Ever tell a joke and misplace one word? The punch line comes and lays there. Listening faces stare back at you, baffled. You are branded a lousy joke teller and the parade moves away. How many editors have doggedly pursued your story arc, reached your thundering epiphany and found themselves searching back through the forest of text to see where they missed the turnoff?
A few months ago I joined a readers’ group started by the Water Street Art Galleries in Batavia, Illinois. Once a month, “Waterline Writers” selects short readings from submitting writers to present in a session held at their gallery. The readings are also videotaped for the Waterline website and Chicago Northwest Suburbs programming. The facility offers studio space to artists as well as a superb gallery of very high quality contemporary art. This creative setting attracts an equally creative, critical and welcoming audience. Interacting with them has helped me polish my writing and has put me in my reader’s head as well as my own.
Whether cobbling together long form books or articles, we are all subject to this form of author’s dyslexia. We suffer the occasional inability to translate what we know in our head into word groups that convey the brilliant idea behind that turn of phrase. Reading out loud to ourselves helps, but we often read what we meant rather than what is on the page. We can’t blame the spell checker, but we can read out loud to an audience.
Standing in front of a roomful of literary folk seated on folding chairs sipping white wine and hanging on your every word is a sobering experience. But think of them as a focus group. They are the litmus paper for the style and ideas of the excerpt you’ve chosen to eventually put before the rest of the world. Are you giving them eight minutes of needed REM sleep? Are they perky as puppies, laughing at all the right places? Do certain words draw stony silence? Are those students in the back row texting each other? At the conclusion, is that applause just a motor reaction to restart circulation in an inert body, or is it heartfelt appreciation?
Locating a group similar to Waterline Writers in your area can help build confidence in the expression of your ideas and make your words more accessible to a wider group of readers.