On Readings

A.L. Kennedy has been talking about readings, over on the Guardian Books Blog. I threw in a few comments, in the comments section. I may as well copy my first one here...

"Readings improve the work, and the confidence in the work. Having to read a chunk of prose aloud, you're forced to disentangle sentences that look lovely and literary on the page, but which are in fact merely incoherent and needed another draft. (Don't worry, good weird prose survives this process, you aren't going to flatten it all out to Ladybird Book level.)

And so much of good writing is about delivering information in the right order (especially inside the sentence, at sentence level). Reading it aloud to strangers (who don't already know it as horribly, blindingly well as you do), you can see where you've screwed up and delivered the tragic/comic punchline twice, or too early, before a vital piece of information needed to make it work. Or very simply that you've had a character do something in a new room before it's entirely obvious to the reader that she's walked through the door."

More on than topic over at the Guardian...