Author Blog Challenge # 3

Who are the writers you most admire? Who are your writing mentors?

The authors I admire most are those who have no pre-established links or ease of entry into the industry through fame, notoriety, political or other position,or contacts in high or low places and who, through sheer tenacity, passion, skill and faith in their story manage to catch the eye of a mainstream publisher and hold this through to seeing their book on the shelf. I may never know their names until I hear them on radio or television talk shows or see it on the back of a book jacket, but they have my admiration just the same. They dared to dream, to write their own script. Other writers I admire are Ruth Park an Australian writer, who wrote prolifically until her death in 2010. I love her realism style of writing that takes the reader on a journey into the times and places she wrote about. Henry Lawson is an enduring favourite, for his ability to tell a yarn in both prose and poetic form to leave a vivid history of an Australia not always well recorded beyond the writers and bush poets of the day. I have many others I admire, from Dickens – strange that I cling to so many long deceased – something to do with age I suspect, to Tolkien and J K Rowling. Among the contemporary writers I admire I include Roddy Doyle for his raw ability to paint his stories in the colours of free speech and to dress his characters in layers of understanding.

My writing mentors have been those willing to share their knowledge of writing and pitfalls of the industry through workshops and friendship, and continues with the people I meet in writing and poetry groups I attend and others I facilitate. The informal mentoring that comes from contact with likeminded people regardless of their age, experience, qualifications or publishing history is invaluable, for they are also readers with an intuitive knowledge as to what works and what doesn’t. I take my mentoring black, no sugar, and copious amounts of it.

~ Merlene Fawdry