said I’ll be doing some more for the show in April.
I suppose I’m better at reading than I am at footwork, but that’s ok.
During the pandemic, my husband recorded me reading short sections from each of the books and then he composed music to accompany them. My goal is to post those over the coming weeks – once I figure out how.
Stay tuned!
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