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• What do LGBTQ teens want to read?
• Victoria Strauss: Mokoto Rich on the math of ebook pricing: they’re not as cheap to produce as many people think.
• Bookends Literary Agency offers a handy publishing dictionary

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• New issue of Apex Magazine is a single author issue with fiction by SFWA member Mary Robinette Kowal.
• SFWA member Jess Wynne has a story in the Steampunk issue of Crossed Genres.
• SFWA member Monica Valentinelli’s THE QUEEN OF CROWS is now available at DriveThruHorror.com.
• SFWA member Jay Lake is reading and signing new novel PINION at Powells Cedar Hills store on 4/1.
• Happy release day to SFWA member Seanan Mcguire for A Local Habitation.
• Happy Book release day to SFWA Member Blake Charlton's novel, Spellwright.
• Welcome to SFWA's newest Active member Rachel Aaron, author of The Spirit Thief.
• Welcome to SFWA's newest Active member Genevieve Valentine. Read one of her qualifying stories.

Industry News

• The Nebula final ballot is now open to Active SFWA members.
• Asimov's has posted their Nebula nominated stories.

This is like a turn of phrase that’s really stunning in a story. You stop reading for a moment and think, “Wow, that’s lovely.” That may be true, but the story has stopped, right there. Same thing with voicing. Any time you make the listener stop to think, you’ve injured your story.

The point of doing different voices is to make it clear who is speaking–it’s not to make it sound like there are fifty people sharing the stage with you. If you really want it to sound like there are completely different people, hire some actors.

Now, with that said, you also want to use your voice to enhance the character and to help paint a picture in your listener’s mind. Even when I’m doing same gender voices, I tend to “lighten” my voice a little to make it more feminine.

But, besides the “audio picture” I’m trying to paint, part of the reason I alter my voice for female voices is so that when I do male voices, I’m altering my voice to a similar degree.

Let me use a visual analogy. If you are watching a cartoon, you don’t think about the fact that there is no texture in hair or clothing. But, as soon as the animated character wanders onto a digitally rendered lawn, the fact that you can see every blade of grass is jarring. It makes the grass look unreal, and the character look unreal. They don’t and shouldn’t live in the same universe.

With voicing, if you want your cross-gender voices to sound real they must live in the same universe. So if you’re a guy and you’ve got to do a female voice, then don’t use your “natural” voice for a male character. Color your male voices to the same degree that you color your women’s.

And remember that you can be subtle.

So let’s look at some of the tools for doing this.  In my previous post I talked about the basic tools  of pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude.  For working cross-gender the first three are going to be your most useful tools.

The key to performing a voice that is not your own is to play with stereotypes. Sad, I know, but people have preconceptions in their heads about what men and women sound like.

The perception is that men’s voices are deeper, placed more in the throat and more staccato.

Women’s voices are perceived as being higher, placed more in the front of the mouth and more fluid.

There are clear exceptions to these ideas, for instance, I have a friend who is a female tenor. When she calls, before she identifies herself, it’s not uncommon for me to think that a man is on the other end of the line.  Likewise, I have a friend who is a high tenor and his natural speaking voice is in my range. Again, I’ve had moments of wondering who the woman on the other end of the line was.

The point here is that even though there are exceptions, the societal expectation that a low voice means male and a high voice means female can work in your favor when voicing.  Shifting your voice up from your narrator voice by only a tiny fraction can make the character sound more feminine because you are using the built in preconceptions of your audience.

And remember, keep it subtle.

Mary Robinette Kowal was the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in Portland, OR with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Tor is publishing her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, in 2010.

Let me talk about conventions and their relationship to my writing life. Everyone will have very different experiences, depending on their personality. Here’s how it works for me.

I primarily go to conventions for three reasons.

1. To see other people in the field whose company I enjoy.
2. Improve craft/business sense.
3. To be “visible.”

1) To see other people in the field whose company I enjoy.
I relish the social aspect of SF. There are people that I just plain like and a convention is like old home week. It’s fun! I like you guys.

2) Improve craft/business sense.
A convention with a really good list of panels is going to appeal to me more than one in which I only hang out at the bar (though I love that, too). I want to know what’s happening in the field and to think about things that aren’t just products of my own brain banging against the inside of my skull. Even if I only learn one new thing, that’s a thing I didn’t know before.

