Composing the Emotional Flow of a Performance or Reading

What Is Emotional Flow? 

For a play, opera, or literary reading, the emotional flow is the pathway of moods that the audience experiences as they take in the performance. 

Audiences begin with a natural reluctance to connect with a show or reading, something we skeptical humans bring to any live event. Emotional connection with the performers can change that.

Zack Rogow giving a poetry reading.

When there is humor on stage or in a reading, the attendees laugh, relax, and let go of that natural reticence. On the other hand, when there is pathos in a performance, the audience also connects, but in a very different way. Identifying with the pain of a character or a reader can be a very personal, internal moment. 

What is tricky for the writer of a play, an opera libretto, or a literary reading, is to know how best to thread together the various emotions that a performance stimulates in an audience. Not all combinations work, as I’ve discovered the hard way.

Start Heavy, Go Light—This Doesn’t Usually Work

Earlier in my literary career, I used to do poetry readings that combined stories of sharp tragedy with boisterous comedy. The tragedy sometimes involved the loss of a parent—very heavy content. My first instinct was to put the tragedy first, and then lighten things up with silliness. I followed my tragic, confessional writings with jokey poems, partly to reassure the audience that I was alright, even after exposing a personal trauma. My punchline humor was also a sort of bravado, a way of sidestepping the depths of emotion I’d just uncovered. I don’t think this emotional flow worked. The humor undercut the pathos and left the audience scratching their heads, wondering if they should be laughing or sympathizing with my pain.

I didn’t discover how badly I was threading the emotions in my poetry readings until I saw a student of mine imitate the heavy-to-light dynamic in his own reading. When I saw how flat and evasive the humor felt after a moment of stabbing pathos, it struck me that I was composing the emotional flow of a performance all wrong. 

Start Light, Go Heavy

It was only by trial and error that I tried the reverse strategy—starting light and ending heavy. I tried this out in a collaboration with actor Lorri Holt. Lorri and I developed together the play Colette Uncensored, about the life of the French writer Colette. 

Lorri Holt as the writer Colette in Colette Uncensored

The story of Colette’s life naturally lent itself to the light-to-heavy emotional pathway, because Colette’s earlier years were like a French bedroom farce. Later on, when Colette’s family was swept up in the rise of fascism in the 1930s and 40s, her life became deadly serious. Colette’s husband then was Jewish and was arrested by the Gestapo, and her daughter regularly risked her life with her involvement in the resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. When Lorri and I tried putting the humor in the early part of the play, and made the second half much more serious, the audience seemed to go with that current much more naturally. The initial humor gave the audience a chance to connect to the performance. Once the attendees had warmed up to the show, they were wide open to feeling the pathos in the second half. 

Alternate Light and Heavy

After seeing the light-to-heavy path work well in a performance, I assumed that was the only successful way to combine humor and pathos on stage or in a reading. Not long ago, I saw a performance of Gioachino Rossini’s opera buffa, La Scala di Seta (The Silken Ladder). You can’t find a more outrageous comedy. The emotions run from slapstick to ridiculous. The feelings of the characters are so exaggerated, their crushes are so obviously unrequited, their amorous hopes are so clownish, that the audience is invited only to chuckle. And yet…Rossini and the librettist Giuseppe Maria Foppa insert moments in this opera where a character confesses a hidden passion in the most poignant way. When the zany servant Germano confesses his love in the aria, “Amore dolcemente tu prima accendi il core,” (“How sweetly, love, you first light this heart on fire”), your own heart just melts. 

How does Rossini succeed in placing these moments of extreme romantic passion in a farce? Well, music helps. Strike up the violins, and anything is possible. But I believe that can also be done in a literary work. It ain’t easy, though. I’m still working on it.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Use Your Whole Personality in Your Writing

When I was a young writer, I went to hear a favorite poet read his work at a well-known reading venue in New York City. I was such a fan of that writer—I’d read all of his books, even his juvenilia published in tiny editions by small presses when he was just getting started. I looked on this poet as a terribly serious and important writer, and since then his reputation has continued to grow over a long and distinguished career.

The Donnell Library in New York City was at one time a major venue for poetry

What surprised me most about that poet’s reading that day was not the poems themselves, but the patter the poet spoke in introducing each poem. Invariably, the author introduced a poem with a humorous anecdote, terribly funny, and then read a deadly serious poem afterwards. Before hearing that poet in person, I had no clue he had a great sense of humor, a quality that absolutely won over that large audience.

What was so odd to me was that the poet never included his sense of humor in his writing. Not once. And yet that trait, as much the poems themselves, captivated the audience that day.

 

I promised myself when I heard that reading that I was going to try to include in my writing my full personality, including parts of it that might not be solemn, or that I might not think an audience would like. All of us are complicated beings, and unless we bring those complications to our writing, we’re going to miss opportunities to engage our readers in ways we could not predict.

