A Conversation With Joyce Carol Oates on the 4-Part Formula for Writer Success (Killer Writers)
“Do you have advice for writers who get slapped in the face while trying to progress?”
“I think people tend to go forward and keep trying. As a young writer, I would have many stories out in the mail. It was a different world where we had to send things out in manila envelopes. We didn't have an online way of sending things, so I might have 12 stories out. When you have 12 stories out, one or two might likely be accepted. It's sort of like fishermen. Sometimes they have a number of lines out, so the more that you try, the more likely you are to have something good happen. If you invest all your energy in just one thing, like a really long novel, that's probably not a good idea for a young writer. It's too focused on one thing.”
“So for people starting out, basically, we've just summed up, read, write, and send it out.”
“Yes. And if you can go to writing conferences and just kind of meet people and take a course, that's very positive.”
My 2024 in Reading (Plus Lessons from Tokarczuk's Prose) (Lincoln Michel)
In my piece, I made the argument that “TV prose” fails to summarize. Instead, scenes play out in “real time” and show the reader every action and every spoken dialogue. The above is a quick and nice example of how prose can easily speed up time, skip around, and summarize. Specifically, I’m referring to the the line In a few sentences, Wojnicz explained his family history. Many authors would quote that dialogue in full, but why? The reader doesn’t need the information repeated and summarizing helps the pacing and dark humor of the doctor’s response.
Lastly, I talked a lot in the article about interiority. Interiority is vital to first person and close third prose, and not something that film and TV can easily access. It is an advantage of prose. But I should have included a bit about how omniscient third allows for a kind of commentary that is also an advantage of prose. (Again, visual media has its own advantages that prose has a hard time replicating.)
2025 will be the year media changes forever (Chris Cillizza) has me thinking more of moving to Substack.
I submitted part of "Love Stinks" to Nashville Review.
Thornfield Hall's Tolstoy on New Year’s Day: “War and Peace” should be read by anyone wondering if reading Tolstoy's novel is worth the time. It took me decades to get around to reading it, and I kick myself for the time lost. A classic? Yes. A bore? No.
I stayed up too late reading Cracking the Code of Linear B - archeology and ciphers were too much to resist.
I also made a trip to the Jackson Street convenience store for supplies.
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