Juiced On Writing

On Saturday I attended an in-world awards ceremony within Second Life. The event went incredibly wrong for me, but if interested you can read about my second life exploits predominantly now on another blog, Metaversally Speaking. Go there to see an account of the errors affecting my first ever public appearance with my writing.

Whilst all the problems were going on, I still had enough to think about in simply reading out my short story. Asking me to read in the first place was one huge thing. Asking it for my first public appearance should have been a big thing also.

Here, in my real life – the life where I am writing, and plotting out stories, and a writing career, I have no public audience. Locally, there isn’t even a writing club – or even a reading club. Everything for me is virtual.

For some time in Second Life, I couldn’t work out the emphasis behind writers ‘speaking’ out their work in public or group workshops. I could understand adding voice to an event which included a published author reading out an excerpt of their work – after all you would either have this, or simply have a bunch of virtual avatars to look at. Voice added some personalisation to the events. Over the past few weeks I have tried to attend as many reading events as possible, to get an understanding for this.

But I’ve shirked away from all the group messages asking me to come prepared with work to read out to a group. Me? My voice? Now, when we were talking about my own self, the whole thing took on a much less appealing factor. I didn’t want to read out my stuff, why would anyone else want to listen to it?

With the Storyquest awards ceremony I was forced into my own first voice attempts. And into reading out – in it’s entirety, a piece of my writing. Whilst I was dealing with the large problems occuring inworld at the time, and juggling my story on-screen, scrolling through it, reading out loud, and holding buttons and mouse down, I had little time to think about it all.

However now I do. I know the story I was reading had areas within it, that on re-reading I am less than happy about. If given the chance I would not like that story to go to publication – but as part of the prize and contest itself, it will do so. And the story was written in a day’s timeframe, and less edited than I would like. But it’s also a darned good story, and certainly a good start to the fictional side of my writing life.

But to the point – if given the chance, I would rewrite large passages of that story, and some of that comes from having had to read it out.

Reading out a story is an oddity in itself. My own short story has three female characters, including the un-named female protaganist. This made it hard, in certain passages, to tell who was speaking. Particularly as I use a lot of dialogue. Was it the hero, or another bit character with a female voice?

This became particularly challenging when reading it out.

Acting it out, with different voices for different parts would have made the world of difference, but one person’s voice just couldn’t cut it in places. Even as I read it, I found myself trying to take on more of a persona in voice for different female characters, hoping that would help people listening to understand. I seriously doubt I succeeded.

I see that now, having read it out. I see the places where I should have gone back and clarified the voices within, perhaps by even adding character names to differentiate some.

Authors are always told to read their stories out loud. In my case, I randomly do this, passage by passage, thinking that the reading voices inside my head will surely suffice. But my lazy approach has now caught me out. So I’ll give myself a B for effort, and a Needs Improvement on this particular learning lesson for my own work.

I’m still not confident in doing this publically – for me the only option is an online writing event such as those found in Writer’s groups within a virtual world such as Second Life. But those events still involve participation and critique, and that’s not something I can, as yet, accept within my own boundaries. I don’t want to do it for others, and I don’t want to hear the results for mine. Perhaps this is because I still find that I am learning, in my own way, how to improve my own writing (and what I am happy in seeing in my own writing), and am still quite new at this.

Does voice and reading out loud matter to you as a writer? Do you do it?

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