3) To be “visible”
I’m a new writer, so I’m building my “brand.” I’m not going to get that many new readers at a convention, but the people at cons are the ones who vote on things and frankly, nominations can be leveraged ((Nominations and awards do not automatically mean a reader increase. You have to know how to work them, but the power of narrative on career is a different topic.)) into getting more readers which means…that cons are filled with a good target audience. Cons also tend to have editors at them and those are good people to know.

Now, I’ll be frank about how this works, because a lot of people don’t understand how to do effective schmoozing. Yes, yes, I’m aware that admitting this happens is distasteful. But, I’m going to talk about how to schmooze, anyway.

Schmoozing 101

These are all ideas to employ but none of them are hard and fast rules. Schmoozing is all about being charming and that will vary somewhat depending on the situation. So, here are the basic ideas behind successful schmoozing.

First idea: The other person is more interesting than you are.

Clearly, there are going to be cases where this isn’t true BUT act like it is. Why? Because the more time someone spends talking about himself and the more he feels intelligent and the more interesting he will think the conversation is. Hence, the more interesting he will think you are. So practice being a good listener.

Now, the way I do this is that as I’m talking with the person, I listen for the things that we have common interests in. They like cars? Great, I can reference the MG-TD that I covet. That gives me something to add to the conversation so that they don’t feel like they are being interrogated.

What if you can’t find any common ground?

Second idea: Have an exit strategy.
Let’s say you are a writer talking to an editor. It’s a good conversation, but you don’t know them all that well. The conversation pauses. Rather than looking for a way to prolong it, excuse yourself. To borrow from theater, “Always leave them wanting more.”

Exit strategies are also useful when you are trapped in a conversation. It’s okay to break the flow and say, “I’m so sorry, it’s been good talking to you, but I need to [x].” Yes, I’m suggesting that you lie. They trapped you. You are escaping. It’s fair.

But if the conversation is going well?

Third idea: Don’t be the first to bring up business.
Why? Because everyone at the con is talking about writing and business and you, you will be a welcome respite in the midst of a sea of people who have all been talking about the same things. You stand out this way. Now, if someone else brings it up, you are more than welcome to indulge, but don’t go there first. Later, make sure you follow up, but when you are in a non-business setting, leave the business alone.

Fourth idea: When the conversation turns to business, be prepared.
It is a con, so the conversation is very likely to swing round to writing. If you have something to pitch, practice your pitch at home. If you have a question, practice it at home. If you’ve gone to panels, think about what your opinion is before someone asks you.

Right now, I’m sucking at answering the question, “So what do you write?”

I rattle off a couple of magazines — which is what they want to hear — and I fail to say, “I have a novel coming out from Tor in 2010.” I think I told two people that at the last con. This is foolish. Someone gave me an opening to pimp myself and I didn’t oblige them.

Fifth idea: Be physically pleasant.

Is this shallow? Yes, yes it is. But we’ve all read the studies that repeatedly show that people who are attractive are treated better, so for heaven’s sake, take advantage of that. You look good in green? Wear green. Nicely turned calves? Show them off. And for heaven’s sake, bathe. Trust me, in a con, just a little bit of effort will make you stand out.

Want to know a secret? In real life, I almost never wear makeup, but I wear it at conventions. Too many people take photos and I look dead in photos without it. Especially on very little sleep, which is a natural state at cons.

Sixth idea: Follow up.

You meet someone who is either fascinating or who might be a good connection later. Drop them a line afterwards. It can be as simple as swinging by their website and saying “Hey, good to meet you!” Don’t stalk them, but that tiny bit of post con contact will help them remember who you are. Heck, it’ll help you remember who they are too.

By the way, this is why it’s good to hand out cards at conventions. I’ve been bad about this lately and keep forgetting to print enough to take with me.

So let’s review.
1. The other person is always more interesting than you are.
2. Have an exit strategy.
3. Don’t be the first to bring up business.
4. If business comes up, be prepared.
5. Be physically pleasant, ie, bathe.
6. Follow up.

There are other things too, but these are the basics.

—

Conventions and Writing, or Schmoozing 101 is reprinted with permission of the author.

Mary Robinette Kowal was the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in Portland, OR with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Tor is publishing her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, in the Spring of 2010.

Let’s start by identifying the three pitfalls that most new readers fall into.

