'One thing I've learnt is that the world isn't full of writers, either aspiring or published, but that there are readers, too, and they may have no interest in the mechanics of writing.



This may sound obvious, but (in my defence) it isn't.  After years of going to workshops and writing groups, meeting with writer friends and discussing our work and the difficulty of getting published, I'd rather forgotten that there are people out there who have no interest in what happens behind the scenes - they just want to be transported into the world of the fiction and allowed to stay there.



How did I reach this amazing degree of awareness???  Well, I went to a talk where the speaker was addressing an audience made up primarily of readers, and I realised that the speaker's focus was very different from that in a talk given to a writer-audience.



So thank you, Rosie Thomas, for giving a really brilliant talk at the Oxford Literary Festival that (I hope) will help me to keep the nature of my audience in the forefront of my mind when I come to talk to readers about my novel The Road Back.'







http://www.lizharrisauthor.com

THE ROAD BACK to be published by Choc Lit, September 2012

follow me on twitter @lizharrisauthor