 

Yes, literature is a serious art with a serious purpose, but it also requires breathing room for humor, for whimsy, for digressions that might not seem immediately part of the intent of a piece of writing. So use your whole personality in your writing. If you tend to be serious but you have a sense of humor, include that lighter side. If you always go for the punch line in your writing, allow more pathos to seep in. If your most widely used voice is sincere, use your sarcasm for a change. If you’re always satirical, let your empathy into your writing.

 

Using your whole personality involves not just character traits, but your interests as well. If you happen to enjoy cooking seafood dinners, or watching soccer on TV, or walking around cemeteries, those sides of you are gold for writers. They are areas you care about that can help get your readers deeply involved because they really matter to you. Not only that, you’re an expert about them, or you at least know more on the topic than most people. That doesn’t mean you should spend your entire literary career writing about your collection of Madagascar stamps, but it does mean you can include a poem about your favorite Madagascar stamp, or you can write a mystery that hinges on a Madagascar stamp.

So, don’t think that only part of your personality qualifies as literary. Every patch of your soul should be part of your literary quilt.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Spontaneity, Wit, Improvisation, and Automatic Writing: How to Write Better Than Your Conscious Mind

When a person is about to say something funny during a conversation, they start to speak without forming an idea of what words to use. A witty comment usually begins with only a vague impulse that the moment and the context are ripe for humor. This is an intuitive feeling, and it’s the act of launching into the conversation that helps the speaker to form the specific words that make people laugh.

Similarly, when a jazz musician is about to start a solo, I don’t think that person has a clear idea what they are going to play. It’s just a willingness to jump in and get into the groove the band has set in motion that provides the impulse for that riff.

Automatic writing is also like that. Writers in the surrealist movement in the early 1920s invented automatic writing—André Breton described the process this way in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924):

Portraits of André Breton by Man Ray

Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.

In other words, write faster than you can edit with your rational mind, and the results will outpace anything you thought you could create.

The surrealist group practicing automatic writing in the 1920s

The human mind is far more brilliant than our conscious mind. One of the challenges of writing is to let go of our thoughts so that we can actually think with our deeper psyche. Not with the reptilian brain, but with the brain powered by what Federico García Lorca described as the duende, the mischievous sprite that rises from the raw energy of the Earth.

Of course, this dynamic often applies more to poetry than to prose. Fiction and nonfiction writers have to plan, outline, create structure. But poetry thrives on this sort of spontaneous fabrication, taking flight from a platform that is itself already airborne. Or, to paraphrase André Breton, “Trust in the inexhaustible fountain of whispers.”

I don’t mean to suggest that all spontaneous writing is great. Some of it can be downright foolish. But I would say that spontaneity is the source of much of the best and most unexpected writing.

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Choosing Poems for a Reading

The poems you choose for a reading can make an enormous difference in how an audience receives and appreciates your work. The order that you select for your poems can be equally important.

You may want to focus your choices on a recent book, in order to promote sales. If you include poems from too many different projects, the audience may not focus enough on any one series of poems to want to read more.

The poem you start a reading with should be one of your best, or at least one of the works you feel particularly excited about in the collection or group of poems you’re featuring.

The first poem sets the tone for your reading. It shows the audience that you’re going to deliver a satisfying experience, and that they should pay close attention. The first poem forms a bond between the poet and the audience—if it’s the right poem. The wrong poem can have the opposite effect—it can put the listeners on guard that this reading might demand things emotionally that they are not prepared to give.

What do I mean by “the right poem” or “the wrong poem” to start a reading with? Well, a poem that puts the audience members on the defensive or that puts an idea in their mind that the poet is not psychologically stable is not a good choice. For instance, a first poem that relates an episode of kinky sex, or violence, or terrible tragedy, is a questionable way to start a reading.  I’m not suggesting that you take those poems off your list. Not at all. But the audience wants to know first of all that the poet is in control of his/her life and that the audience is not there to take care of the poet’s life traumas.

A poem that is dense and requires multiple readings to understand or appreciate is also not a great choice for the first poem of a reading. Long poems are also not the best.

On the other hand, the first poem, and all the poems in a reading, should challenge the audience. The people who have made the effort to come out and hear you want to be surprised, moved, and provoked to think and feel. That balance between tossing a thunderbolt at the audience, and making them feel comfortable, is not an easy one, but it’s critical to a good reading.

One way to set an audience at ease from the beginning of a reading is to use humor. Audiences love the release of laughter. It allows them to relax.

One of the most effective arcs for a poetry reading is to begin with humor, and to grow more serious as the reading progresses. This allows the audience to get comfortable with you and to trust you, and then to challenge them with more highly charged work as the reading goes deeper.

