Monday, November 08, 2004

Inflection and Enunciation

We started working on new monologues in my voice and speech class tonight. Again, we've got about 2-2.5 minutes each, but it's more of a scripted sort of thing this time than the more free-form demos we did before. So people are doing monologues from plays, or reading poems or speeches, etc. I wanted to do something from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, just because I love reading that book out loud. It was tricky finding a good, self-contained portion to do in such a short time frame, though. I was changing my mind up until the last minute and took two choices to show the professor. I did the first choice in class tonight, but then after talking it over, decided to switch to the second one for next time. One of the things she was commenting on for me tonight was variety of inflection, so if I do the scene that has dialogue in it, that will give me more opportunities to play with that. (It's part of the argument between Arthur Dent and Mr. Prosser about knocking his house down to build the bypass.) Another thing to work on for me was enunciation. She had told me to work on enunciating more last week, but now there are also things that I'm over-enunciating. Argh. Mostly things like aspirating the t's in words like "kettle" or "water." So anyway, those are my next challenges.

I'm debating whether or not to take a break from NaNoWriMo tonight. I'm kind of tired out from the last week of noveling, and I don't have a lot of ideas right now. But I'm also kind of nervous about dipping myself 1600 words in the hole. (Well okay, 1300, because I got a small buffer built up this weekend, but still.) I don't have to go anywhere tomorrow night, so maybe I'll just start typing then and get on a roll to catch up. We'll see.

1 comment:

Fran In NH said...

Hey,Graham, don't give up. This is "all-thumbs" here, who still can't get her nano-blog right, and my chapters are all backwards but,well, what the hell, if I'm gonna go blind I might as well do it writing. And you're not hopeless, kid. I'm almost 56 and probably old enough to be your mother(and I can almost hear that grateful sigh from your end that I'm NOT, but that's okay). Still, I'll keep hacking away at this, like I've been doing since 6th grade. Practice might NOT make perfect, but after all that SOMEthing's gotta improve. Good luck!