Who is your favorite author?
That can be a tough question for a lot of reasons. Maybe you love to read and struggle to pick just one. Maybe you are not a big reader and struggle to even think of one. Or maybe you just never even pay attention to the authors at all.
However, one of the best things about reading, beyond the content, is being able to dive into the mind of the person writing the novel, poem, short story, and more. The little glimpse of the inside of their mind that walks you through the words on the page. Authors are sharing a part of themselves with you when you read their words, and a good author can improve your life.
A good author can inspire you. Sometimes phrases or sentences strike a chord in you that make you feel like someone is explaining life to you, or at least understands the human condition. Other times, the message or plot of a novel can drag you through an emotional, intellectual, spiritual roller coaster and connect with you so strongly it’s as if the author is writing to you personally. A good author can move you, motivate you, or encourage you simply by creating words on a page for you to read.
And the best part about novels is that you’ll always be able to come back to it. Authors provide us with words we can always come back to. One of the most comforting things is knowing that the author's words will always be there to read over again, glean something new from, and still remain there should you ever want to return to them.
If you like what an author has written, then there’s usually more to read by that author. By finding one author you really love you can expand your library and read more by that author. Whether or not you love the other pieces they’ve written, it can help bring you to new ideas of what to read.
Finding a great author can also lead you down other roads of exploration. If you become interested in the life of the person you’ve been reading, discovering an author that’s piqued your interest can give you a history lesson too. Finding out more about the life of the author, the time period they lived, and what motivated them to write what they did can be fascinating and lead to interesting discoveries.
Authors are truly allowing you to look into windows of their souls and sometimes you get lucky and find one you love. Good authors make lasting impressions beyond their words, they make themselves a piece of your own identity and have the ability to improve your life.
-Brianna Cochran