The transition from humor to seriousness is a delicate one. Sometimes humor can lighten up a serious mood that you create with a poem about a highly emotional topic. But reading too raucous a poem after one that deals with tragedy may trivialize and conflict with the mood you’ve created, and it can distance the audience. In my opinion, it’s better to start funny, and then move toward deeper topics, with a transitional poem to make the bridge.

Of course, some poets focus primarily on humor in their work, and some deal with such serious subjects that humor isn’t part of their repertoire. All that is fine. I’d only suggest starting and ending with two of the most impactful poems, to create a shape to the reading.

One final rule of thumb: don’t cry at your own reading. It’s good to read emotional poetry, and for the audience to see that you have a lot at stake emotionally in your own writing, through your voice and expression. But if you actually cry, you’re going to weaken the bond between you and your audience, because they’re going to start worrying if they have to take care of you, rather than appreciating your writing. In a sense, the poet is taking care of the audience’s edification and emotions for the duration of her/his reading, so it makes the audience uncomfortable when the shoe is forced onto the other foot. 

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Nicholas Nickleby: or, There’s More to a Story Than the Plot

Nicholas Nickleby is a relatively early novel by Charles Dickens. The book doesn’t have a well-oiled plot, unlike many of the author’s creations. In a work such as Great Expectations, published twenty-two years later, Dickens creates suspense right from the very first chapter, and then the reader is swept along in the fast-flowing river of the story all the way to the end. Nicholas Nickleby lacks that current of suspense. I think it’s fair to say that the reader’s emotional investment in the outcome of the plot doesn’t become much of a factor until a couple of hundred pages into the book.

Charles Dickens in 1839, around the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby

Most of the numerous characters in Nicholas Nickleby also lack the complexity of Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, for example, who starts out as the scariest and creepiest figure in the book, and evolves into perhaps the most sympathetic. The characters in Nicholas Nickleby are relatively flat, either all good or all bad, and they change little over time. The handsome and beautiful characters are universally good, and the ugly ones are all bad—very predictable

And yet…the book held my interest throughout. When I ask myself why, I think it’s partly because Nicholas Nickleby is Dickens’s funniest novel. The satire is so daggered, the narrator always means the exact opposite of what he says, using comically grandiose diction. It is laugh-out-loud funny in so many places, and there are chuckles throughout. Here is Dickens’s initial description of the evil miser, Ralph Nickleby, older brother of the protagonist’s father:

Ralph, the elder, deduced from the often-repeated tale the two great morals that riches are the only true source of happiness and power, and that it is lawful and just to compass their acquisition by all means short of felony.

Dickens’s portrayal of almost limitless greed of some businessmen in 19th century London feels all-too contemporary today.

Even the names of the characters are sometimes hilarious, including the self-important actress Miss Snevellicci. Every time Nicholas Nickleby’s mother opens her mouth, the reader has to laugh at the strange meanderings of her mind (apparently based on Dickens’s own mater familias). Mrs. Nickleby always seems to get distracted by irrelevant details and to miss the main point of her own remarks. Here is Mrs. Nickleby’s attempt to explain why she believes her daughter, Kate, is very intelligent:

I recollect when she was only two years and a half old, that a gentleman who used to visit very much at our house—Mr. Watkins, you know, Kate, my dear, that your poor papa went bail for, who afterwards ran away to the United States, and sent us a pair of snow shoes, with such an affectionate letter that it made your poor dear father cry for a week. You remember the letter? In which he said that he was very sorry he couldn’t repay the fifty pounds just then, because his capital was all out at interest, and he was very busy making his fortune, but that he didn’t forget you were his god-daughter, and he should take it very unkind if we didn’t buy you a silver coral and put it down to his old account?

None of this has anything to do with whether her daughter Kate is intelligent, and not only that, Mrs. Nickleby seems completely unaware that Kate’s so-called godfather is a con man. The book is peppered with wonderful comic bits like this, and those moments are part of what sustains the reader until the plot finally kicks in.

The other affecting part of Nicholas Nickleby is Dickens’s exposé of corrupt Yorkshire boarding schools where unwanted boys were dumped, forgotten, and abused. 

This part of the novel is linked to the most interesting character, Smike. The young man Smike has been so brutally treated in the boarding school where he works almost as a slave that he has lost much of his ability to think and feel for himself. And yet he is doggedly loyal to Nicholas and his sister, and has an instinct for the good despite his lack of mental acuity. The cleverest part of Dickens’s plot is the way he makes Smike seem as if he is a completely peripheral and minor character, but eventually Smike becomes the trigger of the book’s climax.

The takeaway for me as a writer, reading Nicholas Nickleby, is that there is more to a story than the plot. There is the voice of the author, the writer’s sense of humor and satiric wit, and the heart of the writer as s/he sympathizes with the characters and analyzes society’s flaws. All of those, while not enough to make a long novel work by themselves, are more than enough to keep the reader going at moments when the plot lags, especially if that writer is Charles Dickens.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry