I’ve been thinking about discussing reading aloud for a while now and John Joseph Adam’s recent post about Harry, Carrie and Garp brought it to mind again. I know it seems like reading aloud ought to be self-explanatory, but I’ve heard a lot of authors who should not be allowed to read their own work. [...]

The human voice is very flexible and we’ll look at the ways you can manipulate it. Remember though, that the voice uses muscle and you can strain it just as easily as an ankle. Pay attention and stop if anything hurts. Your basic tools are Pitch, Placement, Pacing, Accent and Attitude. Pitch is fairly self-explanatory. [...]

Narrating is at once the easiest part of reading aloud and the hardest. It is the easiest because you don’t have to worry about character voice or distinction–or do you? You do. That’s why it’s one of the hardest parts. The narrator is a character in your story and is the one that needs to [...]

Cross-gender voices are a tricky business. Even if you can really do a convincing cross-gender voice–and I know folks who can–the fact is that in a live reading, people know there’s one person doing all the voices. There are two ways cross-gender voices can throw people out of listening. It’s really bad, and embarrassing, or [...]

First of all, know that not all microphones are created equal. There is a huge, I mean, huge range in what they are designed to do. There are some basic things that you can do to enhance performance in a recording though. Sibilant and plosives. An “s” is a sibilant sound. Plosives are any sound, like a [...]

I forgot to mention a couple of my favorite tricks, which work nicely with a microphone. If you drop your volume and lean into the microphone then it will sound as if you are right next to the listener, whispering in their ear. This can have a wonderful effect to distinguish between “asides” and dialogue. [...]

In puppetry we say that breathe carries the emotion. The only time a person notices another person breathing is when it’s important, when it’s carrying information. The simplest example is what happens when you look at someone lying down. You automatically notice if they are breathing, to make certain they aren’t dead. But there are [...]

Vocal fatigue is something you’ll have to battle when you’re doing a book signing or working a convention. The voice is created by a set of muscles and it can wear out. There are a lot of things you can do to keep it in good working order, and a lot of things you can [...]

Maggie asked: What do you do when you make a mistake, or cough, or have to clear your throat, or take a drink of water? I know that a person can take a break when recording a reading, and one can take a drink then. I also recall readers for the talking books for the [...]

You’ve honed your voice to be a well-modulated wonder. Now you have to get in front of people and actually read. In some readings, the author remains seated. Some, they stand. What should you do? Well, it depends on venue, the story and your own preference. If you’re in a small venue with an intimate [...]

Okay. At some point, every SF story on the planet is going to hit some handwavium. You know the thing I’m talking about, that magic point where you just have to make stuff up in order to cover the gap between what is possible and what you think might be possible sometime in the future. [...]

The tricky thing with reading a story written in the first person is that your narration has the same voice as your main character’s dialogue. There is a simple trick for differentiating when your POV character is narrating and when she is addressing someone else. For the narration, think, “I am having an intimate conversation [...]

As noted last week, I’m not going to post this week. Now, I asked you to record a story yourself. If you did and would like comments on it, paste a link into the comments of this post. Meanwhile, I’d like to offer you The Time Traveler Show #9 Halloween Special, which has an interview [...]

I have a mild cold that I picked up from the germ factories that come aboard the boat to meet the Cinnamon Bear. It’s not bad, just a scratchy throat and fatigue–although I suppose the fatigue comes from other sources. Anyway, we carol as people are boarding. I enjoy this even though I’m scantily dressed [...]

Early on, I talked about the importance of selecting the right piece for a reading. Some pieces of fiction naturally lend themselves to being read aloud, while others are meant to stay on the page. In John Scalzi’s The Sagan Diary, I ran smack into that difference. Scalzi asked me to read the preface, which [...]

When Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press asked me to read Kage Baker’s Rude Mechanicals, I was delighted, because I love the Company stories. I was delighted until I started reading the manuscript and realized that the point of view character was male. I skimmed forward, just looking at dialogue. Most of the characters were male. [...]

Please go listen to this brilliant and funny bit of advice: How Not To Do A Podcast by Kate Baker.

My niece gave me a cold for Christmas, so we’re going to take advantage of it to show some tricks for dealing with throat ailments. For kicks, I recorded the whole post this time. You can listen to it here OR you can read and just listen to the example clips. Listen to Reading Aloud: [...]

Last night, to celebrate, I worked. I needed to turn in my recording for PodCastle and had been given an extension because of my cold last week. The dragon lady was not appropriate for this story. Even so, my voice was a little fragile and we had to stop a lot. Actually, that’s not completely [...]

If anyone has time, I could use help with two tasks. 1) I recorded a story (not mine and I promise it’s good) and I need to listen to it to make sure that we didn’t leave any of my stumbles in it. I’m tuning out my own voice. The story is two and a [...]

Ah-ha! I had dim memories of learning a general rule of thumb for how to handle the A in RP English, so I went looking for it. Until around the 1600s everyone, no matter where they lived, pronounced a the short way, as in trap. But in the 17th century it became fashionable in London [...]

The dialect is definitely going much smoother when recording Shades of Milk and Honey. The first day I was covering about 7 pages an hour and my usual speed is 15.  I’m back up to the twelve range, which is still slow but at least in the realm of reasonable. It will be interesting to [...]

While I was in Utah at the Superstars Writing Seminar, I did a very fast version of my “How to Give an Effective Reading” workshop.  I do this talk at conventions when I get the chance and have the text of the longer version here on the site. BUT while I was there Stephen Nelson [...]

Stage fright is one of the most horrible things about reading. It can be debilitating and, what’s worse, it can cause a self-feedback loop that will make the symptoms manifest in different ways. Some people’s knees shake, others can’t breathe, some people forget everything they know… it can be horrible. People suggest things like, “imagine [...]