Babel Clash

Reading Bill Willingham’s post from a couple days ago, I was reminded of some of my own thoughts about the act of reading. Bill talks about the collaboration between the writer and the reader, and how the reader actually does most of the heavy lifting in that process. I agree, but I might put it in slightly different terms.

When we think of the performing arts, we think of dance, music, theater, that kind of stuff. I don’t know too many people who would place “reading” on that list. But if you think about it, reading is a performance just like any of those. In any performing art, the performer takes a composition (choreography, a musical score, a script) and brings the composition to life by performing it (a ballet, a symphony, a play). As far as I can tell, reading is just like any of those things: the only difference is that the performance typically only happens in the reader’s mind (or at bedtime, when I read books to my kids).

The scope of that performance is limited only by the reader’s imagination. Whatever experiences, sights, sounds, and emotions you have in your mental prop closet get dragged out onto the stage of your mind and pressed into service. You decide what the characters look like, what their unexplained motivations are, what the castles look like, all that. And if the writer has done his or her job well, then you use all of those props to make a convincing, engaging performance.

One of the reasons that it’s so important for parents to read to their children is that you’re not just teaching them to read; you’re also teaching them how to perform the stories that the words represent. When I read books to my kids I do voices for all the characters with appropriate accents, and I gesture, and sometimes even get up and run around the room.  I don’t do this just becuase it’s fun (though it is), but to demonstrate how to bring the printed word to life in their minds.

In fourth grade, there were times in class when the teacher forced us to read aloud portions of some story or another, one at a time, a few paragraphs each. I was always astonished at the deadness of most of the kids’ voices as they plodded along, simply pronouncing the words, giving little or no indication that they even understood what they were saying. Only a few other kids and I put any effort whatever into it; we were the only ones having any fun. (Of course, after class the other kids would beat us up and throw slushies at us, but that’s a whole other story.) When you hear people say that they don’t like to read (a notion that has always astonished me), it’s because they’re like those fourth-graders, going through the motions of the performance, but putting no effort into it and, thus, getting nothing out of it.

For a writer, it might be a good thing to think about your novel not as a finished work of art in and of itself, but as a series of instructions that allow someone else to perform it. The readers are indeed not the audience, but  collaborators who are their own audience. Your job as a writer is to give them the necessary information and then step aside and let them do their jobs. It’s very much like the script of a play; the script is mostly just dialog; it’s up to the directors and actors to determine who’s wearing what costume and where the actors stand and how the stage is dressed and what that dialog means.

As a writer, I think it’s a useful concept. And as a reader, I think it’s empowering. You’re not just a passive recipient, the way you are as an audience member at someone else’s performance. You’re the one up on stage making the decisions, deciding what’s important, how the characters look and sound. I think this is why I have such inordinately fond memories of the experience of reading books, much more so than that of watching movies, say. And also why children like to hear and read the same books over and over again. They like to be caught up in the performance; they have a surfeit of imagination and can make every story new each time, fitting in newly uncovered pieces of real-world experience every night to make a more compelling tale.

I think it also helps explain that wondrous phenomenon of how great books change each time you read them. You pick them up once when you’re young and again when you’re older and they seem almost like different books. This happens to me each time I read Hamlet. No matter how many times I “perform” that play, I always find myself thinking, “Is this really the same thing I read before?” It seems like each time entirely new scenes spring up out of nowhere. And of course the reason you get such different things each time is that your mental prop closet has a whole new set of contents. As your experience grows and you change, so change your performances. The mark of truly great writers is that their books can be performed by anyone, regardless of their mental budget or depth of experience or understanding, and that no matter where in life you are, you’re still able to perform that book and get something out of it.

As performing arts go, it’s not the most glamorous and there’s no money in it. No one has ever been famous for reading a novel well. On the other hand, though, you also don’t need special shoes or expensive equipment. Just a book, really.

And best of all, of course, there are no critics.

(Well, my kids are critics. They get bummed out when my wife reads to them because she doesn’t do all the crazy voices and stuff. But that’s the price she pays for her minimalist approach.)

Related posts:

• Telling the Tale
  Bill’s and Matt’s posts about reading really struck home for me. I like to think of stories (anyone’s stories) as a script for a performance. And I’ve learned the most about storytelling by telling stories (without any script) to live audiences, starting with my kids. A live audience has a...