Writing Lessons from Joyce Carol Oates

 Mother Jones' Alexander Sammon interviewed Joyce Carol Oates under the headline Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates:

Mother Jones: In the opening essay of Soul at the White Heat, you stake out the different approaches of famous writers pertaining to the place of politics (or social justice) in their writing. On one side we have the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Charles Dickens. On the other there are Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov, who dismissed this type of writing roundly (“mediocrity thrives on ideas”). What place do politics hold in your writing?

Joyce Carol Oates: The greatest works of literature seem to embody both “art” and “morality” (of some sort). We come away from the tragedies of Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form—yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective. Of course, both Wilde & Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly—for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.) There is a greater art in Dickens than in either Wilde or Nabokov, but it isn’t at the expense of Dickens’ social conscience. It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. “Politics” per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal. I feel akin to Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes “scenes” in his plays, and constitutes “story” in prose fiction. There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life’s surprising unfolding. Long ago I’d said that I am “fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality”—this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

And I find that liberating. Would I had been able to think so decades ago.

MJ: I’m wondering what drives you to write so much, and what you hope to convey at this point in your career.

JCO: I don’t really seem, to myself, to write “so much”—nor do I write quickly. You would be surprised, perhaps stunned, to see how much revising I do in a typical morning. Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process. Writing allows for fictitious voices—the voices of persons unlike myself—that might otherwise be muted.

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MJ: Tell me a bit more about your own writing process.

JCO: One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, “tone” is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. It’s always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole. All these elements are particularly intriguing when a collection of short stories is assembled, for each story relates to the others thematically, and first stories and last stories should be related. It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn’t quite in focus.

All of these processes are constantly undergoing change, of course. “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence has been written.” Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite. Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I’ve reached the ending. We have not discussed genres, but each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of “form” to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

I should stress that, for me, voice is predominant. I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express. To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration. If Shakespeare’s great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective; each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation. Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.