Unbound Diary Part 9 – Reading Aloud

Tags

Beach Hut Writers, Brighton, Brighton Fringe, crowdfunding, Exeter Street Hall, John Lennon, publishing, short stories, short story collections, Sourdough, spoken word, The Beach Hut Writing Academy, Unbound, writers

I’m nearly 9 weeks in to my crowdfunding project for my book of short stories on fame, In The Future Everyone Will Be World Famous For Fifteen Minutes. I’m going to be doing a few spoken word events in the next few days and. as a director of one (Rattle Tales), I thought I might give a few pointers about how to read to an audience. If you are a writer, at some point, you will have to do this in order to get your work seen. Even when you are a seasoned Booker Prize-winning author you still have to read your work to audiences. It may seem like the antithesis of everything else you do (ie, sitting at a desk writing down weird scenes from your imagination) but it’s just the way it is.

Practice. I use reading aloud as part of the editing process anyway. After I have finished a section of work, I will read it out to myself. I will often stand up to do this or even walk about. This exercise is invaluable for locating the dead pieces of writing, the weasel words, unnecessary punctuation, missed punctation and for providing a flow to your words. I urge you to add this to your writing method. If you are reading a piece at an event always read it out to yourself several times first. Make alterations to the piece that arise from this exercise then read it again. If you can bear it, read it to a couple of people you trust. If you do this enough times you will almost know the piece off by heart.

Eye Contact. If you know the piece off by heart you will be able to make more eye contact with the audience. Look up from you paper occassionally, pause for dramatic effect, address your words to them. I don’t mean stare creepily at one person, in fact if you look at a point just at the top of their heads the audience will get the impression you are looking at them without feeling uncomfortable about it. Smiling helps too and don’t forget to introduce yourself or at least say hello.

The Shakes. All authors get the shakes from time to time. Nobody notices. I have spoken to many first time readers who thought the audience was distracted by their shaking hands or legs. My right leg used to shake uncontrollably when I read. No one ever mentioned it; in fact people said I didn’t seem nervous at all. I have also seen famous authors at big festivals trembling so much their papers rustle. No one minds, they just want to hear the famous author read. If you are uncomfortable with your shaking hands put your pages in a lever file or on a clip-board. Rattle Tales provides a music stand. Sometimes nerves help the piece, I’ve cried at the end of a story and had loads of people come up to me and say what an impact it had because it was heartfelt. Try and keep it together til the last sentence though!

Slow Down. Most people read too fast. Nerves make you speed up, make you want to get it over with. My advice is read it to yourself at your normal pace and then slow it down a notch for the event, relish in the pauses, emphasise the important sentences, take your time over the dialogue. You might want it to be over quickly but the audience want to take it all in. Most spoken word events asks for no more than 2,000 words. This is because after about ten minutes an audiences’ attention wanders no matter how good the tale or the reader. If you are reading an extract bear this in mind, don’t rush to fit longer pieces in.

Acting is for Actors. You are not an actor, well, you might be, but in this case you are a writer. To listen to your story the audience doesn’t need the full Meryl Streep. They don’t want a cast of characters with different accents all competing for attention like a multiple personality disorder. Do appropriate accents by all means but don’t shout as if you are projecting at the Theatre Royal and keep the showing off to a minimum.

I will be putting all this into practice at Exeter Street Hall on Friday May 13th with nine other fabulous Brighton writers who are all members of The Beach Hut Writers. We will be talking about everything from how to get published to how to cope at spoken word events. The genres include, crime, noir, literary fiction, women’s fiction, self help, cookery and diet books and childrens fiction, so there is literally something for everyone.

May 26th is the date of Rattle Tales Brighton Fringe show hosted by the fabulous Lonny Pop. We have just finalized the programme and there are some amazing stories on the bill from a huge variety of authors. I will be reading a short story (Sourdough)from In The Future which was the story I read at the first Rattle Tales show five years ago. I don’t expect to be as nervous as I was then. Tickets are available at Brighton Fringe Box Office and they usually go fast!

