Reading Response Paper - Essay Example

Reading of a condensed portion of “The Art of Fielding” by the Chad Harbach The Reading The audience had the pleasure of listening to a reading of the author’s book, “The Art of Fielding” (Harbach, 2011). The author started on a tentative note, as if gauging his audience’s interest in his work. His voice was moderately loud but he spoke so clearly and knew how to pace his speech based on the character he was reading. Although he did not change his voice too much to fit the characters, the audience had no problem figuring out who he was talking about because he incorporated some quirks of the character’s personality in his dialogues.

The author was successful in making the story so vivid for the audience that they were left entranced as if a movie was playing in their heads as narrated by the author of the story. Examples were scenes from the locker room where the men candidly talked about body hair and how it used to be regarded as a badge of manhood. Such topic was not the kind one commonly talks about, but the simple candidness of the dialogue made such a topic so interesting. The audience was very responsive to Harbach, laughing at appropriate times and giving witty side comments to the funny remarks the author read and expressed funnily from the reading of the book.

Listening to him read makes one conclude that he knew each and every detail of the story and brought that out in his reading. It was as if he was just talking out loud while writing the book but did not need anyone’s approval to express himself on print. Harbach was a confident reader because he knew his book very well.My Response and Reflection I have never read the book that the author wrote and read from. However, I felt drawn to the story because the author read it so well. I thought it was also the audience’ first time to get to know about the story but when they asked questions, it was clear that they have read the book beforehand.

The author used words that were appropriate to the characters who spoke them. Even the use of curse words depicted the character of the men in the story so well. It was easy to relate to the story especially since this one was read by the author himself, as if he jumped right out of the printed page to make the book come more alive. I was impressed by the richness of the story and the multiple perspectives the author held simultaneously. When the audience asked him questions, I was able to relate more to him as a writer.

In the first questions, it seemed that he was thrown off-guard especially because the questions were sensitive, referring to homosexuality. The audience asked him if he derived his ideas from a place of realism or idealism and Harbach kind of fidgeted and stammered while thinking of how to answer such a tough question. He safely got away with saying that it was the personalities of the characters and how they responded to certain situations that inspired him to write and not necessarily the circumstances.

For me, I am inspired to write the same way. I get touched by people’s testimonies of how they overcame challenges or how they failed and learned from it. I take note of the emotions that go with their testimonies and take note of the thoughts and emotions that I myself go through while listening to them and then spin a tale from the encounter. Harbach admits that he draws ideas from his own life experiences. In doing so, he becomes the expert of his own work because no one can express his own experiences better than him.

For example, he said he lived a life of athletics from the time he was young, so he was credible enough to write about the technicalities and controversies that surround baseball in his novel. What struck me most from the reading was his validation that a writer changes much over time and it becomes a challenge to be consistent with ideas spun from way before, left unresolved. He wrote “The Art of Fielding” for ten years, from its conception to its completion, so how a character is depicted the first time he is written about may change in the author’s mind a few years later and it becomes a challenge to create the process of change for this character.

Harbach admits that it becomes a seemingly endless process. It is evident from the reading that the author thoroughly enjoyed the creative process of writing and it left him more passionate to perhaps write another novel. The response of his audience and readers was enough to empower him to craft another one. I felt encouraged myself to write the way he does, meticulously seeing the multiple stories in the book through and tying all the loose ends to make it a tight and neat package of awesome ideas.

I want to touch my readers the way he did and to plant seeds of stimulation in their minds to keep their thinking gears rolling. I want my readers to be left with more ideas than when they started reading my work because their critical and creative minds were engaged and fueled. Work CitedHarbach, C. The Art of Fielding. Little, Brown & Co. 2011. Print