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That’s a video of today’s special Five Easy Questions guest in action.

Novelist DeLauné Michel (author of The Safety of Secrets) knows how to keep an audience in rapt attention during a public reading, and her professional training as an actor has helped her writing in unexpected ways.

For your weekend reading pleasure, I have two bits of wisdom from Michel, as she explains how to read your work out loud and how to edit our novels more effectively. This is all part of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog: 
You give the most amazing public-readings. How did you develop your reading style? How do you prepare? Any advice for writers with stage fright?

DeLauné Michel:
I think I’ve cheated a bit because I was an actor for years, so performing is very comfortable for me. My friend, Christopher Rice once said that one reason he is a writer is that he loves to act, he just doesn’t want to do it in front of people. Continue reading...

I love to act, I just don’t want to only be able to do it when Hollywood gives me a job. So now, I get to act when I write, and again when I read my writing.

When I sit down to write, I imagine that I am telling a very close friend my story, and I think my voice as a writer comes from that. Eudora Welty said that writing is the most intimate of art forms, and I love that about it.

But I don’t imagine that I am speaking to a close friend when I do public readings, I think because the audience already feels like one to me probably because I am comfortable up there. But that is a great trick to use when reading.

One of the best ways to get over stage fright is to give your brain something else to think about, but it can’t be something that is counter to the event or you won’t read well, so if you focus on imagining that you are reading (or better, just telling your story) to a close friend, then there isn’t the mental space to be nervous, and it will absolutely affect how you read.

Practicing also helps!! And doing internal cuts so you aren’t reading sentences or sections that are wonderful on the page, but might be too bogged down with description for a public reading. At book events, I always say that I am reading the Readers’ Digest version of my novel.

Jason Boog:
Your book moves so smoothly, without a single extra word to drag down the plot. How did you go about revising this manuscript? Any advice for first draft writers looking to clean up a manuscript for publication? 

DeLauné Michel:
Maybe it’s all the mysteries I read! Though seriously, Eudora Welty read mysteries to learn how to plot, and was such a huge mystery fan that she was inducted into the Mystery Writers of America, and was the only non-mystery writer ever to have that distinction.

But anyway, what I have found in the short time I’ve been doing this, is that it is all in the first hundred pages. Everything should be set up perfectly, so that by page one hundred, it’s as if someone hit a lever that sets a ball in motion in one of those mouse trap type games, and each thing that is hit causes the next piece to move so the ball can end up where it needs to go.

If all the pieces are put in place in the beginning, then the ending has its own force, and nothing can stop it from happening. Though the trick is for there also to be some doubt as to whether or not it will happen because that is how life really is. But if I create a world with characters that are real and are living truthfully in that world, then that problem solves itself because we never know what’s going to happen or at least how it will unfold.

I trained as an actor in New York, and one discipline I studied was the Stanislavski technique, the basis of which is to live truthfully in the imaginary circumstances. That is what I try to do when I write. I set up an imaginary world, and try to let the characters live truthfully in that world. If I am doing that, then the rhythm and mechanics of the plot take care of themselves.

But this also means revising the first hundred pages a lot. I wrote and rewrote the first hundred of my new novel five or six times over fifteen months, then once it was right, I wrote the last two hundred plus pages in only four – the pages just flowed out because everything was ready to come. In my experience, the roots of most problems in a novel are in the first hundred pages.