If you think that short stories deserve a bit more attention from publishers please plegde to my collection because that’s what I’m trying to prove. In The Future Everyone Will Be World Famous For Fifteen Minutes will only be published by Unbound if I get enough pledges. You don’t have to be from the UK and you don’t have to have a Kindle. There are just 3 weeks left to show your support.

A Duet For Father’s Day

Tags

Brighton Fringe, Dads, Ella Fitzgerald, Father's Day, flash fiction, Rattle Tales, The Brunswick

Hello again. It’s been a while I know but I’ve been busy with family things. Anyway, I read this piece of flash fiction at the Rattle Tales show at Brighton Fringe. It was original written for Paragraph Planet  (a brilliant website that publishes 75 word stories daily) but the story felt longer so I decided to expand it. It seems a fitting post for Father’s Day especially as my Dad isn’t here anymore. I’m sure many of you are missing your fathers today but eventually painful memories can become sweet and that was the idea behind Duet. This one is for you Dad.

DUET

I walk into town despite the deep snow. It’s a necessary trip; I’ve left it late to buy my son’s birthday present and stuff for his party tomorrow.  Besides I like the crunch of snow under my boots, the tickle of fresh flakes on my face. Snow makes me feel alive; its cold brief beauty.

I finish what I have to do by eleven and I’m starting to feel the chill so I decide to thaw out in the M&S cafe.

The warm café is buzzing with shelter-seekers. Easy listening pipes loudly through the speakers – Wham, Chicago, Enrique – teaspoons chink on china and the coffee machines whirr.

I settle at a table, bags at my feet, sip my coffee and relax.

Ella Fitzgerald comes on, Every time We Say Goodbye. Ella Fitzgerald was my Dad’s favourite. ‘No one sings like Ella,’ he used to say. ‘She could shatter glass!’ And I’d always roll my eyes and say, ’must have been very inconvenient at parties.’ And then Dad would roll his eyes and we’d chuckle at our incompatibility.

A few lines in a man’s voice joins Ella’s from the corner table, softly at first, barely a murmur. I look over. It’s an old man. He’s wearing a stained jumper, brown shirt and tie, a bedraggled hunting hat is pulled low over his ears. His eyes are shut. His face deeply lined, rosy nose bulbous and pitted. A small tea sits untouched in front of him. His voice grows with the song, becoming  deeper and more resonant. By the second chorus it booms clearly across the café, word-matched to Ella’s, rising and falling in time, the perfect duet. Everybody stops, even the baristas, and turns to watch him.

‘There’s no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor…’

The song ends too quickly and the man looks down at his tea-cup, failing to acknowledge the smattering of applause.

The Spice Girls are on next.

Reading The Personal

Tags

Brighton & Hove Camera Club, Brighton Fringe, Chris Wright, emotion, Harold White, history, interpretation, miner's strike, mining, National Coal Mining Museum, nerves, photographs, politics, Rattle Tales, reading aloud, Russel Brand, short stories, spoken word, stage fright, stories, Thatcher, Thatcherism, Wakefield, Yorkshire

I had an interesting experience at Rattle Tales’ Brighton Fringe show last week. I did something I’ve never done before; I read a story that was extremely personal to me in content to an audience of over a hundred people.  The story in question is a very recent one, written in April in the ten days between Margaret Thatcher’s death and her funeral.  During that time I felt that a lot of nonsense was being spoken about the former Prime Minister. Somehow she had been elevated in death into our greatest ever leader, the person solely responsible for dragging the country out of the Middle Ages, a visionary, a military strategist on a par with Churchill, a great reformer, all this and a woman too! On the other side she was demonised, acted alone (with no help from the men in her cabinet) and was literally branded a witch (just like in the Middle Ages). For the first time in my life I became fully aware of history as consensus. Something I had lived through and could remember clearly was being historicised. I realized that in years to come Thatcher’s legacy would only be remembered in polarised ways, the views of the majority would prevail but along the way certain views would be lost forever.

