Poor Mojo's Newswire

Then there was the soul-sucking trash. One book I was forced to read was about four members of a gynecological office, three men and one woman, who go on a private boat ride. Two of the men and the women are then mesmerized into being taken advantage of by “Ralph’s tremendous penis” (a phrase that I believe actually appeared in the book. I once swore if I had time to get a band together ever again, I would name it “Ralph’s Tremendous Penis”). There were eight or nine hundred pages of frolicking in the stirrups, followed by another couple of hundred pages of revenge by the woman. The resolution involved local anesthetic and a surgical procedure that would have provided a wonderful transplant for some lucky recipient, had the results not been flushed down a drain. That, as I have described it to you, was a week and a half of my life that I will never see again.

Every day, someone in the office bore witness to genuine, breathtaking stupidity. Often they would stand up from a manuscript, their eyes wide, shaking like they had just been given terrible, secret news and walk out laughing madly.

Readings, like signings, are one of the epiphenomena of writing: not a central part of the business, but people give you funny looks if your first reaction on being invited to do one is to shriek and hide up a tree. Unfortunately, although there are plenty of books with advice wise and otherwise on other aspects of writing, I've yet to run across any advice about readings. So here's what I've learned about reading in front of strangers.

Rule #1 is that the audience is not your enemy.

Odd though this may sound, a certain subset of writers never quite get their heads around this concept. Writers are, almost by definition, unaccustomed to public performance: writing a novel isn't something you do live in front of an audience. (If it was, the audience would have to be so laid-back they'd make the spectators at a five day test match look as if they were in a mosh pit frenzy; writing books is slow.) So most of us, have no idea about how to behave in front of an audience.