Be The Fork
It’s been a few years, but I still remember reading in a magazine how David Foster Wallace gripped a plastic fork for the entirety of one of his readings. When someone from the audience asked him about it, he said that he was nervous.
It’s a big deal—reading your work out loud. You want the work to sound good regardless, but you want to make it sound especially good coming from the artist who created it (you). It complicates things when you’re also scared of reading out loud and/or in front of your peers.
Personally, I’ve come a long way in terms of public speaking. I used to hate it. Now? As long as I have something planned, I’m good. Part of that has just been my journey to not-giving-a-shit-what-people-think-about-me. But everyone is on a different milepost on that road (maybe in another lane altogether). So I’ve gathered my thoughts and come up with two different points that will hopefully feed at least one person’s confidence when it comes to reading your work out loud.
First of all, think about the readings you’ve attended.
Haven’t been to any readings? Go to one! Go to two! A dozen! Guaranteed you’ll be impressed, moved, bored, scandalized, or all of the above. Sometimes crazy stuff happens. Sometimes nothing happens, and it’s still a magical night. This is all to say that if you’re nervous about messing up, or looking stupid, your audience has most likely seen it all before. Your trembly voice won’t scare them off.
More importantly, reading out loud has a special kind of power. You never know what’s going to stick with people and what they’ll take with them as a memory. It can make you realize things you didn’t know before. It can even make you love something you once hated. I’m going to expose myself and admit that in undergrad, I really didn’t like The Living and The Dead by James Joyce (probably because I was assigned to read it more than once, which was too many times). But then one day I heard an Irish man read aloud the final passage of that short story and I thought, wow…this is the most beautiful piece of writing. Why didn’t I see it before? Is it because all this time I wasn’t reading it in an Irish accent? Or did it have to come from an old voice that had more to do with the living and the dead than I ever had?
So, the next time you’re stepping up to a microphone, let the idea that orating can change people’s minds be your strength. Take comfort in the fact that you’re participating in probably the most essential of human acts—exchanging stories.
Secondly, you have to accept the inevitable and own it anyway.
Shaky? Own it. Nervous laughter? Own it. Awkward pause? Own it. Don’t have a plastic fork to hold onto? Be your own fork. This will take practice. And in time you may not even need the fork.
In the meantime, if you’re not convinced and you choose to sit out on opportunities where you could have read and didn’t (zero judgment, by the by, go at your own pace), show up to support your friends, your teachers, and your mentors. Your literary heroes get nerves like crazy, too. And it means the world and more to them if you show up in their audience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wren True is a fiction writer living in Des Moines, Iowa. She is a contributing writer and team member of Hillfire Press. She’s probably taking a nap right now.
Speaking of speaking at readings… Stay tuned for information about our upcoming online and in-person launch for Hillfire Anthology Vol. III—coming soon!