Which author would you love to have dinner with?
Almost everyone answers this prompt by naming the writer they would most like to meet. I want to argue the opposite: that meeting them is close to the worst thing you could do to their books. One exception survives, and she would not have come anyway.
The Case Against Meeting Writers
The prompt contains an assumption I want to question: that meeting a writer would be better than simply reading one. That the book is a preview, and dinner is the full version.
I think it is almost exactly backwards.
A book is a writer’s best attention, gathered over years, revised and reconsidered, sentence by sentence. What we read is a person thinking more carefully than anyone usually thinks in conversation, with more time than any ordinary exchange allows.
Dinner is different. The writer is unrevised and improvising at the end of a long day. They may be tired, distracted, or answering for the hundredth time where they get their ideas. We would be trading a finished work for a first draft and calling it access.
There is another problem: I would know a great deal about the writer, while they would know almost nothing about me. I would probably perform—choosing my stories, monitoring my words, trying to appear interesting. The person I presented would likely be a less authentic version of myself.
But the strongest objection is what happens afterward.
Once you know a writer’s face, voice, and personality, you cannot completely separate them from the work. A writer’s opinions or mannerisms can change the way the sentences sound. What once felt like conviction may begin to feel like habit. The book, which had once belonged entirely to the reader, becomes partly the writer’s again.
So I would decline the invitation.
Reading is not a lesser substitute for meeting a writer. It is a different kind of closeness—perhaps a greater one. When I read someone properly, I enter their mind without the interference of personality. Neither of us has to be charming. I receive their attention at full strength, and they are spared my company.
There is one exception: Emily Dickinson.
I would have dinner with her, but I would not ask her anything. I would simply tell her that her poems arrived—that people more than a century later still turn to them when they cannot say something any other way.
That would not be an interview. It would be a delivery.
She did her work without knowing whether it had reached anyone. Yet it reached me, across 140 years, without a dinner ever taking place.
Perhaps that is the point.
A great writer does not need to meet us. Sometimes the work itself is the meeting.
Would you accept the invitation, if it came?
In response to the WordPress Daily Prompt: 13 August 2026.
Explore more at the Rise & Inspire archive | Daily Prompts
© 2026 Rise & Inspire.
Website: Home | Blog | About Us | Contact| Resources
Word Count:499
Discover more from Rise & Inspire
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A very interesting viewpoint. A different way to answering than I have read elsewhere from other bloggers. But I like your viewpoints all the same.
I have no interest answering this prompt on my blog. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t have an answer. There would have been a couple of authors that came to mind. One author who I saw as a child when she came to my school.
But, after reading your answer and thinking about my original answer, I think I would be too nervous to meet them. 😊
Thank you so much! I’m glad my perspective offered a different way of looking at the prompt. And I completely understand what you mean—sometimes the writers we admire most are the very people who would leave us too nervous for words! 😊