1. Volume
2. Speed
3. Droning

Volume

Many readings simply aren’t loud enough.  You can’t rely on every venue having a microphone or good acoustics.  Fortunately, your body knows how to be loud. The trap that people fall into is that they talk to the person closest to them, the front row.

Try this experiment.  Step outside with a friend and have them walk to the opposite side of the yard or street.  Now say, “Hello! How are you?”  Your body will automatically make all the adjustments necessary for your voice to carry across the street.

The same is true when reading.  Speak to the back wall of your space, not to the front row.  If you are loud enough, you should hear a slight bounce as your voice hits the back wall and returns to you.

Speed

Many readers go so fast that their words become jumbled together.  The problem is that for the listener, this is the first time they’ve heard the story.  The analogy that I use is this: Imagine that you’ve got a mountain cabin. The first time you drive to it, you think, “This is the twistiest road in the world! I’m going to die!”  And then gradually, you get used to it.  A year later, a friend follows you home and they are driving so slow. That’s because they are behind you thinking, “This is the twistiest road in the world! I’m going to die!”

You are familiar with your text. This is the first time the listener has heard your words. Unlike printed stories, they can’t ask you to stop and repeat yourself.  You need to speak slowly enough that they can understand you.

An ideal speed is about150 words per minute. It’s easy to figure out how fast that is by taking a cutting that’s 150 words and timing yourself. I’ll warn  you, that it will feel like you are speaking about half the speed you think you should.  Keep at it.  When you get into performance, you will speed up whether you want to or not.   Adrenalin.

Droning

Humans are animals and as such there are certain things we’re hardwired to do.  One of those is tuning out sounds once we’ve identified them as not a threat.  Droning or speaking in a monotone, sends a signal to the brain of the listener that this is a sound without information.  They will, despite their best intentions, lose focus on what you are saying.

Again, trust your body because it knows what to do.  Remember that the written word was created to record spoken language. When you are reading a story aloud, you are a storyteller.  The way you tell as story to friends about an incident in your daily life is probably totally different from how you read. It shouldn’t be. Use the same animation and pacing that you would use when relating a spoken story when you are reading a written one.

So that’s how to avoid the biggest pitfalls of reading.  But what about going to the next level? How do you make your reading exceptional?

The Basics

The first place to start is with your selection. When you pick a story or an excerpt from a novel, make certain that it is something that is suitable for being read aloud and fits your voice. So, what makes something suitable?

Primarily you’re looking for a small cast of characters. The more characters you have, and the narrator counts as one, the harder it will be to vocally distinguish between them. Unless you’re Mel Blanc, four characters, including narrator, is probably your safe upper end. (This will vary, obviously.) Within that cast, it will be easier if your characters are disparate in terms of type. For instance, a woman and a man are easier to distinguish than two women.

Second, you want a self-contained scene, so that the audience gets a beginning, middle, and end, even if it’s part of a larger whole. Now, if you are doing a reading to sell your book there is something to be said for ending on a cliffhanger, but make sure that it’s really a cliffhanger and not just a random stopping place.

Third, language that lends itself to an almost onomatopoeic sense. Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories were written specifically to be read aloud. He uses rhythm and onomatopoeia to make really dynamic sentences that are just plain fun to read–he’s also writing for children. But an extreme example is sometimes useful, eh?

Really, what you want are words you can linger over and play with. Read this out loud and try to bend the words. “He jogged to the train station, three blocks from his house.” There’s not a lot you can do with it.

On the other hand, “…they ate wild sheep roasted on the hot stones” you can do a lot with. “Hot” for instance isn’t a true onomatopoeic word because hot makes no sound, whereas “sizzle” does. Make sense? But it’s a word that you can twist in a lot of different ways.

Try saying “hot” thinking about the following definitions and make the word mean something different each time.

• Sweltering
• Very sexy
• Spicy
• Tense

Try the same thing with “wild,” which is a great word.

So, you’ve found a selection with a small cast of characters, in a self-contained scene, with an almost onomatopoeic sense. Those are stories that will sound good read aloud, but are you the right person to read the story? Does it suit your voice?

If it’s a first-person story, you really, really need to be the same gender as the narrator or your audience will have a hard time getting past the audio cues. Even in third person story, you need to be aware that the narrator voice will often echo the thoughts of the Main Character, so picking a section where the gender matches will be easier on the audience. There are people who can get away with cross-gender roles, but it’s not easy. Know your limits.

