Thoughts on Being an Author

Thoughts on Being an Author

The first time I ever “met” an author, I was eleven years old, pajama-clad, sitting in the back of my mom’s blue station wagon while Romancing the Stone played on the giant screen in front of me. The author’s name was Joan Wilder. She was a romance author. And she looked like this:

I was too young to pick up on all the non-glamorous things about Joan’s life. The image of the alluring, successful author was forever fixed in my head, and it stayed there even as Joan spent half the movie running through the jungle, covered in mud while searching for a lost emerald.

My mom was an avid mystery reader, so I knew about Agatha Christie, Sue Grafton, and Elizabeth Peters, but even as a teen I still thought authors were Joan Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, or Agatha Christie. She read Tolkien to us at bedtime, and I went through James Howe books like nobody’s business, but still the concept of an author was beyond my grasp. Probably into my teens, I still thought they were real world Joan Wilders sipping champagne on private jets, pipe-smoking Hemingways swirling snifters of brandy while ruminating on phrasing, or solitary older women doting on cats and writing in their cottage gardens. Even though I had loved to write from a very early age, those were images I knew I’d never grow into, so “author” never seemed like something I could ever be.

And what’s funny is, apart from other writers and readers, I sometimes think people are just generally more likely to imagine a Jackie Collins or an Agatha Christie or a James Patterson when they think of authors. Because when someone asks what I do and I tell them I’m an author, they seem perplexed… I can tell I don’t fit their mental image of what an author would be. When they ask what I write, they seem even more surprised to discover I write love stories set in fantasy and future worlds, not memoirs about baking with Grandma or my childhood catching frogs at the creek. They know somebody has to write fantasy and sci-fi and dystopian and thrillers, but probably people like George R.R. Martin and Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood and James Patterson… right?

And I think, actually, that’s probably my favorite thing about being part of the author community on Instagram the past seven or eight years. I’ve met so many indie authors and trad authors from a wide variety of backgrounds, and actually the vast majority of them aren’t anything like Joan Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, or James Patterson. And thank goodness… because as interesting as each of those people are in their own ways, it’s collectively and objectively a pretty narrow field of view… fancy jets, brandy snifters, cottage gardens, and dressy sweaters…

Most authors I’ve met are just regular people with families, pets, kids, day jobs, alternative revenue streams, and neighbors who they either love or loathe. But when they’re not writing they explore haunted Scottish castles or Anglo-Saxon long barrows. They host rotating lodgers or big family events or tables at book fairs. They take state tours of different bookstores or the homes of long dead authors or glittering beaches in far off places. They create beautiful art and crafts and music. They share their passions for everything from France to medieval life to Japanese folklore to cooking. And the best part is reading their books and seeing how all these travels and passions and experiences influence their stories. I feel like the most boring person in the world a lot, but I have interesting writer and author friends, and I feel pretty lucky to count myself among them.

So, at the end of the day, most authors are just ordinary people, but sometimes we do extraordinary things, and mostly we just tell stories. All different kinds of stories, in all different ways, from all different backgrounds and experiences.

And right now, we need that more than ever.