This threat became necessary after the previous term's graduating class had a few students go long, one so much so that not even the faculty frantically clapping from the audience or wildly gesticulating at watches would get him to shut the fuck up and take his seat. And so, to prevent this assault on a weary group of faculty and student body, a strict ten minute rule was laid down as absolute. Not ten minutes and 30 seconds. Ten or less or expect to be humiliated before your peers and mentors.
Naturally, this added some anxiety to already nerve wracking requirement to perform our work in public. And it is a performance. A delivery of lines which must represent our work, whether that is poetry, nonfiction, or fiction. So in addition to the basics,
- Speak clearly
- Speak loudly enough to be heard
- Speak slowly enough to be understood
- Don't speak too slowly, because you will get cut off mid-sentence or before the end and no one will have any idea what you were rambling about and they'll suspect that you've somehow skirted around all good writing advice your mentors must have provided and that you will die a loser, unread, unpublished, in obscurity, all your tuition wasted, your life a complete sham.
First of all, it's terrible to try and hook an audience with a tiny snippet from a novel out of 241 pages. The opening didn't quite work as I have a prologue and not enough time to get anywhere in chapter one. So I selected a later chapter that I hoped would tease with humor, snappy dialogue, intrigue, a little danger, and some good old-fashioned sexual tension. They would beg me to continue!
But my essentials, my whittled down chapter, was too long by more than half. No matter how quickly I raced through it (breaking all the basic rules above) I could not deliver in less than ten minutes.
Choices had to be made. Hard ones.
At first, it was just about how much of the selection was critical for the comprehension of the audience. Cowardly. And not sufficient.
So, an entire scene was cut. Brutally. I had great sentences in there, vital clues, powerful imagery, and none of that mattered if I was yanked off the stage while still setting my scene. And then I started cutting phrases and words from sentences. Every time I read my words aloud, I found another superfluous word or sentence until I'd cut my thirteen pages to five.
I was scheduled to read on the first day of student readings after everyone else in my group. They were good. I didn't want to suck. When it was my turn, I took a deep breath and went for it, all the while terrified that I would run over. The director had interns in the back of the auditorium with time signs, but none of us could look away from our words long enough to find them. We just powered through and hoped for the best. I stopped at what hoped was a dramatic moment, waited a beat and thanked the audience. I was rewarded with gasps before the obligatory clapping. It felt fantastic.
After the crushing weight of the reading, all else - including the seminar I gave - was cake. Once I had a chance to relax, I started to think about the revisions I'd made to my reading selection. Should I go back and cut from my manuscript? How do I choose what to keep and what is cluttering up my story?
I probably made about fifty percent of the changes to that chapter of my full manuscript. I did it recently, though - not right away. I'd promised my boyfriend that I'd let him read my novel in spite of my sensitivity to his hatred of commas. I wanted him to judge me based on my best work, though, so before I hit print, I went back and made changes to the section I'd read until it sang.
He hasn't read it yet.
In any case, I found myself needing to apply similar revisions to the clutter clogging up my house. For the past few weeks, I've had to decide what to keep and what to let go. And then I'd go back and cut a little more and a little more. The determining factor has been Would I pay to store this? In most cases the answer has been no. So Craigslist or Goodwill or ecycle or whatever means that it's not burdening me anymore. I'm not missing it yet. And I can breathe.
So let your work breathe - in fact, let it sing! Decide if you would pay to store all the extra description, the backstory, the witty bon mots. If not, ship it to Goodwill and move forward with a clear conscience. You'll earn that gasp, too, and it will feel terrific.
