In books, we'd found magical portals and steadfast companions, witnessed acts of true love and gaped at pure evil...
If we loved books, we were equally awestruck by their creators. Novelists were clearly a different branch of Homo sapiens; an enlightened subspecies endowed with a monstrously overdeveloped understanding of the human condition and the supernatural ability to spell words correctly.
- Chris Baty (NaNoWriMo Founder)
I never intended to be an author groupie. Never in my life did I sign on for such nonsense. True, at age eight I named parts of my house and the surrounding woods after the locations found in Anne of Green Gables and the rest of the saga. I memorized portions of The Story Girl and begged my parents to visit Prince Edward Island when going to Niagra Falls when ten. I may have practiced drawing Kilmeny (of the Orchard variety) through all of sixth grade math with Mr. Anderson, and my adult signature (practiced for purposes of fame in that same class) heavily bears that portrait's influence.
But it couldn't have been me who couldn't sleep for a month after reading Misery at the same age as Anne. And I would never have been the kid to convince the other fourth grade students in my talented & gifted pullout program that we MUST perform Tom Sawyer, even though no one else had read it. Or who had read Huckleberry Finn fourteen times by the time it was assigned in seventh grade. And it couldn't have been me whose favorite picture book at the library starred a little girl who was too lost in daydreaming to play games like hide-and-go-seek. Or whose favorite book AND CD in middle school was Les Miserables and desperately, desperately believed that Eponine's life was her own (nothing like literature about the French Revolution to make those emo teen years easier! *headdesk*).
So, okay. I guess maybe I should have seen this coming. And Chris Baty definitely summed it up for me in the first chapter of his book with the passage quoted above. It's not even that I've necessarily had meaningful contact with these authors, or learned something amazing from being in their presence. In fact, in some cases it's been the absolute opposite. I did nothing other than shriek and mumble when I met J.K. Rowling - way to go, self - and I was squashed in the melee that was the
Breaking Dawn release in New York, only to clam up when I met Stephenie Meyer both there and in Chicago. Nor had I anything to say to Neil Gaiman - what is there to say to a man who has written so much that is just practically perfect literature that he hasn't heard before? No, the meeting itself isn't what is satisfactory. *
I think a huge part of loving meeting authors is that for most of my life, meeting any author was an absolute non-issue. L.M. Montgomery had certainly passed by the time I read her books, let alone Samuel Clemens or Victor Hugo. I knew this, of course. And then it never even occurred to me that I could have met any other authors as a child. I mean, what do authors DO? They write. It never occurred to me that they did anything else, ever, much like small children feel as if their teachers live at school ("Maybe she needs scissors!" panicked one of my friends seeing his teacher in the store at age five). To be honest, it really didn't occur to me that authors have
always done this until I saw John Green speak for the first time. The woman sitting next to me remembered meeting Katherine Paterson in the
same book shop when she was ten.
What I really love is the part where I'm in the crowd, usually somewhere close to the front because I'm terribly nearsighted, but in the same room and listening. I don't have anything useful to say, myself, but that doesn't mean I don't want to hear. I just love listening to an author read their own work - Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, John Irving, and J.K. Rowling are just wonderful at this. They may or may not make the voices, but hearing what they emphasize is not necessarily the same as what I choose in my head, and it's not the same as an audiobook.** I love the people who have thought of questions ahead of time and who actually have the guts to ask them, unlike the time I prepared to meet Stephenie Meyer and then couldn't spit out the second half of the question, even though she was very nice and asked me to. I want to hear about the author's perception of the writing process, even though each of them says something fairly similar. I want to hear how they feel when they're heavily edited, although there are only really two responses to that. I love hearing why they made something happen a certain way in this or that book, or why this character is one particular way or another. I want to hear what they're working on next, see what catches them off guard, know how their laughs sound.
All of that hasn't quite convinced me that they're all just normal people who happen to have the guts to write out the stories that play inside their heads. No matter how humdrum they
could seem (in theory - none of them have actually seemed humdrum), there is something in me that can't quite think of them as anything other than superheroes with a pen (or keyboard). Their words on the page have a distinct voice in my head; I can hear a narrator's voice and timbre and inflection. Their words can utterly change the way I view the world. There is something that makes these authors who they are and that allows them to reach inside me and to make me feel and breathe and cry because that writer wanted me to at that moment. That's something incredibly powerful, and it
is something amazing. And I think I just want to be able to see a few of the people who have changed my life every day for as long as I can remember.
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* Except perhaps in the cases of meeting John Green, who is not only brilliantly funny, but also particularly normal and un-intimidating. Probably because he spends a lot of time emphasizing that he's as big of a dork as anyone in there. Meeting Hank was just as good - I couldn't get a word in edgewise because I was laughing my ass off as he talked about the role of feet in the Bible and in fetishes.
** Although I've never listened to Gaiman's, but they're probably perfect. He's just like that. *kick/ sigh*.
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