Deborah Noyes is the author of books for audiences 6-60 and her subject matter is just as unique as her wide range of readers. Whether trying to scare you in “The Restless Dead” or tap your childhood curiosity and creativity in “Red Butterfly”, Noyes utilizes her skills as an editor, her experience as a mother and her own personal interests to write her award winning children’s books and to make her foray into adult literature with “Angel and Apostle”. She recently took a little time to answer a few questions for the website.
Six questions for Deborah Noyes
You have been a writer and an editor for others. What are the high and low lights of each one of those jobs?
The two jobs inform one another constantly. I don’t know that becoming an editor made me a better writer, but it made me a more pragmatic one, more fluid about the types of projects I take on — and in a way more adventurous, since it exposed me to so many writing styles and genres. Editing helped me understand publishing as a business and shape my expectations accordingly, and it’s certainly made me prize my own editors. I know what they’re up against.
As for being an editor who writes: trust is so critical to the editorial relationship, and I think — hope — that my authors trust me, at least in part because they know I’ve sat in that lonely seat on the other side of the desk. The writing life can be solitary and tax your self-esteem. You lay a lot on the line. Any experienced editor understands this, but I feel lucky that I get be of use to other writers, share what I know objectively, while also learning from them in turn, and getting to talk craft in the bargain.
Having written for both a younger crowd and an older crowd, which do you feel you are better at? Which do you feel you have more to offer doing?
Older, definitely. My sensibilities can run pretty dark. I started out writing for adults (and still do), but writing picture books like Red Butterfly lets me stray off track, explore themes I wouldn’t otherwise have the time or opportunity to.
I remember adolescence pretty vividly, while I have to dig deep to recall being a kid. So writing for young adults and adults comes more naturally. I envy writers who can really get at what it feels like to be a child and distill that down to its essence. A lot of people don’t realize how difficult picture books are to write; for me they’re an ongoing challenge, a way to keep growing as an author.
I read in your bio that "Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey were my idols growing up, and if I had another life to live (I imagine it often, this parallel life), I’d be a field biologist or trek around photographing invertebrates for National Geographic." You go on to say that there's "nothing lost" from not doing that as writing has been an adventure, yet to someone who also loves adventure, that doesn't convince me. Have you ever considered writing/creating something that would afford you the ability, neigh, create the necessity to have one of those real life adventures?
Ah, you’re onto me! I think, while my kids were young, this was my way of excusing myself for not travelling more, but the pendulum’s beginning to swing back. My son’s 15 now and my daughter’s nearly ten. I took up photography a few years back, and that’s come more to the fore lately, complimenting writing in exciting ways. I photo-illustrated my first nonfiction book, One Kingdom: Our Lives with Animals, which led to a recent offer to photo-illustrate another author’s collection of acrostic poems about African animals. So off I went to Namibia! I never could have predicted three years ago that I’d end up tracking a rhinoceros on foot or crouching for hours in a fiberglass termite mound watching wild kudu in Africa. So I’m figuring out how to incorporate some of that “parallel” life into the real thing, which promises more mobility and adventure.
But there’s a side of me that kind of likes skulking around in my pajamas writing ghost stories, too. I guess the trick is to find your balance. Whatever that means for you.
How old are your children? Have you ever considered working on a project with them? Have they ever contributed to your work directly or indirectly?
Our son, Clyde, is 15, and Michaela is 9. There’s a little of them in everything I do or write (for kids anyway), but those bits get stitched into composites, just as my own feelings and experiences do. No book I’ve written is strictly “about” them (or me). I dedicated One Kingdom to Michaela because she was my long-suffering expedition mate and sometime-photographer’s assistant for that book. Like me, she loves animals; she wants to be a vet. But she’s also an inventive writer and artist, so I can definitely see us working together on a book one day if she doesn’t tire of the whole business by then. Clyde’s so different — an athlete, very physical, social, political (he must have scored all this from his dad!) — and a constant source of wonder and inspiration.
Have you ever created a character or story that you realized was so awful that you were shocked you came up with it? Please share.
If you mean awful in the sense of poorly written or conceived, most emphatically, yes! I do it all the time. Those discarded half lives and narrative dead ends — surviving them — is how you educate yourself as a writer, I think.
If you mean awful in the sense of vile and wicked, I’ve done that too. I seem to be getting fonder of (fictionally!) inhabiting villains, specters, and other marginal sorts if only because they challenge me to question or deepen what I think I know about (and trust in) human nature.
My adult historical novel didn’t take off for me until I introduced the bad guy, who threw everyone else into relief, helped define the other characters in the book. But flawed as he was, I liked him. And then there’s the travesty of dispatching your characters. One reader of my adult novel asked, with an earnestness that moved me, “How could you bring yourself to kill ___?” The fact is, I don’t know. I loved that character. I really did. But it was where his life took him.
In a world where you were given free reign to create/write any book what would it be? Why would you create it?
Where to begin! I’m understanding that I write so many different kinds of books, for young and old, because I have to answer to a reckless lot of obsessions: animals and feral children, nature and the wild, folklore and magic, spirit and science, the social histories of flowers and silk and death, love and duty, the gothic and the arcane… these are just a few of the themes that’ve come knocking in recent years. I let one or two rise to the surface and then decide what format and genre will work best, whose story it is, how it should be told. But that “any” book you speak of would probably involve travel, include photographs, and intersect with at least a couple of these themes, which seem to recur for me.