How did you become a writer? I come from a family of writers – my grandfather a newspaper editor and reporter, my grandmother a children’s book author, and my mom, who was also a reporter and is a brilliant fiction writer. I grew up reading her novels and short stories, and her favorite writers, which became my own: Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Munro. I can remember a long road trip, reading aloud to her from A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck – alongside her, rhythm, concision, cadence and each pause began to feel essential. She was my first serious reader, and a transformative editor. While I’ve written since childhood, I began to take the craft more seriously in high school, writing a novella during an independent course senior year under the guidance of a life-changing teacher. I did a similar project in college, with another teacher whose respect for my work lit the way. My MFA – where I finished my collection of short stories, and met lifelong friends, teachers, and my agent – opened the door to a professional writing career.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My mom, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King. These are writers I imprinted on in childhood. I’ll never forget my high school teacher, Harry Bauld, crying as he read our class Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” He showed us stories could be electric, and holy. My teachers, and their work, transformed me: Chris Fink, Ethan Canin, Charles Baxter, Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Lan Samantha Chang, Kevin Brockmeier. Writing The Blue Maiden, I craved books that made history fresh, with singular voices or forms: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Tinkers by Paul Harding, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley, or Molly McCully Brown’s incredible poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. And lately I’m enthralled by writers whose work has elements of Gothic or Horror, including Carmen Maria Machado, Samantha Hunt, Evie Wyld, Gloria Naylor, Samanta Schweblin, and Mariana Enríquez.
When and where do you write? I write while my 21-month-old daughter naps in the afternoon, and often for a few more hours before dinner. I have a little home office for the first time, with windows that look out at climbing roses (my desk and routine is a novelty…for years I wrote in bed or on couches, and drafted my short stories overnight. Nevermore! Now sleep is precious).
What are you working on now? I’m excited to return to short stories after 8 years of novel writing. Knowing all a novel takes, I can’t quite believe I’m diving back in, but there’s a new novel tugging at me, too.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? In different forms, yes. Never a dearth of ideas or projects. I have worked to solve problems in a piece for months, even years. Essential to the process, but I wonder if fear or perfectionism plays too large a part, or resistance to the vulnerability of finishing and sharing (especially online), or just being hard on myself. I’ve also found deadlines alternately helpful and constricting (the enormity of an unwritten novel against a series of ever-extending deadlines felt nearly impossible and heavy). I’d like to feel the way I did at the beginning, writing in private and secret, in the dark, for myself or a close circle, braving everything.
6. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I’m taken with George Saunders’ description of revision. He generates a block of writing (paragraphs or pages) then reads and re-reads, imagining a meter on his forehead that swings from positive to negative. Each time his meter swings negative, he tweaks the text until he is pleased. By increments, and a kind of alchemy, the work becomes better (more kind, complex, clear, generous, strange) than the writer could have imagined. My “meter” isn’t on my forehead but in my chest, a feeling of openness or constriction. I’ve used this method since I started writing, but Saunders’ reframing of revision as “ritual self-expansion” – decision by tiny decision imbuing a piece with the writer’s taste and essence – gave the bodily intuition I pay to each word, and the pace that requires, a fresh sense of purpose and grace.
What’s your advice to new writers? I often come back to specificity – concrete, sensory details and images. Set aside what you think the work is about, and aim to tell the story with as much precision as possible. Layers of meaning and emotional questions will emerge in time, on their own, as if by magic. And at a certain point in the process, each word must matter. Barry Lopez has a quote I think of often, referencing the Japanese novelist Kazumasa Hirai, who told him “Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language…each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.” I think it’s necessary, also, to caretake your own spiritual interior, the “inner life” as Lan Samantha Chang calls it in this beautiful essay, which I return to often. It can be tempting to measure yourself – myself – by the outer life (publishing, promotion, followers, feedback, degrees, awards, sales, agents, a list that grows ever longer). But guarding that secret, a worthy inner self is essential, the ground where all good work is born.
Anna Noyes’ debut novel, The Blue Maiden, was published by Grove Atlantic on May 14, 2024. Her short story collection Goodnight, Beautiful Women, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the New England Book Award, as well as a New York Times Editors' Choice, Indie Next Pick, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing has appeared in Vice, A Public Space, LitHub, Electric Literature, and Guernica, among others. She has received the Lotos Foundation Prize, the Henfield Prize, and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, Lighthouse Works, the James Merrill House, and Aspen Words. She lives in New York, on Fishers Island.
