John Steinbeck said a writer should be read and not seen.
At four this morning I was restless and turned on the telly to find a black and white film featuring five stories by O. Henry (a.k.a. William Sydney Porter) being introduced by author John Steinbeck http://www.americanwriters.org/writers/steinbeck.asp. The first thing I heard him say was that he always believed a writer should be read and not seen.
I am of the same mind.
The first time I saw a portrait of Shakespeare I was mildly disappointed. How could someone of such genius be so ordinary looking? I’ve felt the same about other writers many times since, and though I’m aware of how shallow and ridiculous this makes me seem, I’m pathetically human and I still feel it.
When I try to examine what it is that makes me so disappointed I realize it all comes down to perception. When I examine Shakespeare’s works I perceive a golden mind behind the tale and am deflated to find only flesh and blood, and very routine flesh and blood at that. It makes me wonder if this is why some choose not to believe he actually wrote the plays and poems he is so famous for having written (as in the film Anonymous http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1521197/.) Are they looking for a golden being to go with the golden mind?
I surmise that I too disappoint.
At signings I was frequently greeted with: “Did something terrible happen to you as a child?” Inwardly I wanted to howl, clutch my breast and respond in a voice like Vincent Price: “Yes! My God, yes and how is it that you alone have recognized this?”
I cannot imitate Vincent Price. If I could I might have been so snotty, but instinctively I knew what prompted the question. I was a disappointment. They expected someone dark and scary and perhaps scarred or tattooed. Instead they got me, a person they couldn’t reconcile with dark fiction.
My first agent begged me to become another Mary Higgins Clark. I told her one existed already. She then asked me to become like Anne Rice and appear somehow quirky or exotic, to have something that made me unusual. Again, I knew what prompted this: I was ordinary. There was nothing dark or deviant about my appearance. I couldn’t blame my first agent for scrabbling for a hook. My reluctance was no doubt a part of our agreement to part ways. Like Steinbeck, I couldn’t understand why anyone should want to see me. My work should speak for itself.
Until my third novel most people believed I was a man. Then some reviewer made a comment about me writing as well as any male horror author and the jig was up. Believe it or not, sales immediately fell off, as if no one believed a woman could write horror as well as a man. Well they believed it until they knew otherwise, which sucks for me, and for all the other female authors out there who are subtly, insanely discriminated against by book buyers. The funny thing is, I do it too, because of the built-in erroneous perception that the really gritty, dark psychological stuff is not the same when written by a woman. It’s more like, well, like Mary Higgins Clark. Which is not who I am.
Dammit.
