I originally started typing this post a month ago while taking a break from preparing my set for an April Fool's day event hosted by catch breath. A month later, I can say that the event was really fun, I was happy to be included among a talented cast, and it was really cool to see Jesse Prado and Jem Bonilla who came all the way out from New York City and finally hear Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo read live in person.
In preparing for the event there were some things I considered. Because a few comedians were featured, I wanted my set to also be punchy and funny if possible. I know I’m not a comedian, but I do enjoy quipping and joking around, and I usually think it’s a good idea to match the tone of the evening when performing unless you plan on going the exact opposite way and doing something totally out of left field which could also work if done correctly. The material I was polishing up was newer work, or more accurately newly reworked stuff that I’ve expanded and reimagined since being originally written two years ago when I had the time and space to let my mind wander and daydream deeply while being aware enough to record it somehow, in a notebook or a phone app.
There were two separate pieces I was thinking about using for my set.
One of the pieces is a short subdued story, dark with some funny moments, that I started during quarantine back when I was guiding a weekly generative writing salon over zoom. (As a sidenote, I’m restarting the online salon. It was a really good way to stay motivated and work on writing, everyone who participated used the time we had together to make interesting things, and I miss it. When we first started, it was really just a way to be social and talk about our thoughts and anxieties regarding the lockdown, but after some time the focus turned to creative writing and I began introducing new prompts every week as points of inspiration. Writing with others in tandem feels extra special, almost magical, the energy flows and you can’t help but feast on it. Some really good ideas were born from that group. If you think you’d like to try an extremely lowkey and fun weekly writing workshop so you can get some new stuff written or work on an ongoing project with a renewed enthusiasm, please subscribe now using the special offer button below and get access.
The other piece I was considering for the April Fools event was a series of tweets I wrote one day while sitting in an Uber stuck in traffic trying to get over the Bay bridge from San Francisco to Berkeley. I kept seeing all these really obnoxious billboards for startups and business solutions software and I reacted to it by doing a sort of character study in chunks and posting them directly on Twitter. I have read the string of tweets in front of an audience before, at the book release party for Saint 1001 by Daphne Gottlieb, and got a good response from it (people laughed when I wanted them to laugh) but I always thought it was just an early draft. It’s a funny idea that should be turned into a more robust narrative, so that's what I was trying to do before the event. Basically I copied and pasted the tweets into a Google doc and used them as the jumping off point to build out a fleshier story.
I spent several weeks thinking about both pieces and opening their respective docs to re-read and make edits and additions. Both pieces, at this stage, feel like fully formed ideas that I might still want to pick at, because I can’t help but continue to make tweaks with every re-read, but otherwise are ready for other people to check out. It's probably a common feeling for writers to want to share things before they're completely finished. I know this is definitely the case with me. I've published things that I probably should have sat on and let develop a little bit longer.
There's definitely something embarrassing and kind of funny about a lit mag publishing your work months after you've submitted it and then reading it again in its published form and realizing you should have edited more before releasing it out until the world. The amount of times I’ve hit “publish” on this very Substack and then went back in to made edits after the newsletter was emailed to everyone on the list are too numerous to count. On the flipside, there are times where I’ve published early edits of things and felt good about their roughness because it represents part of my writing process. In fact there was an entire online movement of writers, of which I was a contributor, who published their “quick shit” pieces moments after conception, on their own blogs or on other platforms. The typos, the rawness, the run-on sentences and lack of formatting, it was all a part of the statement of the piece.
If we’re really thinking about it, is anything ever completely finished? Unless it’s a certified masterpiece, and maybe even if it is, every creative work could probably stand to take some more edits, something added, something removed. No matter what, someone out there will have an opinion that something more should have been done to the work. It’s impossible to please everyone. There’s just got to be a point where the artist decides, Okay this is it. This is as far as I’ll go. It’s done enough.
When it came time to decide which piece to read at the April Fools event, I was torn. Both pieces were appropriate for the event, and I like both pieces, but ultimately one piece was just more fun to read out loud. Reading the pieces out loud is such a good editing technique that I’ve only really started to use on my work. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out, I feel like it helps so much.
Hearing something in your head is a very different experience from expressing it with your voice, and if you’re performing you really shouldn’t wait until you’re in front of an audience to hear how the piece actually sounds. Too many times I’ve read something at an event and cringed at a clunky sequence of words coming out of my mouth, as if I didn’t account for the fact that the words would ever leave the page. Reading my work out loud to myself in preparation helped me make adjustments to the lines and helped me improve the timing, the takeoffs and the landings of the jokes within. It’s a method I’ll be using for every new piece I write.
Do you read your work out loud? It seems so obvious! If you don’t, I definitely recommend giving it a try. And if you join me for my online writing salon, reading your freshly penned work out loud in a supportive space of gentle critique is all part of the program.
I always, always, _always_ read my work aloud. It's the best way to self-edit imho.