Am I the only one who finds literary readings boring? I usually avoided them. Then I had to go on book tour and tried not to bore people. I learned to think of myself as a performer rather than a reader. Here are some tips for writers who have to speak in front of audiences:
Most attendees come hoping to learn more about the author than they can from reading blurbs, or an inside-flap publisher's bio. Many authors resent this intrusive curiosity and pointedly decline to gratify it; they feel (rightly) they have no obligation to do so. But it persists.
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Authors understand the miseries and demands of an author's life, but most readers do not; to them, authors are enviable, magical creatures who somehow conjure art from the blank page. Readers long to know how these feats are performed, and what it costs to perform them.
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Experienced readers have, of course, listened to enough authors address these matters to know that not much illumination may be expected from them. In the end, there simply is no trick to writing. Or, rather, the trick, as T E Lawrence once put it, "is not minding that it hurts."
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