Character Voices

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. To check your range, hum from your highest to your lowest note. Of that, you probably mostly use the middle when speaking. While it can help color a character, it isn’t a good idea to rely on pitch alone to distinguish between characters, simply because you use more than one note while speaking.

Placement – There are several resonators which affect the tone of the voice. Put one hand on your chest and the other hand on your nose. Now hum through your range again. As you do, you’ll feel your chest vibrate at the low end and your nose vibrate in the upper middle. These are both resonators.

The facial mask has several other resonating cavities, which you mostly notice with a sinus infection. Ever wonder why you sound nasally with a cold?

You can move the voice from the front of the mouth to the back of the throat. Broadly speaking Russian tends to be at the back of the mouth while British English tends to be very forward.

Let’s, start with the nasal resonator, because it’s easiest to find.

• Hold your nose, say, “Nnnnnn” and try to get your nose to really buzz.
• Now remove your hand and try to talk, keeping your voice as nasally as possible. Use the phrase, “What did you say?” as your experimental phrase.
• Try adjusting the pitch while keeping the nasality.

A little bit of nasality can be used to make a “brighter” sound.

Next we’ll move to the back of the throat. Open your mouth in a yawn. Let your soft palate rise. Try to talk. Does it feel like your voice is at the back of your mouth? Again, play with pitch. Placing your voice at the back of your throat can make a “darker” sound.

Now, we’re going to move a series of consonants from the back of the mouth to the front. As you do this, pay attention to where your voice feels like it is during the “aaaah” portion of each consonant sequence. It will be subtle.

The series runs like this. Guh, guh, guh, guh, Gaaaah, Kuh, kuh, kuh, kuh, kaah, (I’m not going to write them all out, I’ll give you the consonants and you can figure out the pattern.) G, K, D, T, B, P.

Reverse it, moving from Puh to Guh.

Try saying our test phrase, “What did you say?” at each “location” in the mouth.

Roughly, and very loosely, that’s placement.

Pacing – This covers everything from how quickly a character speaks to the types of rhythms they use. Is their voice quick, but fluid or is it staccatto. Slow and halting, or does it drawl?

Reminder: Generally speaking, always speak slower than you think you should when reading.

Attitude – You can tell on the phone if someone is smiling, right? Technically, it’s a combination of the things we’ve already talked about, but fundamentally it’s about attitude. If you know your character, you’ll know how they speak.

Take the phrase, “What did you say?” Say it as if you are angry. Now, curious. Disbelieving? Great. Now say it like you’re a parent and a kid has just talked back to you. That is attitude. Attitude is your friend.

Accent – Chances are, this won’t be something you need to deal with. If you do have a character who has an accent for God’s sake, make sure you can do it convincingly. There’s nothing worse than hearing someone butcher an accent, it will destroy the credibility of your story faster than you can say “Run fer the hills.” There are a lot of tapes that deal with learning accents for actors. If you’re going to do it, do it right

So, those are the basic tools. The nice thing about character voices is that you can be fairly subtle. Most of the time the Attitude and Pace will be enough. If you can affect Placement, that’s even better. What you are looking for is a voice that is distinct from the other voices and appropriate to the character. Of course, which of these tricks you use for each voice depends on the character for whom you are speaking.

Narrating

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 connect to the listener. The voice needs to be distinctive enough that when you say a line of dialogue and then return to the narrator, the audience recognizes the voice. At the same time, it cannot distract from the story by being so distinctive that it overshadows the words.

The initial instinct is to use your own voice. This is a good instinct, but I’m going to suggest that you use a specific form of your natural voice. When we’re talking, there’s a number of different shadings that happen with our voice most of which have to do with Attitude. Your voice changes, subtly, depending on whether you’re talking to your mother, your boss, your lover, or answering the phone.

Your phone voice is a really, really useful voice. It will probably sound professional, fairly neutral, and slightly more modulated than your hanging-with-chums voice. You know the one I mean, right?

So let’s take that voice out for a spin. I’m going to give you a chunk of text to play with from Ray Bradbury’s The Fruit in the Bottom of the Bowl. Read this silently first.

William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on the mantel ticked midnight.

He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with those same ten whorled fingers.

He had never thought of himself as a sculptor and yet, in this moment, looking down between his hands at the body upon the polished hardwood floor, he realized that by some sculptural clenching and remodeling and twisting of human clay he had taken hold of this man named Donald Huxley and changed his physiognomy, the very frame of his body.

