Tell 'Em A Story

     Tuesday night, I did something completely out of character: I got up in front of a group of twenty or thirty people and read a story I had written.  Out loud.

     It wasn't my idea.  Some months back, a "flash fiction" story I had written won second prize in a local contest.  Flash is under a thousand words and generally centers on a single image or emotion.  My story was set on a farm in a near future that's gone badly sideways, and then....  But I won't give it away here.

     The local writer's organization that ran the contest has returned to in-person meetings in recent months -- writers are a reclusive lot, but eventually even the loneliest river figures out it'd better find the sea or just dry up -- and they had decided to have the editors of their magazine do readings at the August meeting.  Once they ran through all the editors willing to speak into a  microphone with a live audience (funny thing, people do not just line up, eager to do so), they were still a little short, even after sneaking in a couple of genuine non-editor poets, so they asked the contest winners.  I'm not sure about the guy who came in first (and deserved to), but the third-place finisher and Yours Truly agreed.

     So there I was Tuesday night, sitting in an aisle seat in the next-to-last row, listening to well-read poetry,* and some that struggled with the PA system, and a first-rate short essay and--  My turn.

     I'd timed the thing.  Six and a half minutes.  I rewrote it to make the mechanics more linear: you want people to know who's got what line in dialog, so neat tricks like, "'I'm not so sure,' she said, 'if this is a good way to indicate a pause when reading aloud,'" don't work as well and you use actor's tricks instead, attributing the speaker at the beginning and actually playing the pause when you read the line.  Because my story has two characters, presumably husband and wife, I went through and highlighted their lines in different colors, and let my tone and cadence change just a little when I read them.

     And what do you know?  It worked!  I even got a laugh of recognition at the right point, when one of the characters realizes things have gone even more strangely wrong than he expected.

     Performing like that, I get a feeling of being "beside myself," watching the performance play out; I looked at the audience, but I'm not sure how much I saw them.  But I didn't faint or pick my nose, so I think it went all right.

     It was a far cry from my experience on the radio years ago, reading a sixty-second supermarket commercial or a fifteen-second weather forecast into a microphone, alone in a room with an unknown number of listeners on the far side of the transmitter.  And it was not nearly so terrible a thing as I had feared.
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* The challenge of poetry is that unless the poet's an absolute genius, you're probably not going to read the poem with the same rhythm and flow as the poet wrote it, and even more so if you read it silently.  It's good to go hear the words as the poet heard them, and I say that as someone who is no huge fan of poetry: a good poem is a gift but good poets are rare.  I'm pleased to report the meeting organizer had managed to find good ones.