Day Three of the residency and the morning starts with the sign-up sheet for that night’s readings. Our first night of two provided for the 17 writers here. After gazing at it on the way back from bussing breakfast dishes, I decided to wait.
It was still there at lunch. Waiting. Should I sign up for that night or wait? Would I feel even more pressure if I waited? If I knew Syd Lea would most likely also be there? Syd, if you read this, I know you would be kind and generous as only you can be! It’s all my own internal pressure.
So I scribbled my name on a line midway down the list. By dinner last night, several more people added theirs to the list so I was middle of the pack. Good or bad?
Then started an angst-ridden afternoon of mauling manuscripts and questioning why I ever thought I could write in the first place — i must be a poser countered with, well, they chose you, and back and forth, rinse and repeat. Before dinner, I had winnowed my selections down to one from the beginning of my first novel, Deer Apples (which I thought was finished, but oh, what I found in just the first pages of that manuscript! Am I done?). And one from chapter two of my work in progress, Bone Box.
I’d put Deer Apples aside after grad school to start Bone Box and worked on that manuscript off and on for a year or so, went more or less fallow here and there, then let it marinate while I reconstructed the first manuscript after my Mom died. So now it’s time for Bone Box to take the lead. Decision made.
Five minutes per reading. That’s the time limit here. How many pages is that? How many words? How should I present? After spending an hour in the amazing early spring sun, one of those rare Vermont May days where the temperature at 2 p.m. hits 80 while nights still fall to 50, I was ready to time my reading. I tried mumbling to myself outside, but the glare on my cell phone made it virtually impossible to time myself. So back to the studio.
Going down the hallway of Maverick, the writing studio, the building seemed to whisper. It was other writers doing the same thing, practicing their readings sotto voce, their voices a reassuring murmur of solidarity in solitude.
Five minutes when you’re searching for a scene to read from a novel seems like a blip in time, too short to make your point. But when you’re standing at that podium, your face blooming crimson in it’s usual redhead uncontrollable blush, it seems like an eternity. Page two out of four feels more like mile one of a longer run — where is the end? That was about when the tremor started to creep into my voice, the one I knew I needed to control.
And then it was over. Applause! Compliments! Wine at the bar afterwards! Toasts! More compliments! And I recognized what I knew, but what had been buried in piles of shitty self-deprecation, that this process is an important one for my work and one that I need to do — either by myself. I need to read out loud to myself and in public. I need to find more venues to read my work.
Reading forms more than a social function. It forces us to look closely at our work and hear the awkward phrases, where characters fall flat, places where dialogue will move the story, where too much explication can be condensed. It can save hours, eons even, of editing alone on a computer screen. Plus, it gives us practice so that we can present our work in an entertaining fashion. After all, once we get to that holy grail of a book tour, isn’t the whole idea of a reading, to sell books? Art meets the real world.
On Writing and Life 