Here are very rough, basic rules to start with.

1. Speak slower than you think you should. As you become more familiar with text you will naturally speed up. This is the first time your audience has heard the words. You should be painfully slow, in your own ears.
2. A period means pause and count to 2.
3. A comma means pause and count to 1.

Go ahead and read it aloud, just thinking about the mechanics.

Now, the fun stuff.

Each sentence has a word or phrase that is the most important thing in it. Take the first sentence of the second paragraph.

He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor.

What’s the most important thing here? “the man lying on the floor.” Underline it, so that when you get there you put a slight emphasis on it. Now in that phrase, what’s the most important word? Man? That would be my bet. So a slight line goes underneath it, but you don’t want to do too much or you’ll break the rhythm of the sentence.

Placing emphasis can be as simple as putting more stress on that part of the sentence, the same way you put more stress on the accented syllable of a word.

There’s a simple exercise to make you more conscious of using stress in a sentence to change the meaning. Say, “The ball is on the table.”

Now I want you to answer each of these questions with the same sentence, changing only the emphasis of one word to answer

What is on the table?

The ball is on the table.

Now answer these questions using only “The ball is on the table.”

• What is the ball on?
• Is the ball under the table?
• The ball is not on the table, is it?

There are other ways to do it as well. You can use a vocal tremor, a dimenuendo, a crescendo, tempo, aspiration or a dozen other tricks. The key is to decide how your character, the narrator, feels about the moment. Remember Attitude? Go through this block of text and mark the attitude that you think your character feels. The deeper the penetration into the POV character, the more attitude your voice should display.

Bradbury uses the word “looked” three times in that sentence. The echo of the word can be powerful if it’s used right. Take a minute and think about how William Acton feels about each of the things he’s looking at. Perhaps the emotions could be wonder, disorientation and horror.

Another section to pay special attention to is this bit, “he realized that by some sculptural clenching and remodeling and twisting of human clay”

The verbs “clenching” and “twisting” are particularly visceral. When I was talking about words that were almost onomatopoeic, I meant words like this. When you clench something it doesn’t really make a sound, but you can manipulate the word to create a vocal description of it. If you tighten your throat–clenching it–the sound of the word will change. Find words like these and see if you can wring the vocal description out of them.

So read that chunk o’text again–after marking it–and see how much emotion you can get out of it.

What we’ve done with this exercise is gone from an emotionally neutral narrator to an emotionally invested narrator. There are times when each will be the most appropriate choice. Remember when I said about each sentence having a word that’s the most important in it? When you are using these ornaments try to pick only one per sentence, otherwise it’s like having a superfluity of adjectives. It’s very easy to tip from emotional investment to verbal pyrotechnics. Make certain that you are making choices that advances the story.

With all of these points, the key thing to remember is that you are returning to a long tradition of oral storytelling.  Don’t reduce your story to words on a page. Talk to your audience and tell them the story.

Mary Robinette Kowal was the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in Portland, OR with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Tor is publishing her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, in the Spring of 2010.

]]> http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/reading-aloud/feed/ 10 http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/the-consciousness-problem-by-mary-robinette-kowal/ http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/the-consciousness-problem-by-mary-robinette-kowal/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:39:14 +0000 NebulaSuggestedReading http://www.sfwa.org/?p=2097 “The Consciousness Problem” by Mary Robinette Kowal
Asimov’s, August 2009

Entry fee is $20 plus $2.58 in taxes, Canadian. This cost is to defray costs of the workshop. You pay the fee when you’re notified that you have a slot and not before. Instructions will be emailed to entrants directly.

There are a limited number of slots available and right now, it’s one slot per customer, no multiple submissions.

Maximum length is 10,000 words, including any synopsis of the rest of a novel, novella, etc. Shorter lengths, including flash, are fine, even encouraged, but only one story.

Genre: science fiction, fantasy, horror, the usual for a Worldcon
Type: short story or novel excerpt
Language: English or French
We will also consider entries for critique of non-fiction critical essays on the subject of genre, same length requirements.

The entries will be distributed in advance so the window to get space in the workshop won’t be open for very long.

Official details will be forthcoming on the Anticipation website (http://www.anticipationsf.ca) and through other avenues of communication. You can also email writers-workshop@anticipationsf.ca directly to request a slot now.

Oz Whiston
Creative Writing Track Programming