Reading Out Loud

My ears ache from wearing head phones and I’m getting tired of listening to my own voice. What am I doing? I’m narrating my memoir, Walking Nature Home, for the audio version to be released late this year. So far, I’ve read three chapters. Each one takes about a day, even though the finished length of each chapter is only somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes. With nine chapters total, I figure I need six more good reading days to finish.

What takes so long? Getting it right. The actual read of a chapter takes somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours. When I stumble over a word, or get the tone or emphasis wrong, or make another error–or a loud motorcycle goes by outside–I start the sentence over again. Sometimes I go back to the beginning of a paragraph if that makes a “cleaner” break to make sure I haven’t changed the tone or volume of my voice.

I could record at a real studio, but I’d rather spend those hours in the comfort of my own office, sitting at a microphone table designed and made out of scraps by my sculptor husband, Richard. My office isn’t soundproof, but by using a homemade foam baffle (thank you for that too, Richard!) and a directional mike (a Blue Yeti USB mike that plugs right into my Mac laptop, for those who want to know the technical stuff), it does pretty well, except for the occasional passing ya-hoo with a loud vehicle. That round black screen in front of the mike in the photo above, by the way, is to soften the explosion of sound that comes with ‘P’s and other hard consonants. It looks weird, but is very effective.

The rough edit takes about twice times as long as the read time, which means three to four hours of careful listening, deleting each bad or duplicate part of the soundtrack and pasting the two cut edges together, just the way we used to do with real tape and a razor blade back in the days before recordings went digital, listening carefully to the mend, and then moving on… I do the rough edit myself using Garageband, Apple’s nifty–and surprisingly powerful–audio editing program that came free with my Macintosh. It works just like the sound boards I’ve used in real studios. (That’s Garageband above, with me reading the opening of Chapter Three on the sound track.)

What does this have to do with writing? These hours at the mike and listening with the headphones remind me of why reading your work aloud is one of the best editing techniques around. I’m hearing Walking Nature Home anew: the tone of the words, the cadence and rhythm of the sentences and paragraphs, the flow of the story itself. And even after editing it dozens and dozens of times, even after the editors at University of Texas Press went over it with their careful eyes, even though it’s in print, I hear things I could do to improve the writing.

That’s the magic of hearing your work, of reading it out loud and listening crically. Looking at your writing on paper or on screen is useful; hearing it is entirely different. It sounds new, and thus you notice things you otherwise wouldn’t.

You don’t need my quick-and-dirty home recording studio to do it. All you need is a quiet space–a room with a door that shuts, or a time when no one else is around to interrupt you. Pick up your writing, put on your best storytelling or reading voice, clear your throat, sit up straight, and read. Don’t rush it and don’t dramatize, just read your words with the respect they deserve. And listen. When you notice something that doesn’t sound right, stop and make a note. Then pick up your writing and start reading again. You’ll be surprised at what you hear.

P.S. What is surprising me as I record Walking Nature Home? It’s pretty darn good!

Difficult Memories: Finding Voice and Grace in the “Hard Stuff”

How do we handle the hard stuff in our life stories? How do we write about the memories that are controversial, painful, or just no fun to remember? We'll practice writing techniques that strengthen our voices and reveal the grace and wisdom to be found even in hard times.

That's the description of "Difficult Memories," the workshop I'll be teaching at Story Circle Network's Stories From the Heart V Conference, in Austin, Texas, February 5 – 7, 2010. 

When I proposed the workshop last spring, I was thinking about my process in writing my memoir, Walking Nature Home, and my struggle to find the wisdom in the painful and outright hard parts of my own story. When I wrote the first few drafts of that book, I was still angry and hurt by some of my experiences. Writing out my feelings was therapeutic, but didn't result in particularly good memoir.

In fact, some of the initial drafts are so bad that re-reading them is more than embarrassing. It took me decades–and many rewrites–before I learned to chip away at the narrative to find the gift of gold in the hard stuff, before I found the grace to tell my story in a way that was respectful, honest, and compelling. When I finally did, reading the story was exciting instead of painful. It finally felt right–and I felt good about writing it.

Here's an example of finding voice and grace in the hard stuff, from the first chapter of Walking Nature Home:

That Labor Day weekend, we went backpacking with friends and an early fall snowstorm moved in. All I remember from those three days is a steady rain of wet, white flakes falling silently, muffling forest and lake and rock, pressing down on the roof of our small tent until I felt like I would suffocate. On the long drive out, even the cab of our pickup truck seemed to have shrunk. I looked over at Kent and said,

“I need space. I think we should separate.”

His jaw clenched hard, but he didn’t turn his eyes from the gravel road. “You’ll be dead first.”

I moved out. He attempted suicide. I saw a counselor. 

Those four paragraphs paint a vivid picture of the disintegration of my first marriage, conveying the salient points without portraying every gory detail. The last line shows how dramatic paring events down to their essence can be: "I moved out. He attempted suicide. I saw a counselor."

There's obviously a lot more I could have said. That chapter did in fact originally include much more material, all of it vivid and dramatic in its own right.

Over time as I worked on the memoir though, I realized that this particular part of the story had come to "weigh" so much that it disturbed the overall balance. Writing out the intimate details of the disintegration of my first marriage may have helped me come to peace with my decisions, but it distracted from the larger point, a love story on several levels: me learning to love myself, the loving bond I found with my second husband, Richard, and the love of nature, the community of species with whom we share this planet, that sustained me through those years and still does.

As I re-visited the painful story of my first marriage, my ability to tell the story well grew as I grew as a person. I can't say which came first: my ability to understand myself or my ability to write the hard stuff with clarity and grace. But I know that we grew together, that memoir and me. 

Now I need every bit of that clarity and grace as my beloved Richard and I walk hand in hand through the "hard stuff" of his brain cancer. I know my practice in learning to tell the sometimes painful and traumatic stories that make up Walking Nature Home is helping me keep my balance today, both in writing and life. Wrestling with difficult memories not only taught me how to write a story that novelist Sandra Dallas recently hailed as "a moving story… filled with hope and joy," it also taught me how to make a hopeful, joyous life–no matter what comes.