Title: How to Give a Great Reading

Instructor: Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., Ransom@RansomStephens.com

Details to Sign up for currently scheduled classes here!

Description:

You’ve just been invited to read at a literary event. What should you read for the time allotted? How can you guarantee a lasting impression that leaves the audience wanting to read your work? Readings are the central tool for building your audience and promoting your work. You need to be ready and you need to be good. Ransom Stephens has produced hundreds of readings and wants to prepare you. You’ll learn how to choose the right piece for each event, you’ll discover storytelling techniques that fit your style and enhance your readers’ experience, and, most important of all, you’ll see how to use this opportunity to develop an audience.

This course will enable you to:

  • Build your audience and sell books at readings.
  • Choose the right piece, of the right length, with the right beginning and ending for a given venue to leave the audience hungry to read your work.
  • Edit a passage for reading out loud.
  • Apply the right diction to enhance characterization.
  • Determine your intrinsic strengths as a storyteller and how to use them.
  • Provide the perfect amount of story buildup.

Syllabus:

  • The perfect reading
    • The perfect story arc to capture an audience
    • The perfect length
    • The perfect choices for bars, bookstores, coffee shops, art galleries…
  • Storytelling vs story writing
    • The difference between the written and spoken word
    • Examples from great writers who are great readers
    • Examples from great writers who are really bad readers
  • Diction
    • In narration
    • In characterization
    • Microphones, acoustics, and feedback
  • Performance and improvement
    • Examples from the class

Details:

Bring a passage to read out loud!

The class is an interactive seminar that requires three hours for 15 people.

About the instructor:

Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., has been a writer and public speaker for 20 years. He has 1000s of hours experience in the classroom as a university professor, is the author of what the SF Chronicle called “a milestone not only for Ransom but for the book industry as well, as the first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing.…an ambitious first novel that sings of the heart and the scientific method as two parts of the same song,” The God Patent (Numina Press, www.TheGodPatent.com). He produces events for Litquake, the San Francisco Literary Festival, is co-producer and MC of the monthly reading series, Inside Story Time, and has performed at hundreds of readings drawing laughs, tears and sometimes both.