Last week I attended a reading by
Jessica Francis Kane, a critically acclaimed author of two short story books
and one novel. During the reading she
read from her latest book of short stories, “This Close.”
While we had been reading her book
in class it was a completely new experience having the story “The Essentials of
Acceleration” read aloud to us. Hearing her read her own work out loud was so
much different than reading it to myself. Essentially it served to cut away the
middleman of my own mind and hear the work in it’s truest voice.
While Kane has a very unique
writing style, it is often easy to let our own interpretations and mindsets
color what we’re reading. While this is
not a bad thing, in fact it’s often what makes reading so special and personal
to us, I also realized how important tone and voice are in writing. If you as a writer want a piece to be read a
certain way, you have to put in the extra effort needed to make that happen in
the reader’s mind. It would be
interesting to compare different reading styles to how the author writes and
see if the author has written in such a way that there is no need to add
anything extra to the piece. I think
probably it would be hard to read your own piece and not add inflections where
you would like to change things, but I bet some of the greatest writers are
able to read from their work as is without any added variations whatsoever.
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