Reading Your Work in Public

 

Reading your Work in Public

 

From what I heard, the number one fear in America is not losing your health care, but public speaking.

 

I will try to give you some hints on how I have “spoken up.”

Please be kind, bad grammar and punctuation disappears while speaking. My experience is more than ten years presenting Garden talks, and a couple of “appearances” on the radio.

 

Go watch other speakers. Go to where authors do book signings. Some authors do it well. Others will bore their readers to death. Realize that public reading takes practice and entertaining a group of would be novel buyers is an art form.  I have seen published authors read fourteen pages of their newest work only to stifle sales. Less can be more. In one reading, I read only two sentences in a three to four minute session and get a good response. That’s the goal.

 

First of all, don’t read from your book. The type size would be too small and lighting could be poor. Retype your copy using a larger type and all Caps. You should be able to read it at arm’s length. Write notes in the margins where you the reader should change your voice in dialogue. Practice this and time it. You don’t want to go over the time allowed.

 

Find out who your audience is. You might need to customize your work for them. Also dress well, patchy and tears in your clothing are so passé. Stay away from dairy products, drink water. In a private area, practice reciting tongue twisters. It may improve your speech.

 

“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers?
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,

where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?”

 

In your work, include a biography like “What caused you to be there? And why I write. This makes you human, kind of like your audience.

 

Start here…

(Turn on back ground music.) Optional.

 

Any writers here? Published writers? Great!

 

“I am writing Esola’s Journey, it is about a young woman from Mars who comes to Earth unexpectedly.

 

I recently found new software that helps you local a picture of the Protagonist in your novel for which you are writing. “The Internet.”  (Show picture.)

The world is full of actors and actresses, important people of the present and the past to give any authors ideas. She is Q’orianka Kilcher, she plays the part of Pocahontas in the movie “The New World.” Maybe, the new Esola.

 

  

 

I worked more than seven years on this project: reworking scenes, characters, and ideas. What have become four books of her year on Earth. A scene I was working on involves the heroine Esola who witnessed a tragedy on her home world in which many of her friends do not escape a large restaurant fire. She stands alone while panic infects the outside crowds. In the scene, Esola could do nothing, but she prays for the dying.

 

The situation, for which I wrote a few years ago, I thought was superb and the prayer great. As the months and years of rewriting flowed over the manuscript, my opinions changed. Something many good writers have come to understand. The situation in which I placed Esola was good as a frame to what would come next. Her prayer needs to knock people off their feet. It hadn’t yet. I needed that her prayer trigger events that will cascade her life out of control.

 

Esola is not a Christian. She will do the things that we Christians should have been doing. She is not telling or preaching, she is showing, sometimes to great personal peril. When we first meet Esola, she only believes in an absent God, by the end of the fourth book she argues with God for all that she and we hold dear.

 

I am not a religious person and you know that Esola is not either. Back in the spring of 07, when I worked fulltime at a piston ring factory. Working at a monotonous task, I found the hook I was looking for. That summer, I attended writing classes at a school in Wisconsin north woods. All around that school were posted bumper stickers on teachers’ desks that said “Be Gentle.” A good sign, for those are the first words to her prayer. This represents Esola’s entire faith.”

 

Esola’s Prayer

Be gentle,

for my friends are coming to be with you,

protect them from the memory of their deaths,

and surround them with love.

For one great day,

we will all meet in the garden,

and all will be,

as it should be.