This weekly book meme is brought by Top 5 Wednesday on Goodreads.

After I got my MFA, I took a hiatus from writing for a few years. Recently, I've begun working a bit more on a few projects, and it's been...intense and fun and overwhelming and exciting getting back into it. I don't know if I think about writing the way I used to, and I don't know if I write the same way I did back then, either.

In honor of NaNoWriMo, this week's Top 5 Wednesday is about those authors we want to write like. If I'd written this POST while in graduate school, it would undoubtedly have been a much different list. There was an unspoken (well, sometimes spoken) rule about "genre fiction" and what we were there to write. But I've come to love so-called genre fiction so much, and to admire so many new authors in the past several years.

But I didn't make this list in graduate school--I'm making this list in 2017, and here are five authors I want to be like when I grow up!

Laini Taylor

I'm sure none of y'all who have read a post or two of mine are at all surprised to see Laini Taylor on this list. She's quickly become one of my favorite authors ever. Her world building is incredible, and her characters and plotting are out of this world. And her sentences! So gorgeous.

Margaret Atwood

What I would give for a mind like Atwood's. I don't want to just be able to write like her, sentence wise, but I want to do what she does with genre.

Kiersten White

I still think about And I Darken and Now I Rise all the time. I love how Kiersten White navigates the different narrators in her novels, and what she does with a retelling. Another thing I especially love about this series in particular is the family dynamic--she's telling such an epic story, but one that is also at heart very much about familial relationships.

Tessa Dare

I want to write romance like Tessa Dare does. I don't know if I'll ever write a historical romance (though I'm certainly not ruling it out!) but what I love about her writing is how she twists the genre on its head (and also all her steamy scenes).

Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell gets me in all the feels, every time. From Eleanor & Park to Fangirl and Attachments, I love how the voice and style always changes but the emotions feel the same. I want to be able to tug on heartstrings with my characters the way she does.

Honestly, I could have gone on and on--I want to create words like Shakespeare; I want to be as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates; I want to write sentences like Ian McEwan...but that would have been cheating, so it's good I didn't go on and on, isn't it?

What about you? Who are your writing role models? (Also, are you doing NaNoWriMo? If so, YOU ARE AWESOME!)

#top5 #romance #youngadult #fantasy #historicalromance