So You've Been Invited to Read...What Happens Next?

Advice for reading work to an audience, part 2

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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At last: the great day has come and you've finally been published in a literary magazine, and it's one that you've longed to appear in. People are reading your poems, your essay, your short fiction, and they may even be commenting online. Then something just as wonderful happens: you're invited to do a reading!   

One friend told me the first thing he worried about was what to wear. If that's your go-to question, cool. But once that decision is made, you have to figure out what exactly to read and how. After all, you want to leave the best impression, build your fan base, and enjoy yourself too.

Don't let your tools be an obstacle

We live on our phones, but that's no reason to read from yours because you'll have to look down too often and it can interfere with making eye contact with your audience.  A better choice would be reading from the issue itself if it's in print. You can also do a reading from a tablet, but many writers prefer to print off copies of the work they're reading so that turning pages is easier and they also make the font larger than the original. 

When I read from a published book, I use the advance review copy (ARC) because I don't worry about it getting worn. When I read an essay from a journal, I like to print off the text in a more convenient font and put that text in bold. It's especially helpful if the lighting at the venue turns out to be less than optimal.

You need to know and love your text(s)

It's important to be as familiar as possible with the poems you choose, your fiction, or your creative nonfiction, whether an excerpt or something complete. You need to study the work as if it was written by someone else, learn its rhythms, find its possible pitfalls when it's read aloud, and revel in its polish. Every word, every line has to feel natural and fluent no matter the genre. If you love what you're reading, truly love it and think it's the best example of your work for that venue, you're off to a head start. 

I've seen too many readers actually say they're not sure whether their reading works or not, or express doubt about some aspect of the reading. Why would you want to prejudice an audience like that? Confidence going into the gig is vital for you and for your audience: They want to see a professional, not an amateur.

Be ready to make some changes

A text of any kind meant to be read in a magazine, a book or online might not be 100% performance-ready. Reading is a very private experience, but being read to and listening is quite different. You might, for example, have to add some transitions, change some complex sentence structure, or add tags in stretches of dialogue that identify the speaker. People listening don't have the opportunity to re-read a line or a passage that seems unclear to them, and you want to make sure your text can be readily comprehended. I've occasionally found myself shortening sentences in some of my short stories, and if I know the piece well enough, I've even ad-libbed. Every text is different in performance, and every performance will be different. 

Your reading needs structure

Once you've been introduced and you’ve thanked the organizers, how do you want your time in front of that audience to flow? Where do you begin and where do you want to finish? What kind of journey will you take them on? If you're a poet, will you work with a theme or a series of themes, or will you vary styles and voices? If you're an essayist, can you find something short enough to give listeners a feeling of completion? And if you're reading fiction, the same thing applies: is there a beginning, middle, and end to the piece or excerpt you’ve selected to read? 

On tour in Germany for my memoir My Germany, I read the short prologue every time because of its structure, just as much as the content. It opens with me on a train in eastern Germany, arriving at the same city my mother was brought to as a slave laborer on a very different train during WWII, then moves to my feelings about Germany growing up as the son of Holocaust survivors, and ends with my very surprising first reading in Germany. It worked.

Drama is essential

An audience expects to be interested, entertained, perhaps even amused—but at the very least, moved in some way by what you're reading. Where is the drama in what you've chosen? Is it in the imagery? Is it the storyline itself, whether fiction or creative nonfiction?  Is it the characters who appear in your work? Is it your prose style? If there's dialogue can you make it sound real, not artificial? Can you, while reading, vary your tone of voice and speed enough to supply drama to your performance? 

One writer told me about trying to come up with dramatic gestures, but I think it's more important to let gestures be organic, flow out of the text as you deliver it. And some people just don't gesture a lot, which is also fine. Don’t feel obliged to. I was born in New York and like many of my former compatriots, I sometimes use my hands a lot when I speak. At other times I feel the stillness of my body fits the material better. See what works for you. The performance of your writing has to feel natural and authentic, not stagey.

Avoid reading anything that upsets you

People do not come to a reading hoping the reader will be dull, flat, unengaged with them, and seemingly unengaged with the prose or poetry they're sharing. Listeners expect a polished performance, they expect feeling. But too much feeling can shift the tone of the event. I've seen writers start to tear up when they read something very personal that they clearly haven't had time to process sufficiently, something based on events that weren't distant enough in time or significance.  Do you want your audience to feel sorry for you or instead appreciate your artistry? 

One writer who I read with announced that she always felt like crying at a certain point in her selection. There was a lot of shifting in chairs when she said that. It seemed to make many audience members uncomfortable, while I think others were waiting to see if she really did cry on this particular occasion. That's distracting, and will detract from the performance of your work.

Keep looking ahead

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the writing life is being invited to do a reading. No matter the venue, it means you've been recognized—you're appreciated. And when you do a reading, you're not home alone writing or stressing about not writing, you're out in the world meeting your fans and potentially making new ones. Even better, you can experience your work in a whole new way by actually hearing it as a public performance.  

You might not feel entirely comfortable when you start out, but the important thing to realize after you embrace the performance side is this: you will get better as you do more of them. Your progress might not be linear, you may even be disappointed by some readings you do. Disappointment can come from anything:  from poor turnout to not liking the venue, to lack of sleep to your audience just not being in the mood for what you're reading on that occasion.  Assess what didn't work, see if you have the power to change it, and if not, focus on your next reading and the one after that.

Learning to give memorable performances of your work is a process that requires practice.  So practice—a lot.

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For more advice on readings, check out Lev’s previous article, “How to Do a Killer Reading From Your Work.”

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