Top 10 Authors I’d Love to Meet

One of the best things about reading is the way that a reader can get inside the author’s mind and live in the world he or she created. It always makes me feel like I have a direct line to the author – even though I have never met them! Thanks to That Artsy Reader Girl‘s prompt, here is a list of ten authors that I would love to meet, to know more about how they created their books.

1. Tamora Pierce

Tamora Pierce was the first author that I really came to love. I loved the Lioness series, but the Immortals series was my favorite (I could relate to Daine more than Alanna since I too feel awkward around humans). For 35 years, Tamora Pierce has built some incredible magical worlds and great strong females. I want to know how she does it! I would love a chance to pick her brain on some projects of my own.

2. Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is a much newer obsession of mine, but I love her commitment to realism, even when that means facing the ugliness of our world. There is so much trauma in her books that makes my heart heart, but I still finish them feeling like I learned something about people. I’d love to know more about what inspires her. Plus, I feel like she’d just be an interesting person to talk with.

3. Robert Jordan

Ok, so I know that this one is impossible since he passed away a few years ago. But Robert Jordan wrote one of the greatest fantasy series of all time, and he had plots full of details and hundreds of characters and different plot lines and the relationships between his characters were all over the place, but he still seemed to keep things fairly clear. I’d love the chance to talk to him about what his writing looked like, and how he kept things organized, and how he managed to still be inspired to write when he had so many things happening at once.

4. Garth Nix

Aah, Garth Nix. I love love love the magic system in the Abhorsen books. I want to know more about how he developed it. When I was a kid I wrote Charter symbols all over my notebooks and drew them on my skin and wanted a set of bells so I could pretend to control the dead, but my parents aren’t really fantasy people so I couldn’t justify the purchase for them.

5. Victoria Schwab

As much as I loved the Shades of Magic series (interesting characters and magic and world building) I follow Victoria Schwab on Twitter and I just feel like we could be friends. She is witty and honest and I would love the chance to chat with her about books and writing and her ideas and what her life is like as a full-time author.

6. J.K. Rowling

So J.K. Rowling is of course the ultimate author success story, and undoubtedly I would love to talk to her about her experiences and how much I have always loved Harry Potter. But more than that, I feel like J.K. Rowling’s story shows how far you can go when you just really love the thing that you do. I’d love to talk to her about her own love of writing and the world that she has built. Not everyone has been wild about some of the changes and additions she has made in the past few years, but all of those changes seem to come out of a pure love for the world that she has built and I really admire that.

7. Erika Johansen

Not gonna lie, the Queen of the Tearling series slayed me. The characters were complex and often deeply flawed, and I loved the long history of the world, and the leaps in time, and the magic. I don’t even know all that much about Erika Johansen but I would love to chat with her about her books and find out more about how she wrote them.

8. Madeleine L’Engle

I have always loved A Wrinkle in Time, but I love it even more as a parent. Meg is a heroine I can hold up to my daughter, and I love the faith in the novel that shines through without being overbearing. Madeleine L’Engle wrote some incredible fiction that has actually stood the test of time quite well.

9. Kate Forsyth

I’m a relatively new follower of Kate Forsyth’s works, but everything I have read from her so far has been both magical and also deeply disturbing in its realism. I would like to chat with her and learn more about her inspiration for Bitter Greens especially. I love all of these new adaptations of the Rapunzel myth, but Bitter Greens felt particularly timely, the recent developments in America with violence towards women.

10. Kiera Cass

The Selection series was so sneaky for me. So many people had recommended it to me, and I really was quite certain that I wouldn’t like it, but I did anyway, and I think that has a lot to do with Kiera Cass’s excellent writing and well-developed characters. I love that she attempted “popular fiction” and nailed it but still had a lot of depth to the work.