The key for an author trying to engage a listening audience is to bring your talking voice into your reading voice.
That's the advice of writer, actor and reading coach David Prete, who taught five sessions of a master class on the Art of Public Reading at the Literary House this week.
"The basis of training your voice is training your ear," said Prete.
Writers on campus and some from the community attended the master class to learn how to read their own writing in an intimate way, through different characters within themselves, to capture the attention of audiences.
Alum Ellen Wise shared her poetry, and told the class "I like poetry [because] it's so compressed."
Prete's students were asked to bring a couple pages of their own work from different genres and were told to wear comfortable clothes during the interactive class.
In the class, Prete had the students do an exercise where a person would tell a story from their real life but then would randomly move to a page of their writing and start reading.
He had people switch back and forth to create a seamless feel between the writing and talking.
Prete would point out bad habits of readers, like a soft tone or lack of eye contact with their audience, so they were aware of problems and could begin to fix them.
He told students to think of their writing in terms of words, not sentences, while they read it aloud. He also analyzed some pieces of writing that students brought to the class.
He said that recent generations have not been trained to hear.
Television makes it so that "[o]ur eyes are doing the work [for us.]," said Prete.
People at each session learned that there is a natural rhythm to pieces of writing, and the best read pieces have many variations of the modalities of public speaking. The three modalities are speed, pitch and volume.
He worked with the students to find their range and duration. This was so people could benefit from "know[ing] the things you can do naturally and best."
Prete has studied with Mike Nichols, an Academy Award-winning director and George Morrison, an on- and off-Broadway director. Prete co-starred in the off-Broadway play "On The Line at the Cherry Lane Theater."
He has been in theatre productions and co-founded Water Theatre Company where he worked as an actor and producer.
He teaches writers to read their work in front of audiences through classes taught one-on-one, in small groups, or at conferences and many other colleges across the country.
He teaches a graduate course at The New School in New York City called "The Art of Public Readings." His first book, "Say That to My Face" was published in 2003. He is working on a novel called, "Bones of His Bones."
Ellen Wise didn't know what to expect from Prete's class, but believes the class "opens up a lot of ideas and things to pursue [in the future]."
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