Read Your Work Out Loud

   By Thomas Kies

I was recently one of the judges in a short story contest called “Winter Hauntings”.  The winners were celebrated at a ticketed event with music and wine.  They were also treated to hearing professional actors read their stories aloud to the audience.  

One of them told me, “That was an adrenaline rush!”

I get it.  We’re in rehearsals for a mystery dinner theater I’ve written.  This one is called the Reading of Dr. Bell’s Will.  It’s a combination of live theater, video, and live music—I guess you could call it mixed media.  

It’s my second opportunity to be a playwright. 

The joy of doing these is not just that it raises a lot of money for the college and our local theater, but I get to hear and see my characters come to life.  

It’s an adrenaline rush. 

When I’m teaching my creative writing class, I advise my students to read their work aloud, not necessarily to any kind of audience, but to themselves to hear it.  It’s one thing to see your sentences and your words on the screen of a laptop or on a sheet of paper, but if you listen to it, you get a better feel for how flows.  

Is it clunky? Is the dialogue not believable? Does that word feel awkward? Should I delete that adjective? 

As part of my class, every week, I ask my students to write about a thousand words after I give them a writing prompt.  Then at the next class, they stand up and read what they’ve written.

That’s scary.

Even after this many years, I still get the yips when I read my own work in public.  

But in my class, after the student has read the piece they’ve written, we applaud.  Then we go around the room and talk about what we like about it.  And then, and only then, do we spend time talking about how we might make the piece stronger. 

I want it to be a positive experience. And one where the people in the class see how important it is to hear what you write. 

According to the Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this is why you read your work aloud. “As listeners, we need the order of ideas in a paper to make sense. We can’t flip back and forth from page to page to try to figure out what is going on or find information we need. When you hear your paper read out loud, you may recognize that you need to re-order the information in it or realize that there are gaps in your explanation. Listeners also need transitions to help us get from one main idea to the next. When you hear your paper, you may recognize places where you have moved from one topic to another too abruptly.

Sometimes sentences aren’t grammatically incorrect, but they are still awkward in some way—too long, too convoluted, too repetitive. Problems like these are often easily heard. Hearing your paper can also help you get a sense of whether the tone is right. Does it sound too formal? Too chatty or casual? What kind of impression will your voice in this paper make on a reader? Sometimes hearing your words helps you get a more objective sense of the impression you are creating—listening puts in you in something more like the position your reader will be in as he/she moves through your text.”

By the way, the dinner theater will take place on February 8 and 9 at the Carteret Community College Culinary Building and you can purchase tickets here:  www.carteretcommunitytheatre.com 

Have a great week and keep on writing…and reading.