I am not from a big mining family. One of my uncles was a miner but he died when I was a small child (of lung cancer of course). He left a wife and a brood of children and I remember spending happy times with my aunt and cousins, going to their house for Saturdays and sleep overs. My Dad was in the army for twenty-five years and then worked in insurance. Looking back, I think he used the army as means of escape, a way of not living out his life in the industrial North. If he had stayed he may well have had a life as a miner; it was good honest work. Dad was the one who got away, but his siblings and their families stayed put and worked in the industries, lived on the estates and socialised in the working men’s clubs. They are called ‘working men’s clubs’ for a reason by the way, the men (and women) worked hard.  My Dad brought his family back to Yorkshire after a long time away, after postings abroad and marriage to an Irish girl, but he was the outsider who had returned to his roots and never quite fitted back in.

I had a strange political upbringing, Dad was an out and out Thatcherite who saw the sense in the championing of individualism and the ‘on yer bike’ philosophy and Mum was a working class Irish Catholic who knew about prejudice and the value of community.  As far as I am aware they never voted for the same party. During the miner’s strike I was at the 6^th form of a huge Catholic school in Featherstone. Featherstone was a pit town and some of this kids I went to school with were hugely affected by the strike. Pride and despair are the two words I would use to describe those years; I’ll never forget it, friends who were forced to live on charity, a scythe slashed through whole communities. My politics were formed then and actually they haven’t changed much since, through student protests and countless petitions I have maintained a continued interest in what I perceive to be the injustices perpetrated by successive governments.  I like to think of myself as left of centre but, as a like-minded friend said during the media circus surrounding Thatcher’s death, slightly left of centre in the 1980s is now considered to be raving Marxist, yet I’m certainly not that.

When I heard the news of Baroness Thatcher’s death I didn’t see it as a cause for celebration. Surprisingly, Russell Brand (in The Guardian) summed up what I, and many others from my generation, were feeling; essentially an unfathomable melancholic malaise, a real sense of loss and a nostalgic hankering for a past that may not have existed in the first place. His article was the only thing I read on the subject that I wished I’d written. As a writer I felt the need to address what was being over-looked by both sides and so I wrote a story set in a pit town on the day the news broke.

The main character in my story is based on my Dad’s surviving brother, a retired fireman and not a miner in reality, but possessed of the old-style working-class values I needed for my character. He would never celebrate someone’s death, no matter who it was. I had him firmly in mind physically when I wrote the story and then mixed in a bit of my Dad’s personality too. The character was an amalgam of the two brothers, one who had stayed in Yorkshire and one who had not.  Writing it was a very moving experience so I knew reading it would be too.

I showed the story to a few writer friends and then put it up for Rattle Tales. In the intervening weeks I read my story aloud many times to myself and each time I ended up crying. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s Northern romanticism, the same reason I like Richard Hawley and Stan Barstow, the Brontes and Ted Hughes. Maybe it’s just that you can take the girl out of the North but you can’t take the North out of the girl, the reason I always end up with talking in a Yorkshire accent whenever I’m back home, a nostalgia for something I left behind. I put the story away for a while, got it out and read it again, and still I cried! Then the Brighton Fringe was upon us and there were suddenly loads of jobs to do organising the show. The Rattle Tales crew went into overdrive  co-ordinating writers, proofing the anthology, marketing etc. and the stories were being interpreted by Brighton & Hove Camera Club so there was all that going on too.  I forgot to practice the story again until the day before the show. I read it aloud several times throughout the day and I still couldn’t do it without weeping.

At the event I was unbelievably nervous. I know this was because my story was so personal to me because I’ve not been that nervous about reading to an audience for a very long time. I was shaking as I took to the stage and just after I started my voice wavered and tears welled in my eyes, but it got easier as I went on and by the end I was much better. It’s not very professional is it though, getting emotional on stage?

