On Readings
David Mitchell read at Powell’s the other night, and it was fantastic. (Thanks to Grant for saving me a seat. It was packed when I got there) I didn’t take notes, because when I do take notes they are almost exclusively drawings of dragons wearing different kinds of hats, instead of whatever it is I am actually taking notes about. The “quotes” in this article are therefore just muddled recollections. But as far as I can recall, they bear at least a passable resemblance to what was said . In any event, I feel qualified at least to point out the areas of the reading that lent themselves to greatness:
(Regarding my qualifications, I am a reasonably handsome man with a three thousand dollar education and some opinions. But on a relevant note, I go to a reading or two a month. I usually try to get a beer after with the rotating rouges gallery of other reading… attenders that I’m on familiar terms with. This last bit is to slyly establish that I am a cool dude who drinks beers. But also, that I bounce my thoughts off other [smarter] people to establish which are insightful and which are tinfoil hatted outliers. What follows are the insightful ones)
DO THE VOICES. Or at least some voices. Or at least alter your cadence a little. Even a small effort goes a long way. Mitchell has an incredibly charming accent that I would describe as West Midlands (while admitting I have no ear for English regionalism), so it’s not like he was going to transport us instantly to feudal Japan. But small changes in his delivery established who was who in dialogue heavy sequences, and what emotional cues we were supposed to be getting. Yes it’s goofy, but it’s fun and goofy. At one point he asked the audience to “pretend I’m a matronly Japanese woman” and then later “oh, and pretend I’m blind too.” One segment of the book features a number of tittering women, and by god he tittered.
TALK TO THE BABIES Maybe that’s not super practical at every reading, but during this particular reading a baby became cranky. As the mother was dandling it to a quiet corner, Mitchell stopped what he was doing and declared “Don’t go little baby! You can stay! I have one of my own!” It was fucking adorable. I don’t even like babies, but I like them more than I did before that happened. “What’s his name?” Mitchell asked. “Josephine” was the reply. “That was a very masculine wail, is all” Mitchell said “Maybe it’s really Joseph? No? It really is Josephine? Well that’s delightful too.”
PREPARE FOR THE INEVITABLE. At every reading, someone always asks about process. I say this without exaggeration or condemnation. OK, maybe a little condemnation. It can’t always be the same person, because if it was they’d probably notice that a) the answers are almost always the same b) the body language from the author is either a wince, a silent groan, or downright hostility. If you are curious about the answers, they are always “I keep office hours, I don’t get out much, I read an enormous amount.” If you are curious about the body language, it is more specifically “I brought you a message of inherent human truth, and you have asked me what kind of car I drove to get here.”
Mitchell, while providing essentially the same basic response, also wove in an interesting metaphor about a penny arcade horse race. “There are five horses, and five components to my writing. You want the horses to finish at the same time, or else you’ll have to rewrite things.” The metaphor concluded with perhaps my favorite sentence of the evening “Oh no! The structure horse has gotten ahead of the character horse! Now I have a good structure, but the characters don’t think for themselves!”
Now everything Mitchell said at the reading seemed remarkably off the cuff, confessional almost, which was one of the pleasures of hearing him speak. But if he was going to keep something in his back pocket for that question, the horse race story was both interesting to an old salt like me and mollifying to the question asker.
GO OFF SCRIPT: Some of the most interesting things from the reading were interjected in the middle of the reading proper, and not the Q&A. “Oh dear, guard and garden… that’s too close, isn’t it. Product recall! How about… ‘sentry.’ Yes, sentry. ‘The sentry in the garden…’” was a good one, as was [I’m really going to butcher this one] “My characters have to meet, but the setting wouldn’t allow for casual sort of run ins. And you have to have that for romance. So I had to employ an old writer’s trick and have a monkey steal a man’s leg. See, a Portuguese sailor gets his leg crushed, which they have to amputate, and then a monkey runs off with the leg so the female protagonist has to run after it and runs into the clerk. It’s a hackneyed gag, I know, but…”
It was great. It played like a directors commentary to the text, and I’m sure it was a godsend to those in the audience who hadn’t read the book yet. Context aplenty, and it provided some process tips to the process hungry jackals in the audience.
DO DRAW PICTURES IN THE BOOK: Well, you don’t have to, but I got my copy of the Cloud Atlas signed, and he drew a little cloud on the title page, and some birds. It was awesome.
Here is a picture of my feet at the event. You are just going to have to trust me on this.
