Nothing to Prove by the Doubleclicks

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I steal wholeheartedly from John Scalzi.

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.

Mike Underwood on Reading Your Work

I have been privileged to see a lot of writers who read their work well. I also know that it's hard for a lot of writers to read their work. We are, after all, in large part introverts.

At Wiscon, Mike Underwood read a new piece from his upcoming novel Celebromancy, and his performance blew me away. He did a lot of variation in his character voices, actions, and...humor. Mike has generously let me interview him about reading. I may steal some of his techniques. ;P

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Writer Tamago: I was very impressed by your reading at Wiscon. You told me that you think of reading as a performance. What is your philosophy behind that?

Mike: Before I was a serious writer, I was a singer and a gamer. Live performance is, arguably, in my blood – my parents met doing musical theater in college. And so, I’m very practiced at performing live, be it in a band, a choir, or in a tabletop or live-action role-playing game. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to modulate my voice, how to find the right timing, how to create distinct character voices, and when to go for the throat with a performance. A lot of what I do as a performing reader goes against some of the wisdom I hear commonly – the biggest one being “read slow” – I don’t. I want to grab my audiences and run with them, and when I’m narrating action, I want that momentum to come across to the audience, and reading fight descriptions in a slow, even tone will not cut it.

My other main reason for viewing reading as a performance is that I want readings to feel like there’s an added value – that there’s a reason to come to a reading instead of just waiting and buying a book when it comes out, or buying and reading in private, without the author present. I love oral storytelling, and live readings are a way for me to take my prose and re-present it through the lens of that ancient tradition.

Writer Tamago: What do you do to prepare for your reading?

Mike: It depends on how long my selection is, and how much time I have to prepare. The first task is selecting an excerpt. I try to pick something that doesn’t require much context, since every bit of time you spend explaining is time you’re not spending performing. I think the most important parts of selection are picking where to start and where to end, not at all unlike writing itself.

If I’ve got a good chunk of time to prepare, I will print out the selection and go through to highlight individual character voices, make notes on tone, timing, and inflection. Notes look like this:

“Exasperated”
“Sing-song.”
“She doesn’t believe what’s she’s saying.”
or
*Facepalm*

No matter what, I try to rehearse ahead of time, reading the selection aloud at least twice to re-familiarize myself with the excerpt, to brainstorm timing and settle on the voice for each character present in the scene, and figure out if I’m going to do any special gestures (running a hand through my hair, looking over my shoulder, banging a wall or the table, etc.). I also try to time myself so that I can check and make sure my projected time for the selection matches what I’m actually doing in practice. I tend to bet that when I perform live I will be a bit faster than in practice, just because my natural inclination is to speed up when I’m in the moment.

Writer Tamago: Do you have a background in drama? If you do, what from it do you use to bring your readings to life? If you don't, what techniques help you in your reading performance?

Mike: My background in drama is kind of sideways and around the corner. My dad has a Masters’ in Theater, my mom a Masters in Music – so the make-believe I grew up with may have been a bit more rigorous than some. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was about nine, and singing in choirs since I was seven. I never took formal acting classes, though I did some graduate coursework in Theater Arts for my interdisciplinary M.A. in Folklore.

As far as technique goes, I think my best tools are voice, gesture, and presence. Voice and gesture I’ll touch on below, so right now, let’s focus on presence:

For me, presence is the thing that separates a technically good performer from a truly memorable one. Presence is that inner light, the ability to reach out and grab an audience, to hold them spellbound. I can’t claim any great talent in terms of presence, but I try to do my best with what I have – I think real, palpable presence is very rare, and tends to take many long years to develop your skills and be able to project it on command.

But I believe that anyone can walk through the steps that produce presence.

· Try to spend more of your time looking at the audience than at the page.

· Make eye contact, and tell the story directly *to* the audience, not just at them.

· Bring the audience in with your words as much as you can, make the story present to the situation, not something apart from it.

· Tell the story like it matters to you, and to them.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.