I needn’t have worried because so many people came up afterwards and told me how much they liked it and how my obvious emotion made the reading better because they could sense the feeling behind the words. I began to feel elated. I’m not an actor, I can’t do voices and dramatic performances (though in this case I did manage to resurrect my Yorkshire accent) but I did invest a lot of feeling in my reading.  It was hard going but it was well worth it. I felt as though I’d achieved something, as though I made a story I’d borrowed memorable and that was the reason I’d written it in the first place.

My advice is this – if you have written something you have invested a lot of emotion in and you get the opportunity to read it to an audience, go for it, it’s a great feeling when you’ve done it.

Photograph by Chris Wright (Brighton & Hove Camera Club)

Archive still by permission of National Coal Mining Museum of England, Harold White Collection.

Festival Craziness

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Beach Hut Writers, BHASVIC, Brighton Festival, Brighton Fringe, Bullet Catch, Cahir McDaid, Craig Melvin, David McAlmont, Faust, Gatsby, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Gove, Musik Kabarett, Nina Hagen, Paul McVeigh, Rattle Tales, Rattle Tales Anthology, Shirley Golden, Spiegel Tent, Sunshine Books, The Brunswick Hove, The Chimney House

I realise I haven’t blogged for ages. The truth is that during the Brighton Festival things get a little bit crazy. Not only do Rattle Tales have their regular Fringe Festival show but my husband, Rob, exhibits his fantastic photographs at The Gloobah House on The Dyke Road Arts Trail (part of the AOH), and then I try to see as much as I can at the Festivals. So this month is all parties and art, readings and theatrical events. It’s great fun!

Tomorrow I’m attending the Book Group in the Pub at The Chimney House in Port Hall, they have been kind enough to read Starlings and tomorrow they have invited me along to discuss it. On Friday I’m going to see Bullet Catch at The Spiegeltent, the festival brochure describes it thus;

The Bullet Catch is the greatest challenge for any illusionist. A stunt so dangerous that even the great Houdini refused to attempt it, it has claimed the lives of numerous illusionists, assistants and spectators since its conception in 1613.

Now, with a little help from his audience, modern-day marvel William Wonder presents a theatrical magic show featuring storytelling, mind-reading, levitation, games of chance and – if you’re brave enough to stay for it – the most notorious finale in showbusiness. Tense and thought-provoking, it balances suspense and humour with a perceptive exploration of despair and of the nature of choice.

Sounds promising. I’ll write a review if Imake it out alive!

On Saturday I’m at The Sunshine Books, Art & Cafe with lots of Beach Hut Writers. We’ll be giving short readings from our books and chatting to customers from 2.30 AND there’s lots of lovely cakes. Come along and meet us.

On Sunday it’s the outdoor extravaganza Faust at BHASVIC, (better make the most of the car park before Michael Gove builds a free school on it!). This looks like it will be amazing, updated Gatsby-like to 1920s prohibition with fire displays and boxing rings. That reminds me, I need to fit Gatsby in somewhere, I can’t wait to see it, the soundtrack hasn’t stopped playing chez Mettler.

Next week is Rattle Tales 2nd Brighton Fringe show. Last year was a sell out success and we’ve just heard from our new venue The Brunswick in Hove, that it looks like this one will be too. There are only 7 tickets left so if you want one you’d better get one now. We’ve teamed up with Brighton & Hove Camera Club who have been given the stories in advance and will be providing projected images to accompany them on the night. I will be reading a new story about a certain deceased Prime Minister and I have to do a Yorkshire accent! It’s not that bad as I lived there for eighteen years but wish me luck anyway. There are fantastic stories from other Rattle Talers and from three guest authors; Paul McVeigh, Cahir McDaid, Craig Melvin and Shirley Golden. There really is something for everyone and we are thrilled to be one of the Independent’s festival picks. We’ll also be launching our anthology which really is something special. It will be available to buy in paperback and kindle soon. 

Next weekend I’ve the Musik Kabarett with Nina Hagen and David McAlmont! And I’ve not even been near any Fringe shows yet. So much to see, so little time. I’m also thrilled to be writing again. It’s flowing like water and I’ve nearly completed my famous names collection.