Joyce Carol Oates: A mini writing masterclass

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 and is one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century. In her book The Faith Of A Writer, she talks about her process, her inspiration, and her revelatory perspective on the art of writing.

Oates writes that art is an access code to the infinite and the universal. Through art we seek to create something “that will speak to others who know nothing of us.” We live in our individual silos, but art is the bridge that runs through them and births an “unexpected intimacy.

Oates asks an interesting question: Why did realism, as a literary genre, evolve very late in the history of literature? The oldest stories are all surreal and feature gods, monsters, and giants. Is it because reality is painful to look in the eye, and hence we took our time?

Oates has a capacious memory - she learnt most of the poems in Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland when she was eight. Decades later, she can recite nearly all of them - a testament to how, riffing on Auden, the words of dead writers can be saved “in the guts of the living.”

Caroll shaped Oates’ philosophy more than her writing style. Even in her most realistic work, something “grotesque or surreal” lurks in the corner. Oates describes her sensibility as an odd mix of playful and morbid - and wonders if that is not “simply the way the world is"?

Oates’ advice to writers: Write your heart out. Eugene O’Neill, an American writer, raged against his long-deceased father through his work. Hemingway, raged against his long-deceased mother. The things that haunt us are the origin of authentic creativity.

Use pseudonyms to get rid of inhibition. Oates writes: “If you feel unable to ‘write your heart out’—inhibited, embarrassed, fearful—you may want to...write under a pseudonym.” Oates herself used a pseudonym in the 1960s. Isn’t this so much easier in the age of the internet?

A deceptively simple writing hack: Run. Running aligns the body’s rhythm with the mind’s rhythm. Through running, our hands, feet, and lungs become “an extension of the imagining self.” Writer-runners you may have heard of: Shelley, Murakami, Malcolm Gladwell, Wordsworth.

Oates muses on the origins of art: Does art originate in childhood play? Or is it produced by youthful rebellion - by the urge to define oneself as “novel and ungovernable”? Or is art a way to hold on to an ever receding past - to keep in words what can’t be kept in fact?

Where does inspiration come from? The world, Oates writes, is a “forest of signs.” If one pays attention, there are meanings and messages beneath the apparent chaos of everyday life. It’s the artist's job to pick up these signs and render them coherent for his or her readers.