The Writer as Performance Artist
The Writer as Performance Artist
When I was a little girl dreaming of the writer I’d like to be when I grew up, I often spent hours gleefully fantasizing about stepping up to a podium, clearing my throat artfully, and reading my work aloud to a packed crowd of eager and expectant staring eyeballs.
As if.
Writing was the perfect career for the shy kid I was—and the shy adult I often still am—because you got to hole up in your bedroom to dream about people who dared to brave the world in ways I didn’t dare (and often still don’t dare) to brave myself. Performing the work didn’t figure into my vision of the writing life.
But I’ve learned that in two very important ways, writers are performers first.
There’s the physical performance of reading your work for an audience, of course. As a staff member at The Drum, I recently served on the selection committee for the MuseFlash competition (writers at the 2012 Muse and the Marketplace writing conference were invited to record a piece of flash). After spending a few hours listening to writers perform their work, it became clear that a strong performance was as important as a maintaining good posture during a job interview—when I came up against the hard choices about which stories to promote to the discussion round, a strong story brilliantly performed beat out a brilliant story with a slouching performance every time.
And though happy-to-stare-at-a-screen-and-dream types like myself can get a fluttery heart just thinking about physically performing work, what should really scare the bejesus out of us is the second kind of performance—the writing itself.
In a recent master novel in progress, Grub Street instructor Michelle Hoover warned that we should “never underestimate the Neanderthal in [our] readers.” In other words, writers can polish sentences until they gleam, carefully chose images that break readers’ hearts, and sweat out perfect, character-specific metaphors, but ultimately readers flip pages to find out one thing: What happens next? What happens next? Oh sweet jeeves what the hairy hell happens NEXT??
I know this. You know this. Everyone who isn’t a rank beginner knows this: Pretty-pretty prose for the sake of said pretty-pretty prose is a whole lot of pretty-pretty nothing. So why is it these pretty-pretty nothings keep finding their way back (and back and back) into our work?
I’ve been polishing my novel’s prologue for months, and I’m about to cut it because I’ve realized1 that the content I thought was so pivotal is mostly backstory dressed up in pretty-pretty nothings. Sure, three drafts ago it seemed Important that the prologue pin down the character’s backstory to inform the rest of the book, but while I feel a loyalty to that solution (it got me through that sloggy second draft, after all!), there’s nothing in that prologue to inspire the Neanderthal in my reader to keep flipping pages. So I’m setting it aside in the interest of a more energetic plot. But I don’t see the time I spent as a waste—I’ll use what I learned about the character in the performance on the page moving forward.
And if that performance is geared at a Neaderthal, I’ll focus on making sure every scene is mostly the narrative equivalent of meat and heat. How do you satisfy the Neanderthal in your reader?
This essay was originally published as a guest post for the Grub Street Daily blog on June 5, 2012.
By “I realized” I mean that I’ve been gently schooled by a writing group so patient I’m gonna risk the cliché to say, “medals all around.”