JCO Answers How She Writes a Book a Year

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Is it possible Harper's Bazaar asked the one important question of Joyce Carol Oates and no one had before? Check out This Is How Joyce Carol Oates Writes a Book a Year.

Stephen King in his On Writing (a book I recommend, albeit for an odd reason: King publishes how he revises a story) recommends having in mind an audience. Oates offered a similar and different idea:

Who do you write for and why?

I started writing really when I was in high school, and I think I’m sort of writing for an ideal audience. It’s more like telling stories and trying to express the experience of a story as if it was a little movie. I think our lives are one story after another and we’re trying to give voice to that experience. I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a specific audience. I mean, if you had no audience at all, you might still want to take photographs, and you might commemorate something. I don’t have a specific audience, but I would hope to have a literary community.

Do you mean a community of readers or writers or both?

Just that we have a common vocabulary and respect for literature, because there are so many people who don’t. It’s like that community of people who care about good films: more of a community of people who care about our culture.

How she describes a novel may explain one of the many reasons the short story form is difficult for me.

What do you usually start with when you are starting a novel? Is it an image or a character, or is it a sentence or a word?

A novel is a river, with a number of tributaries flowing into it. I don’t think you could write a real novel, a substantial novel, on just one little idea. For me, it’s like a number of ideas that come together, and I kind of conjoin them like characters. You have to have a little family of people. For me, it can begin with a place. All of my writing is set in a real place in my recollection. In The Frenzy, for instance, the first story is very much in New Jersey, down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then it’s on the Garden State Parkway, and then it’s in Cape May with a view of the ocean at a certain time of year, off-season. Very New Jersey.

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