I’ve spent the evening doing chores, walking the dog, running. Throughout much of it I was listening to people reading things in ways that make you soften a little, or take a deep breath. There’s something about a perfect reading that just makes my whole brain light up. Something about a quiet, gentle anguish, or the vocal tremor of subdued anger. It does something to me.
This is the kind of work that I can never get off my mind. That, left to my own devices, I think I’d make over and over again until I’d landed on something perfect; some perfect things. It all starts with writing, as almost anything should, but finding the right voice—literally—for what you write is a whole separate, wonderful thing. Finding the right pitch and tone and cadence for it.
Writing something to speak aloud is so much harder than it sounds though. Writing poetry to be performed. Writing something for screen, or stage, or whatever. The only way you can do it is by actually performing the thing in some way, over and over again until you nudge it into the right place, which might mean rewriting it and it might not. You can perform the same thing many ways.