Recently, I organized a whole day of writers talking about what they do and reading aloud from their work for my local RWA chapter, Maryland Romance Writers (where Pam Rosenthal is speaking on Oct. 21!) last month at the Baltimore Book Festival, and also had the pleasure of reading earlier this week for Lady Jane's Salon in NYC, which was a lot of fun. You can see some of the pics from the Baltimore Book Festival on MRW's Facebook page.
What I found surprising was the reluctance of many writers to read aloud from their work, and this seems a phenomenon of the genre. Writers in other fiction genres read aloud at the drop of a hat. Yet I think it's one of the most empowering things you can do, because it is also one of the most revealing of yourself:
Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading. Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times.And here's a fabulous example of this eroticism, from Austen's sexiest book, Mansfield Park, when Henry Crawford reads aloud from Shakespeare. I love the voyeurism as Edmund watches Fanny's reactions:
... whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty. -- It was truly dramatic. -- His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his reading brought all his acting before her again; nay, perhaps with greater enjoyment, for it came unexpectedly, and with no such drawback as she had been used to suffer in seeing him on the stage with Miss Bertram. Edmund watched the progress of her attention, and was amused and gratified by seeing how she gradually slackened in the needle-work, which, at the beginning, seemed to occupy her totally; how it fell from her hand while she sat motionless over it -- and at last, how the eyes which had appeared so studiously to avoid him throughout the day, were turned and fixed on Crawford, fixed on him for minutes, fixed on him in short till the attraction drew Crawford's upon her, and the book was closed, and the charm was broken. Then, she was shrinking again into herself, and blushing and working as hard as ever; but it had been enough to give Edmund encouragement for his friend, and as he cordially thanked him, he hoped to be expressing Fanny's secret feelings too.As well as an acceptable form of parlor entertainment, reading aloud was also showbiz and wildly popular, particularly when Dickens and Thackeray got into the act. Thackeray used readings as promotion for new books, whereas Dickens read aloud "household words" already dear and familiar to the public. The London Times claimed that the vogue for public readings began in 1844 and by 1868,
"Readers are abundant; there is not a literary institution that does not in the course of the year publish a programme of entertainments in which some plays or poems to be 'read' by some person of celebrity, general or local, do not hold a prominent place, and for the innocent amusement of the poor, 'penny readings' in the parish schoolrooms are now commonly encouraged by every clergyman who takes a practical interest in his flock." Quoted in Voice and the Victorian Storyteller by Ivan Kreilkamp.Charles Dolby, who managed Dickens' reading tours in England and America, wrote an account of them in 1885, which you can find on Googlebooks. Here he describes the immense excitement Dickens' readings produced:
Hundreds poured into a hall already crowded to suffocation, amid rent garments, expostulations, threats, cries for " the manager," and " Where is Mr. Dickens?" It was a surging, roaring sea that overflowed everything, even the platform on which Mr. Dickens was to read. The attendants and men at the doors suffered much—to use Mr. Dickens's own words in telling the tale: "They were all torn to ribbons; they had not a hat and scarcely a coat amongst them." Indeed, so futile were the efforts of the attendants to control or in any way to stem the tide, that Mr. Dickens found it necessary to come forward and address those who were already in the hall, while an intimate friend, from a prominent position, endeavoured to instil reason into those who were outside.
Mark Twain in 1868, was less than impressed with Dickens' appearance in San Francisco:He is a bad reader, in one sense -- because he does not enunciate his words sharply and distinctly -- he does not cut the syllables cleanly, and therefore many and many of them fell dead before they reached our part of the house. ... I was a good deal disappointed in Mr. Dickens' reading -- I will go further and say, a great deal disappointed. The Herald and Tribune critics must have been carried away by their imaginations when they wrote their extravagant praises of it. Mr. Dickens' reading is rather monotonous, as a general thing; his voice is husky; his pathos is only the beautiful pathos of his language -- there is no heart, no feeling in it -- it is glittering frostwork; his rich humor cannot fail to tickle an audience into ecstasies save when he reads to himself.Do you enjoy reading aloud or listening to authors read? And why do you think the practice is not widespread among romance writers?
p.s. in the spirit of blatant self promotion, I'm at vampchix today talking about JANE AND THE DAMNED and at Word Wenches with the BESPELLING JANE AUSTEN gang, Mary Balogh, Susan Krinard and Colleen Gleason. There are books to be won!
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