Travelling to promote a book or to promote yourself

 

Angela Lansbury at the Hayes Conference Centre, Writers' Summer School.

You should not be posting while you are travelling, but after your return. Why?

a) You might be telling potential burglars that your house is empty.

Your insurance company might decline to pay because you had advertised that your house is empty.

Before you set off, you should have clear in mind

a) What you want to tell others

b) What you wish to learn from the people you meet and the destination.

Many novelists and short story writers take trips to gather information for plots, about characters, places, and plot twists. Simple misunderstandings can be the twist in a short story or chapter. 

Somerset Maugham found many of the plots for his stories from talking to people in the bar of the hotel where he was writer in residence.

Somerset Maugham was prolific. 

Useful Websites and Information

Read more by clicking the look inside on the book by Angela Lansbury

https://www.amazon.com/Improve-Your-English-alliteration-assonance/dp/1675046840

Angela Lansbury's book Improve Your English with alliteration, assonance and rhyme is on Amazon.

An Indian View of Sharing Your Life Story, Anne Frank and Spike Milligan

Problem
Do you really want feedback? Or only praise? Somerset Maugham said, "People ask for criticism but they only want praise. I recently gave a workshop on Writing and Sharing Your Life Story. I asked for feedback, which came to me on forms I had printed.

I was also evaluated in my manual for speeches from Toastmasters International. I was evaluated on the Entertaining Speech.

During my workshop I started by asking, 'How many people feel their lives are not sufficiently exciting, or that you are too young to write memoirs?' 'Are you concerned that you have not travelled anywhere, or anywhere exciting in the last year?'

Anne Frank
Then I showed the Diary of Anne Frank, a best seller written by Dutch Anne, who was under twenty years old, and did not leave the building where she lived in Amsterdam.

During her lifetime the diary was not published. It was not even read by one other person. It remains one of the century's and the next century's most popular books, full of insight and optimism.

Spike Milligan
I ended by saying that even death can be humorous if the writer or the person while they are living chooses to make it so. I showed the gravestone of Spike Milligan, with his witty words, 'I told you I was ill'.

The cemetery administrators would not allow that to be written on the English language gravestone. So the family had the words inscribed in Gaelic.

Indian Viewpoint
My feedback from an Indian member of the audience was that he and the audience found my two and a half hour presentation colourful and entertaining. However, Indians would find it hard to identify with Anne Frank who was European and Jewish.

Also Indians cremate their dead. So they would not necessarily understand the word or concept of a gravestone.

Wow. I shall obviously have to go back to some Indian friends and ask them how to make the start and end of my talk more relevant to them. Can I relate Anne Frank and Judaism and Nazis to the caste system?

Can I show how gravestones and war memorials record the words of famous people succinctly, and summarise their character, their optimisim, stoicism, humour in the face of adversity, sense of continuity with history?

Singapore
I was not in India but speaking to a multi-cultural audience in Singapore. They say that travel broadens the mind. It certainly does.

Useful Website

https://www.hitendra.com/hitendras-articles/what-anne-franks-diary-can-teach-us-about-living-through-a-pandemic-and-finding-our-true-self

https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/what-we-do/worldwide-activities/india/

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. My books are on Amazon and Lulu.com . Take a look. Please share links to your favourite posts.