Hearing Yourself

Reading your work out loud has many benefits, and if you do it at one of our events, you’ll probably find it exhilarating. In my opinion, possibly the only thing cooler than reading your own work to an audience, is sitting in the audience while you listen to someone else read your work.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced this a number of times in the last year. While I enjoy writing short fiction, my passion is writing plays. I love dialogue, and I love creating characters, and then I love hearing and seeing those characters come to life and speak my words. Books are personal. What the author has in mind when he develops the protagonist for a story may not be anything like what the reader sees and hears in his or her mind while reading.

A screenplay will eventually give everyone a shared experience, or will it? The chance that the story that makes it to the big screen is the exact story the author wrote is probably pretty slim, so the author may feel a little left out in the end.

With a stage play, however, what you write is what everyone gets. It’s the ultimate shared experience for everyone down the line. And as a playwright, it’s an experience I cherish.

I’m excited to say that I’ll get to have this wonderful experience again soon. My play The (Not So) New Normal has been selected as part of Writer’s & Books 2 Pages/2 Voices – an evening of short plays read by area actors. It’ll be a fun evening at the theater. I invite you to check it out Tuesday, January 24, and join me in hearing my characters come to life.

For more information, check out: https://wab.org/events/2-pages2-voices-2.

– S. Seifritz –