The Unnoticed Writer
Anne Leigh Parrish
Over the last couple of days there’s been fair amount of buzz around the fiction writer Edith Pearlman. Her “break-out” story collection, Honeydew, is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company. Pearlman is 78, and has published a number of story collections with small presses. In 2011, her collection Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories earned a National Book Critics Circle Award and a PEN/Malamud Award. Now she’s been noticed, and is moving on up to the bigtime.
In Laura Van den Berg’s piece on Pearlman in today’s New York Times Book Review, Pearlman is quoted as saying “It’s very important for a writer to be unnoticed. As quiet and unnoticed as possible.” This flies in the face of what all authors are being told these days. We’re supposed to work social media to death, build ourselves as a brand, get ourselves out there and in front of as many people as possible.
I don’t think Pearlman is saying that a writer shouldn’t promote herself. I think she’s talking about what a public persona – or public perception – might do the art and craft of writing.
If you worry too much about how your short story or novel is going to be received – whether or not it’s going to make someone indignant, mad, or even outraged, you might tend to hold back. Any writer worth her salt knows that this is a game of courage and really laying it on the line – or page, I should say. You can’t hold anything back and tell the truth. You can’t worry if someone is going to be put off by your words, unless of course you’re being blatantly racist or sexist, or just plain vulgar.
What if we all wrote with the idea that no one might ever read us? Would this silence us, or set us free? I say we’d be free. I don’t mean that you should ever overlook the reader. The reader is your essential partner. The person who completes your circle. This, though, is much more a question of craft than anything else. In your writing career, you reach a point when you know how to keep the reader interested and satisfied. You’re not clumsy anymore. You reach your audience. You make contact.
But what about the content of your work? That really needs to be your own, and not tailored to anyone else. Your vision must prevail at the end of the day. If you think your readers expect a certain kind of story, or novel, and you write it just to please them without having full faith in why you’re writing it at all, you’re doomed. At least, that’s my opinion.
While it’s true that the world influences us in ways we don’t always see, making it silly to think we can ever write anything that is completely disconnected from the world, we can’t pay too much attention to any world except the one that’s in our own heads. I know this sounds horribly self-indulgent, but this is art we’re talking about, and artistic vision, and those are born in quiet, raging corners of the soul as we filter everything we experience. No one can tell us how or what to feel.
We have to figure that out for ourselves, without anyone else’s input, commentary, criticism, or judgment. All of those come later, when are work is done, published, and reviewed. Then we hear about what worked or didn’t work, what inspired or bored, what engaged or turned off.
If your goal as a writer is to change someone’s mind about something important, or show them what they didn’t know before, you’ve got to listen to yourself, all by yourself, unnoticed, until the words are born. Only then can you give them to someone else.
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Anne Leigh Parrish’s debut novel, What Is Found, What Is Lost, came out in October 2014 from She Writes Press. Her second story collection, Our Love Could Light The World (She Writes Press, 2013) was a finalist in both the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her first collection, All The Roads That Lead From Home (Press 53, 2011) won a silver medal in the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards. She is the fiction editor for the online literary magazine, Eclectica. She lives in Seattle.
What Is Found, What Is Lost: A Novel (She Writes Press, October 2014)
Our Love Could Light The World: Stories (She Writes Press, 2013), Finalist the short story category of the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards; Finalist in both the 2013 International Book Awards and the 2013 Best Books Awards
All The Roads That Lead From Home: Stories (Press 53, 2011), 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal Winner
Website: www.anneleighparrish.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/AnneLParrish
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AnneLeighParrish
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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- The Unnoticed Writer | insaneowl | January 7, 2016
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This article really resonates with me. I had interest in my novel from several big agents who rejected it, in the end, saying it was ‘too brutal’ to sell. At this point I could have made major writing changes to make it ‘more popular’ or ‘more saleable’. I decided against this. I even found it slightly strange that agents would react this way as crime novels are often full of dismembered bodies, abused and murdered women and so on. I realised that it was the central character, a child suffering extreme violence, that put agents off.
I recently won the Luke Bitmead Bursary award for the novel and though I’ve accepted lots of advice and amendments from the editor, toning down the brutality isn’t one of them. This is a story I’ve developed over the past ten years, a story I feel needs to be told. I understand that some people might not be able to read it but the solution to that is not to censor my own writing.
I have a handful of book token Christmas gifts – which I’ll use to buy Pearlman’s work. I’d not heard of her before this article so thanks for educating me as to another writer who has struggled with publication.
That was so helpful. Thank you.
“You can’t worry if someone is going to be put off by your words, unless of course you’re being blatantly racist or sexist”
I do agree with many of your points, but I’d argue that sometimes racist or sexist text isn’t always blatant … at least to the author. I think it’s really easy to assume your own biases are right as far as marginalized groups are concerned. There are a lot of tropes and character traits used in fiction that actually are really bigoted but we don’t think about because they’re used so often. When you don’t step back and check that your representation of women, people of color, LGBT characters, etc isn’t actually disrespectful or harmful then that’s an issue. Maybe that’s more of a 2nd draft concern, but it’s still something writers need to be concerned about.
This was really hard for me to grasp at first. Unlike most people, from what I’ve heard, I have no reason to share my stories to anybody except to make the reader happy. If the reader isn’t going to be happy with my story, I have no problem keeping it to myself. Within myself. I have no big message to give in my stories. For me, they’re just stories. But the last paragraph helped it click. I want to show people stories they haven’t seen before. I suppose I had already internalized this, though. That I have to listen to myself only when it comes to that. Because that’s how I work. Lol. You’re totally right, too. The writer must be quiet and live in her own world in order to bring her own story to the table. Then let readers do with it what they will.
I think you’re so right re: being true to one’s own voice or vision . . . and the hope of finding an audience should not cloud the authenticity that makes for really good writing. But in more ways than one, the ‘unnoticed’ writer can’t really know the full scope of her audience until she’s out there, getting some notice. The example of Edith Pearlman (I’m a big fan of her work) is as much about writers gaining a following, little by little, in mostly literary circles until one day, often because of a major award or a piece in some high-profile magazine, there’s a surge of interest. If you’re writing, you can’t help but want to be read (i.e., noticed). It is a game of courage,as you point out, not to mention persistence. That ‘quiet, raging corner of the soul’ has some profound things to tell us, if we listen.
What delightfully encouraging words! If we are called to write, then write we shall! When it becomes to fit within a mold, then we lose our creativity.
Thank you for the great article!
Spot on thoughts on writing, Anne. Thanks for talking about the courage it takes to write excellent fiction. Also about the importance of learning not to care what others will think of one’s work. It’s so important that a writer be bold and not self-censor.
I finished reading Bernhard Schlink’s der Vorleser a few days ago. The story revolved around the aftermath of a horrific event in Nazi Germany. Unlike an American novel, the horrific event itself wasn’t higlighted; rather how that event effects an unlikely pair of lovers a decade and a half later. Vorleser (The Reader in English)addressed moral questions in far greater depth than is usual for an American novel. I know I’m making der Vorleser sound terribly dry. It wasn’t. When I finished reading it, I lamented that here in America the emphasis is almost completely on whatever story makes the loudest bang, tears at the heartstrings. It is as if the American reader can’t be expected to be effected/moved by/”get” more gently told stories; as if the American reader must be hit over the head or bowled over or made to weep. If an extreme reaction doesn’t occur, the novelist has failed.