One answer to the ongoing debate I've been having with myself regarding the benefit of public readings...
O: You've done a lot of live readings. How does that affect the way you write? Does it make you more self-conscious?
SV: It doesn't really make me self-conscious. It does make me careful about other people's time. If you're just writing something for print, you can be as long-winded and abstract as you want, because if you write something too long-winded and abstract, the reader can just go back or put it down. But if you have a captive audience sitting there listening to you and you're facing them, they're the best editors in the world. If there's silence, you can feel that silence—it's deafening. You can feel them wriggling in their seats and wanting to go home and wondering what they're having for dinner. So I think it's made my writing a lot more pointed, and made me funnier. There's obviously nothing in the world better than getting that laughter back. Before I started doing so many readings, if I thought a sentence was pretty, or if it made a point I wanted to make, that was enough for me. But maybe now I'd go over it three or 10 or 12 more times, seeing if it could be funnier. I guess, all in all, it probably made me... I don't know if this is good, always, but it made me want to be more entertaining. I just kind of happened into all of this. Like, I wanted to be an art historian. I studied art history, and I always thought I'd just write about things that I was very interested in that nobody else would read. I bet a lot of art-history books and papers would be a lot more interesting if other people had to sit and listen to them.
Interview with Sarah Vowell, The Onion
