Article written by Rory Hawkins
Why are we so reluctant to read our work out loud? It’s something we’re taught to do from the beginning of primary school, but it never seems to get any easier. As writers, some part of us knows this, so reading our work out in front of others is something clouded with doubt. Off the page, it might sound dull, confusing, pretentious or just plain clunky. But it’s part of the process – it can make your work better.
Spoken word is considered a performance art in of itself, sitting very close to poetry. Many “spoken word” events will be just that: people sharing their poetry. But as I’ve talked about before, poetry can be highly personalised and so very subjective. The same can go for any narrative prose. Inspiration can lie very close to our own experience; how we write about that comes to the fore when others read or listen to it.
The first new challenge: how to read your work. If you’ve the confidence to be speaking in front of people, the worst is through, but reading everything in the same tone of voice can leech whatever energy you’re trying to build up. Spoken word relies heavily on inflection (how the word is expressed) and intonation (the rise and fall of pitch). Together, these work to make spoken word sound more naturally charged with emotion and so more aesthetically pleasing.
Rather than thinking of it as reciting your work, read it as an actor would a dramatic performance of a new script. In writing, you’ve already thought about the emotions running through characters heads or how tense a situation is. So go one step further: how would they physically say dialogue, internalised or between two characters?
Inflection: rather than how a word is used grammatically in a sentence, what is its purpose? If someone is using a specific line, there’s an emotion behind it, so what is each word trying to express? The differences between thoughts and intentions should change your tone of voice as you speak – this is intonation. By applying the connection between language and thought, we naturally reach variation in how that language is expressed.
But this isn’t just to do with dialogue between characters. Third-person narration still carries some personality of its own, either yours or an omnipotent voice created by the story’s tone. It’s the harder of the two to read aloud because this kind of unattached, descriptive language doesn’t usually have such an overt personality. It’s something to think about more: what kind of voice do you want your narrative to have? What kind of relationship do you want with an audience or reader?
The second challenge: if thinking on how to better adapt your writing to spoken word, what can spoken word do in return? Reading aloud helps you pick out the sentence structure and flow that works. We’ve all written dozens of sentences that make sense on the page (you can cycle back if needed) but when said out loud go on and on and on until you’ve forgotten what the beginning was even about.
Personally, I try to write in bite-sized chunks (with some pseudo-academic mouthfuls here and there). This is because I’m very conscious of how easy my writing is to follow. No-one likes to read prose that doesn’t want to end – it defeats the point of being in a sentence.
Equally, on the creative front, it’s easy to write out your own stream of consciousness and think it profound or insightful. I think that’s a pitfall for most writers, not being able to see where their work falls flat where it’s trying to be more meaningful. While you can say it’s more natural or “raw”, stream of consciousness doesn’t offer a decent enough structure. If you were to read it aloud, you’d literally just be babbling about everything that crosses your mind, with no pauses for breath.
Reading your work out is a great way to remind yourself that it needs to follow an understandable structure for other people. If you want your work to be published or taken with heart, then it needs that touch more of understanding: that you know what the medium is and how to push at its restraints.
If you want to refine your writing more, I’d say that’s what spoken word has to offer. It reminds you that your writing needs to be emotionally engaging on a word-level, and not just through an overarching plot or complex themes. In learning to speak with more variation and meaning, you’ll hopefully see how that can be applied to thoughts that flow into your fingers and across the keyboard.
That said, there’s plenty of spoken word events happening in Brisbane all year round, both as regular events and competitions – they’re just all poetry.
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