Anna Noyes on Knowing When to Give Up

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Anna Noyes about her debut novel, The Blue Maiden.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You sold a book based on a proposal and you had 600 pages, and you put your heart and soul in it, and then you said it was wooden. Was that something that you knew? And what did that feel like to give it up?

Anna Noyes: It was really painful in the writing.  I think I was very excited initially to have a project that really sounded like a novel coming from a short story background. I think there was something that felt really appealing to a reader who I wanted to please, but who wasn’t necessarily myself. So, there was this grand kind of epic scale, and it felt very romantic, the story I was trying to tell. And I think I had in mind that reader throughout the entire process, and I just couldn’t get the sentences to appeal to me. They were very kind of beautiful and flowing and long, and everything was sort of focused on the sweep. But the other factor, too, is that I had never written a novel before, and I was on a deadline for a little over a year to finish this entire project. And so, I think I was a little unclear on what exactly a deadline meant in that context.  I took it very, very seriously, so I really tried to finish in that span of time and was told that I needed to turn in something polished. A lot of the time when I was writing, I assumed that I could turn in something very rough and then have many years to polish it, sort of collaboratively, or, you know, just take the time it really needed, which ultimately, I ended up doing anyway with The Blue Maiden.  It felt incredibly rushed, and so I was trying to do a lot of research to understand context across Sweden and New York City in the early 1800s and what does it mean to be blind and what is a doctor. There was all kinds of research I was trying to do as quickly as I could, and then process and turn into scenes and narrative that were rich and energetic in rapid time. You know, I don’t think that there was any way I could have completed that project in the time that I had to complete it.  It’s possible that if I had had time, because where the work really comes alive for me is finessing the sentences. I love being able to cull and compress the language, and in this case, all I could do was really rewrite the book and then try to turn it over and see if it was done. I write my short stories very quickly, and I would write them often overnight, and they come out kind of full cloth. I did some edits, of course, but they were close to their finished form. So, I think a part of me hoped maybe a novel could be similar, but I would get that draft out and there would be something complete in it. And truthfully, after I ended up culling it way, way down, I still had to rework it for over a year, paragraph by paragraph, and that was just delightful. I was so happy to have the time to really investigate each word, but I wouldn’t have had the time to do that if it was 600 pages. It still ended up taking me eight years. It feels like it’s the book it was meant to be.

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Anna Noyes’s debut novel is The Blue Maiden and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, with starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Forward. 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. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in New York, on Fishers Island.