Thursday, June 4, 2009

Reading Your Work Out Loud

My fellow writing friend, Chandler Craig,  joined the DFW Writers' Workshop this week and I had the pleasure of attending it with her on Wednesday. She recently posted on her blog about the experience and I highly recommend you take a read! She did a great job detailing the experience as a first timer, and the lay out of the workshop and what we do there. She also goes into how nerve racking a first time read can be. I can attest to that. Anyone who is a member there has had their "first read". I think anyone who types or thinks fast probably speaks fast, ten times more so if they're nervous. This was my case, and as you can read in Chandler's blog, hers as well (though I really think she did awesome for her first read!).

Have you ever read your work out loud? Not in your head, but you know, verbally? If you've never taken speech classes before and don't do a lot of public speaking to begin with, I'd suggest practicing. Even if you're not going to join the DFW Writers' Workshop (which I dare to ask WHY NOT? So what if you live in another state! ;P ) if you plan on being a published author, or are one already (which those that are probably already know this), you will want to have book signings, and book readings. So, practice talking as slow as possible, because when you read really slow and add your nervousness, it will probably come out sounding where it needs to be. 


6 comments:

  1. Reading aloud lets the ears pick up things the eyes miss in revisions too.

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  2. I have read my book aloud to my husband at times, and it's so hard! I agree with Angie about picking up things you didn't see before. Also, I feel self conscious because I know the voice in my head and what these people sound like, and I get distracted by the nagging that I'm not doing them justice.

    And it's when I find the really dumb nerdy parts, too! LOL.

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  3. Agreed, I should have put that in the blog. Even during our reads at the workshop I always see someone catch something and mark it as they read, and I've done the same before. And Sharla, I totally can relate to the "doing them justice" part. Also, when I have guy characters when I first read I wasn't sure if I was suppose to read him lower or not. Pretty comical, really lol.

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  4. Haha, I felt like I should do voices or something for the character but I *knew* that would come out lame. So instead I opted for terrified and shaky all the way through.

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  5. I agree that reading aloud is an extremely useful too. When I was a speechwriter, we had to read all of our drafts aloud to find the clunkers and errors. I've continued to do this with fiction and it's always amazing what you can find!

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  6. Good post! I also finding that reading out loud but backwards is a good strategy. Sounds odd, but it works!

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