I am a Genius. You say, how? Because when I write, when I sit down at a café with paper and pencil or peck away at my computer, I make things up. Only then am I giving myself permission to create characters, whole worlds, or anything that comes to mind. A beach in 1909. A monster wave coming into shore where a family is having a picnic. My grandmother at nineteen pining for a boyfriend. My father at six, disappointing his mother, an argument between an old guy and a kid on an e-bike, two women at the beach, a student preparing for an exam and a mom worried about her six-year-old who was bullied at school and hasn’t come home. A college student during exam week worried she hasn’t done enough. A slender man taking a toke on a cigarette, shouting into his iPhone.

Only by making myself the king of my world can I invent it. I can make up whatever I want, I can put people in peril, or save a kid from drowning. Real life doesn’t allow this freedom, at least not often, anyway. But fiction and writing does. This is what makes writers write.

However, this is only the first part.

Being a genius means you have put something down on paper.

Something on paper may need editing.

Some editing is good for you.

Some editing makes you doubt you are a genius.

More editing makes your work sing.

More editing means you have to “kill your darlings.” Some editing makes you doubt what you have written. Some editing may make you want to hide. Some editing makes you want to do the dishes, the cat box, clean the garage, puke, do anything but write. But do not despair. Keep going. After over 250 short stories, I always feel like a hack. Every day.

Some editing may show you have a good sentence or two.

Polishing means you have to look at your work with a steady eye.

Reading your work aloud in public means you have to look other people in the eye.

Reading your work aloud in public can be scary.

Reading your work aloud in public can make people laugh.

And it can make them cry.

I first read my work aloud at an open mic in a Fairfax bar called Pints ‘N Prose. In 2011. Like all good open mics, this one was timed, five minutes (which I learned later was 750 words). I read from my novel. Right away, I could tell I wasn’t making any sense, the audience did not know the characters, didn’t understand the setting, or the conflict. They fidgeted, I was lost and knew it. At five minutes and ten seconds, they blew the horn, which was at least three feet long and loud, kept behind the bar. A person hauled me off the stage and I slinked away.

I found a dark place beyond the stage to sequester my beet red face from public view. I wanted to crawl under my table and die.

What was the problem? Many. My reading had to be short, snappy, have a denouement, an action and a resolution. What my writing teacher calls Slam, Bam, Kablooie.

I scrapped reading the novel, and concentrated on finding that five minute sweet spot. I would beat them at their own game.

I started reading the sheriff’s calls section (actual police logs) from the newspaper, The Point Reyes Light, our local West Marin newspaper. Most every day there were lots of calls, but this particular day, a Wednesday, there was this sheriff’s call.

“There were no calls. Good job West Marin.”

So I decided to write about what didn’t happen. I took citings from other days and made them not happen. Boys at a bus stop, with a bag full of rotten apples, did not throw them at the bus, because one of the boy’s mother called them in for supper. A paragraph.

An unhappy man woke up feeling sick and desperate on the floor by a porcelain throne and did not reach for his bottle of Jim Beam.

No one was camping at Brighton Beach in Bolinas, which was the first time that happened in over sixty days.

Speeding drivers slowed down and did not run into a ditch.

A cow, wanting green grass, did not break the fence, but instead turned around to join the herd.

A desperate Penny Henny, behind in her rent, pleaded with her landlord for more time. The landlord got a text from his mother that she was expecting lunch.

It was a series of short paragraphs, and the story ended with an elderly lady looking for trouble and grabbing her gun.

I knew this story would fit the time. When I read it aloud the whole place erupted in laughter and applause. I wrote another based on another sheriff’s calls, and the audience was close to tears. I wrote and read more and more, hitting that sweet spot. I had found a new voice in my writing. A publisher asked me what I was writing and I sent in one of my stories and received a publishing contract. So you never know.

Reading your work aloud will improve your writing in countless ways. E.g., it can reveal the seemingly poetic sentence as a confounding tongue-twister, the overuse of certain “crutch” words and clunky expressions, an emotionally-starved or unimaginative dialogue, holes in character traits and development, and the lack of storytelling rhythm and pacing. And if you have a live reading audience, the benefits are immediate. Your writing improves. You can hear your audience fidget, or whisper, or you can see them sit up and smile or sigh or burst into tears.

So when you prepare for a reading, look over each word. Does this move the action? Is this the best way to say this? What do my characters want? Where’s the kablooie? And remember, you are a genius.

Susanna Solomon is the author of Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, and More Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, short stories she first read at an open mic.

She is also the author of  Paris Beckons, a short story collection based in Paris. At the moment she is at work on another collection tentatively called A Garden of Misfits. From an alien to a time-traveling cowboy to a not-very bright guy wanting to be a “made” man, Susanna tells stories about people who are different.