It’s hard to see how that ties in with being a novelist?
It’s all about communication – tailoring what you say and how you say it to your audience. Getting your message across by understanding what the other person’s knowledge and expectations are likely to be. Communication is a passion for me whether it’s writing novels, talking to a toddler, chatting with my sons, writing educational programmes, training teachers, talking to the young people at the unit, gossiping with friends… it’s all about knowing your audience. I was gutted when the profession which I belong to voted, in the early nineties, that we should be known as ‘Speech and Language Therapists’ [previously we were just ‘Speech Therapists’ which didn’t in any way express the range of our work]. It won’t surprise you to hear that I voted for ‘Communication Specialist’.
