When I blogged A to Z in 2017, R was for Readers. That’s worth a look if you’ve got an extra moment. I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter at the time. The two lines I quoted from her are worth repeating (virtually everything Le Guin wrote is worth repeating, and rereading):

“A story or poem may reveal truths to me as I write it. I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work.”

After comparing “well-made writing” to a “well-made clay pot,” which people put to different uses, and into which they put different things: “What my reader gets out of my pot is what she needs, and she knows her needs better than I do.”

Le Guin sees readers as active participants in what a work means. It differs from person to person, and it definitely differs over time. I’m currently taking an online seminar on William Faulkner, a writer who’s intimidated the hell out of me for over four decades, even though he died in 1962, when I was 11 years old and had never heard of him. We just finished three sessions on The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929. What I take out of that novel now is not what I would have taken out of it when I was in college, if I’d managed to get through it, which I didn’t.

Anyway, back to “active participants.” You’ll never meet the overwhelming majority of people who read your published work. Hell, William Faulkner was long dead before I was ready to read his work, and Shakespeare was much, much longer dead before he became required reading for high school students.

Musicians and theater actors, on the other hand, regularly get to have contact with their audiences. If they perform in a stadium or a huge theater, the contact won’t be one-on-one, but they’ll still get to feel how the audience is responding to what they do. If it’s in a much smaller venue, like a coffeehouse, audience members and performers may get to meet face to face after the show.

Poets and writers can have this experience too. In the age of Covid-19, face-to-face opportunities are almost non-existent, but we had them before, and they will come back. Public libraries often host readings by local writers. If you’re lucky enough to have a coffeehouse or similar venue nearby, check them out. They may already have a spoken-word series or be willing to start one.

If no public space is available, how about a house reading? Musicians of the sort who don’t require massive equipment do house concerts: these take place in private homes with living rooms large enough to accommodate 20 or 30 people (when social distancing is not required). The seating is cozy and not always on chairs.

How do you get people to come? If the venue is small, like your or a friend’s living room, word-of-mouth is the best way to start: friends, friends of friends, family members, fellow writers . . . A double bill with a writer friend or a musician will greatly increase, maybe even double, your circle of possible attendees.

Combining a reading with a potluck can make a reading more enticing to those who’ve never been to a reading or who have had less-than-wonderful experiences at the ones they’ve attended. I first read my work in public at a potluck-reading organized by the writers’ group I was part of at the time. The place was packed, and it was a great experience for all, especially those of us who’d never read in public before.

While Covid is still with us, you might be able to pull off a Zoom reading.

Unfortunately, if you’ve been to many readings yourself, you’ve probably been to some awful ones. What makes a reading awful? The two biggest reasons:

• The reader(s) go on much too long.
• The reader(s) are mediocre performers.

The first problem is easy to fix: Don’t go on too long. Forty-five minutes is plenty long enough for a set of prose or poetry if the writer or poet has some experience as a performer. No more than two sets in an evening, please, and make sure there’s a 15- or 20-minute intermission between them. If there are several readers on the program, 10 minutes max is a good guideline. If there’s a more experienced and/or better-known reader involved, that person can have a full set, with the other (probably earlier) set divvied up among three or four writers.

This segues neatly into how not to be a mediocre performer:

• Time your reading. With practice you’ll be able to guesstimate how long it takes you to read, say, a page of prose, but a guesstimate is no substitute for actual timing.
• Note the word practice. Musicians, dancers, and other performers know they have to practice. Plenty of writers don’t get this. Performing — which is to say communicating to an audience — isn’t the same as writing. Some writers are natural performers. Others aren’t. Whether you are or not — practice. Draft a friend or two to give you feedback: too fast? too slow? fuzzy enunciation? etc.
• Come to your piece the way an actor comes to a script: as if someone else wrote it. A theater director told me this long ago, and it may be the most important advice I ever got. Memorizing lines for a play, an actor says them over and over and over again. She isn’t just imprinting them in memory; she’s trying out different ways of saying them, different phrasing, different tones, different emphases. By the way, I generally recommend not memorizing whatever you’re going to read, not unless you’ve got some performing experience under your belt. You do, however, want to know your work well enough that you don’t have to keep your eyes glued to the printed page or the laptop screen.

You’ll probably find that giving readings affects your writing. You’ll start writing with your ear as well as your eye; you may develop the habit (if you haven’t already) of reading everything you write aloud. Maybe it’ll whet your appetite for theater: you may want to experiment with staging, or start writing monologues or other pieces that are meant to be performed, and not just by you. In that case, go ahead and memorize your work so you can perform unencumbered by your “script.”