Live Performance: An Invaluable Lesson

Cult Fiction is the writer's workshop that I'm part of.  We meet weekly to argue about our story structure and narrative style.  Every three months, we have a performance night.  At the performance, actors read our stories to an audience.

Why actors, rather than the writers?  Frankly, the actors do a better job, on average.  There are certainly authors who do well enough reading aloud at events, and some are even good at it.  But take a random sampling of writers and thespians, and have them compete for "best delivery."  As the saying goes, the race isn't always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

At the workshop, we have instituted a rule: nobody reads their own work.  I'll bring my story for critique, and Jude will read it aloud.  I take out my notepad just I would for somebody else's story, and I critique what I hear.  It's invaluable: I'm denied the cadence in my head, I'm forced to hear what's on the page rather than what I wanted on the page.

This has impacted how I compose narrative, now.  I write with the intent to hear somebody else reading my text aloud.  I write it, and I listen for how it would be read, and I ask if it works.  And I learned a lesson: "Put the character on stage before the character speaks."

Here's what I mean.  Take this example:

Tommy knelt at the concentric dials on the vault door.  He didn't need headphones or sonic pads.  No, what he used was simpler: acid spray, conductive neutralizer, and a small robot.  He controlled the spidery robot with a handheld pad and video goggles.  He was immersed in the virtual world of the spidery bot within moments, and he was burrowing his way to the vault's release mechanism.

"Hey, what's going on?"

Now, in a movie, this works perfectly.  We see Tommy and the vault door.  We see the robot.  And we hear a new person's voice.  We hear the booming shout (as of a security guard stumbling on a caper) or the cocky query (as of another thief catching Tommy off-guard) or the friendly checkup (as of a team member asking for a status update).

On the page, what do we get?  We get nothing.  We don't know if that's Tommy asking a question as he stumbles on something mildly surprising inside the vault.  Or the robot's nascent intelligence talking back to Tommy.  Or the vault's computer.  Or, indeed, some other person who's not been introduced yet.

And that's the key: in prose, the dialogue follows the speaker.  Imagine an actor reading the text aloud for the first time, cold.  The actor reads Tommy's bit about the vault and the robots, all in a Narrator's voice.  Then there's dialogue, and the actor needs to give that dialogue to a new voice.  Male?  Female?  Neuter robot, or gendered robot?  Then there's emotional tone; apart from the question mark, what clue has the actor to go on?  Fuck all, that's what.

So I learned to give the actor all the clues I can.

Tommy knelt at the concentric dials on the vault door.  He didn't need headphones or sonic pads.  No, what he used was simpler: acid spray, conductive neutralizer, and a small robot.  He controlled the spidery robot with a handheld pad and video goggles.  He was immersed in the virtual world of the spidery bot within moments, and he was burrowing his way to the vault's release mechanism.

Nobody was supposed to be in the entire building.  Not even a custodian was on duty.  Despite this, behind Tommy, as if she'd just emerged from the void, some woman with the voice of outraged authority shouted, "Hey, what's going on?"

Maybe that prose won't win awards, but do you suppose that anybody's going to misinterpret the tone of the dialogue?  Not hardly.  And the intent behind the dialogue in the first example -- surely to give the impression of a surprising shout that can startle Tommy -- is preserved in the second example.

And this extends to kinds of non-dialogue narrative, because there are different tones to that.  A story happening in the moment has one tone.  When the narrative takes a step back to fill in some necessary exposition, there's another tone.  I need to give my actor a sign of what kind of voice to use.

Tommy knelt at the concentric dials on the vault door.  He didn't need headphones or sonic pads.  No, what he used was simpler: acid spray, conductive neutralizer, and a small robot.  He controlled the spidery robot with a handheld pad and video goggles.  He was immersed in the virtual world of the spidery bot within moments, and he was burrowing his way to the vault's release mechanism.

Nobody was supposed to be in the entire building.  Not even a custodian was on duty.  Despite this, behind Tommy, as if she'd just emerged from the void, some woman with the voice of outraged authority shouted, "Hey, what's going on?"

Tommy pressed his thumb on the shutdown button, then he froze.  The robot stopped spraying acid.  He said, with great and deliberate care, "I surrender.  Please do not shoot me."

"Hands up!"

Tommy licked his lips, but otherwise didn't move.  He kept his voice calm.  "There's a bomb."

This was a lie, but it was a good one.  Thieves for years had been using nascent intelligences in their robotic assistants, because there was no better way of getting by automated defenses.  Most of these robots were just smart enough to be aware of their precarious position in life, and they were understandably panicky.  Armed with blades, lasers, chemical weapons, and even explosives, panicky robots could be disastrous.  How did a polite thief explain all of this to a security grunt paid dick-fifty an hour?

It's trickier, but I think it works.  I think the eye skips merrily over the short lines and paragraphs in a tone of ongoing, in-the-moment narrative.  Then it hits that longer paragraph, and the density shift signals a change in tone.  By the end of the second sentence, the long-winded construction will automatically slow the reader's voice.  Its obviously expository nature should do the job.

I think it works, but I won't know until I give it to another person to read aloud to me.

   - emc