Image: An overfilled coffee mug
Friday night I did a reading from The Devil's Interval at a local Fall Coffee House. It was a safe environment to share an excerpt from an unpublished novel; I knew almost everyone who was there. Picking the excerpt to read is an interesting (soul-wracking) experience. The selected reading needs to immediately capture the audience's attention without giving away too much of the story. In an evening of three-minute songs, I'm asking the audience to invest twelve minutes listening to me. And the reading needs to be powerful enough that it encourages the audience to buy the book when it comes out.
I joked with the crowd that I was jealous of all the other performers. As a novelist I need 90,000 words to tell a good story and everyone else only needs 300 words.
The reading was well received, but It's not like a workshop where people are not just willing, but eager, to share all the things that were wrong with your piece. During the evening, I was struck by one experience that writers--no matter how exceptional--never get: the stadium tour. Can you imagine reading to 50,000 people at one time? I can't even imagine 50,000 people listing to my ebook at the same time. If you would like to try, please buy one. I could use the sales!
During the evening performers played original works and covers of hit songs. It was an older crowd, so all of the covers were from the sixties and seventies. And whenever the crowd knew the lyrics, they sang along. (Writer's Note: I'm a storyteller, not a singer. I also do not dance. I can do theater, but if it is a musical, it better be a comedy. And I rarely sing along.)
No novelist has ever experienced the joy, during a reading, of having the audience reciting the text along with them as they read. That makes me sad. How powerful an experience must it be to have the audience shouting out the lyrics while you are singing? It could be really fun to have them read along with you when you split the audience in half and the folks on the left read the first two sentences and the folks on the right read the next two. Perfect gibberish (some people already think my writing is perfect gibberish.)
It's not that people don't memorize parts of books. Go to graduate school in an English department. I guarantee that some of your classmates will show off in class, again and again, by asking questions or making comments in which they quote directly from the text we are reading. It is how they seek approval from the professor and prove they read the book. I belong to the camp that does not memorize passages from the text, but rather puts my energy into understanding them and being able to offer a meaningful critique.
One of the most common type of questions on a final for literature courses was for the professor to list five or six short excerpts from the readings we had done for the class and the students were required to identify the text, they came from, the author of the text and the importance of the excerpt. If you've read four novels and forty-three poems for that semester, that can be a difficult question. In all my years of undergrad and grad school, I only got all of the excerpts correct once. It was when I returned to finish my master's degree, after being out of school for a decade. The kids were older (middle and high school) and I was working a very unique schedule: Sunday thru Thursday, noon to 9pm. I was only taking one class (I had to prove I could still do graduate school level work). That was probably the only class of my entire college career in which I actually read every assigned reading. I not only identified five of seven passages correctly, I wrote about the other two as well, just for the joy of proving I could.
Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck
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