Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!
This week's theme is 'Top Ten Authors I'm Dying To Meet / Ten Authors I Can't Believe I've Met (some other "meeting authors" type spin you want to do)'. You may or may not know this, I have no idea, but I studied Creative Writing for four years at university and got tutored by some brilliant writers, but today I thought I'd talk about some of the authors I wish I'd been able to have some lessons with while I was a student - they're all writers I still wouldn't say no to a lesson with now!
Sarah Waters: I love Waters' fiction, The Little Stranger is one of my favourite books, and I think the stories she chooses to tell are fantastic. The focus of my MA was how historical fiction can be used as a tool to write women, the LGBT+ community, poc and any other form of 'other' back into history, so to be tutored by a woman who specialises in LGBT+ historical fiction would have been amazing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I read Adichie's story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, earlier this year and loved it. She's also a very political, outspoken person and I think I could learn an awful lot from her.
Margaret Atwood: The woman's a genius, what more is there to say?
Samantha Ellis: Some Creative Writing MA courses in the UK make you choose between focusing on solely prose or solely poetry, but what I liked about my course at Lancaster University was that you could explore anything you wanted to. Having said that, I've never tried my hand at writing scripts and I think part of that is because we didn't have any tutors who specialised in them, and Ellis is a playwright as well as a writer of non-fiction. She also seems like a genuinely nice human being and I think a workshop with her would be really interesting - if nothing else we could gush about Anne Brontë together.
Alison Weir: I haven't actually read any of Weir's books yet (something I'm hoping to change this year!) but I think she'd've been a great tutor for me during my MA because she's both a historian and a novelist, and I think I could have learned a lot about knowing when to separate fact from fiction and knowing how much research to do without driving myself around the bend as I sometimes found myself doing.
Gail Carriger: I've been struggling to write fiction since I finished uni and entered the world of full-time work, which I'm finding really frustrating and it's making me lose my confidence when I sit down to finish an incomplete short story, and there's something about Carriger's work that seems so indulgent and fun that I think a workshop with her would encourage me to actually get some words on the page.
Angela Carter: Sadly Carter died in 1992 when I was a measly 4 months old so I'll never have the opportunity to be taught by her, and, if I'm being honest, I'm not actually the biggest fan of her work aside from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. She did teach at the University of East Anglia, one of the best unis in the UK for Creative Writing, and I think workshops with her must have been fascinating because she was so radical.
Robin Hobb: Another author I haven't read but I'm planning to read this year. I think we can all agree that Hobb is the biggest female author in the world of high fantasy and I think she'd have a lot to teach me about building a whole world, with its own countries and cultures and environment, from scratch.
Kurtis J. Wiebe: Something else I wasn't able to explore at uni is writing for comics and graphic novels, and as Rat Queens is my favourite graphic novel series I'd be happy to have a workshop all about writing for comics with Wiebe.
Roald Dahl: Yet another author who has shuffled off this mortal coil, and one who would be 100 now if he was still alive. Dahl died the year before I was born but he was still a huge part of my childhood - I got my dad to read Fantastic Mr. Fox to me so many times that I think we both knew it by heart - can you imagine having a workshop about writing for children with this man? Yes please.
Who did you talk about this week?
Oh so much yes to Roald Dahl. That would be amazing.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Robin Hobb either though I'm hoping to soon.
What a fabulous list. I would be especially interested in meeting Sarah Water, Roald Dahl, and Margaret Atwood, but everyone else on your list sounds like they'd be a fun person to meet as well. I wonder what it would be like to meet all of them at once? That would be such a lively dinner party I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteHere is my TTT.
Roald Dahl would have been awesome to meet, had he not died six years before I was born!
ReplyDeleteMy TTT: https://jjbookblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/top-ten-tuesday-100/
Umm Roald Dahl was basically my childhood idol. Excellent list.
ReplyDeleteOh man Atwood would be bomb awesome to meet. And we must be the only two people with Alison Weir on our lists!
ReplyDeleteA workshop with Roald Dahl would be a dream! :-) Great list!
ReplyDeleteRoald Dahl is AMAZING and I loved his books so so much growing up. <3 And I really want to read Robin Hobb's books someday... I need to get onto that. Also that's just awesome that you've actually been taught by amazing and epic writers. 🎉🎉
ReplyDeleteI can't believe I forgot to add Waters to my list! I love The Little Stranger! :)
ReplyDeleteI read quite a bit of Robin Hobb when I was younger, she would be a fascinating author to meet!
ReplyDeleteI've met Robin Hobb at a reading/signing, she's really nice and gave me good writing advice! Back when I was... uh... fourteen? It was very encouraging!
ReplyDeleteAwesome take on this topic! I'd love to sit through a lecture by Margaret Atwood!
ReplyDeleteHere are my Top Ten!