Inside the Blogosphere: Meeting Our Favorite Authors and Picking Their Brains
Originally published at Grasping for the Wind. Please leave any comments there.
Time for a new edition of “Inside the Blogosphere”. Today’s Question:
If you could meet in person any SF/F author, living or dead, who would it be? And if you could only ask one question of this author, what would it be and why?
Amanda Rutter @ Floor to Ceiling Books: The one author I would love to meet is Charles de Lint. I have been devouring his novels since I was a young girl, and think he is one of the most talented and under-rated authors out there. I feel a special affinity with anyone else who loves Charles de Lint novels! I would most like to ask him whether he truly believes in what he writes - that the fae exist, and that there are other worlds and dimensions aside our own. He writes with such belief that it seems incredible these stories are merely the product of imagination!
Elizabeth Barette @ The Wordsmith’s Forge: J.R.R. Tolkien, and my question would be: “How much time can you spare to discuss linguistics and folklore with me?” Because I could spend hours, days, weeks, poring over the languages of Middle Earth with him. I have books on the topic, but it would be so much more fun to have that conversation in person with the greatest xenolinguist of all time.
Terry Weyna @ Reading the Leaves: I’ve been fortunate enough to have met many of the writers I admire at various conventions, even though I attend relatively few. I tend to go tongue-tied in the presence of folks like Daniel Keyes, Neil Gaiman, Gregory Frost, Joe Haldeman and Laird Barron, even though they are some of the nicest folks you could ever want to meet, but they seem to be used to that - which means I’ve had some great conversations with some terrific writers. That makes my list of writers I’d love to meet but have not yet met fairly short.
And so, although I hate to be so trite about it, the one writer I haven’t met but would love to meet is Stephen King. I used to have a sort of guilty love for his writing, thinking of it as mere candy; but Algis Budrys, God rest his soul, wrote a piece in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction many years ago pointing out that King is a great writer no matter how you look at him, and my guilt fell away. (I’m a little more secure in my opinions these days; otherwise it would be difficult to write book reviews worth reading.) I’d just like to buy him a cup of coffee and sit and talk about writing - and about life - with him. He seems like such a good person as well as being a good writer. But if you really have to limit me to only one question - how cruel! - I’d ask him how he plans his work day, his writing regimen. He seems to me to be the kind of man who can’t not write, but he must still have to plan how he’s going to fit everything in - contract review, negotiations, family time, reading time, and so on. I’d also like to ask him how he goes about writing a novel: does he outline? Do story boards? Think about a plot for three months before setting fingers to keyboard? Does he know how a book is going to end before he begins to write? Or does it just all tumble out as he types? Is he taking dictation from angels, or does he obsessively plan beforehand? Okay, fine, that’s a lot of questions, but you can’t just ask a single question without follow-ups to clarify, can you? Have a heart; in my day job, I’m a lawyer, and questions are my stock in trade.
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