The

Faith of a Writer

LIFE, CRAFT, ART

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Joyce Carol Oates

 THE PAITH OF A WRITER. Copyright © 2003 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All
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FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION 2004

Desigmd by Claire Vaccaro

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Oates,Joyce Carol, 1938-
The faith of a writer: life, craft, art j Joyce Carol Oates.-1st ed.
p. em.
ISBN 0-06-056553-5 (alk. paper)
1. Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938- 2. Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938-
Authorship. 3. Authors, American-20th century-Biography.
4. Fiction-Authorship. 5. Authorship. 1. Title.
PS3565.A8Z467 2003
813'.54-<1c21
[B)
2003049235

ISBN0-06-056553-5 (HARDCOVER)
.'\0. •
ISBN0-06-056554-3 (PBK') .

06 07 08 BVGjRRD 1,0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
 TO
A YOUNG WRITER

W rite your heart out.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your
passion for your subject.
Your "forbidden" passions are likely to be the fuel for
your writing. Like our great American dramatist Eugene
O'Neill raging through his life against a long-deceased
father; like our great American prose stylist Ernest Heming-
way raging through his life against his mother; like Sylvia
Plath and Anne Sexton struggling through their lives with
the seductive Angel of Death, tempting them to the ecstasy
of self-murder. The instinct for violent self-laceration in Dos-
toyevsky, and for the sadistic punishment of "disbelievers" in
Flannery O'Connor. The fear of going mad in Edgar Allan
Poe and committing an irrevocable, unspeakable act+-mur-
 THE FAITH OF A WRITER TO A YOUNG WRITER

dering an elder or a wife, hanging and putting out the eyes exclusively.You can't write for "posterity"-it doesn't exist.
of one's "beloved" pet cat. Your struggle with your buried You can't write for a departed world. You may be addressing,
self, or selves, yields your art; these emotions are the fuel unconsciously, an audience that doesn't exist; you may be try-
that drives your writing and makes possible hours, days, ing to please someone who won't be pleased, and who isn't
weeks, months - and years of what will appear to others , at a worth pleasing.
distance, as "work .." Without these ill-understood drives you (But if you feel unable to "write your heart out"-inhib-
might be a superficially happier person, and a more involved ited, embarrassed, fearful of hurting or offending the feelings
citizen of your community, but it isn't likely that you will of others-you may want to try a practical solution and write
create anything of substance. under a pseudonym. There's something wonderfully liberat-
What advice can an older writer presume to offer to a ing, even childlike, about a "pen-name": a fictitious name
younger? Only what he or she might wish to have been told given to the instrwnent with which you write, and not
years ago. Don't be discouraged! Don't cast sidelong glances, attached to you. If your circumstances change, you could
and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is always claim your writing self. You could always abandon
not a race. No one really "wins." The satisfaction is in the your writing self, and cultivate another. Early publication can
effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give
And again, write your -heart out. anything to have not published their first book, and go about
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to trying to buy up all existing copies. Too late!)
read, not what someone tells you you should read. (As Ham- (Of course, if you want a professional life that involves
let remarks, "I know not 'should.' ") Immerse yourself in a teaching, lectures, readings-you will have to acknowledge a
writer you love, and read everything he or she has written, public writing name. But only one.)
including the very earliest work. Especially the very earliest Don't expect to be treated justly by the world, Don't even
work. Before the great writer became great, or even good, expect to be treated mercifully.
he/she was groping for a way, fumbling to acquire a voice, Life is lived head-on, like a roller coaster ride: "art" is
perhaps just like you. coolly selective, and can be created only in retrospect. But
Write for your own time, if not for your own generation' don't live life in order to write about it since the "life" so lived

24 25
 THE FAITH OF A WRITER TO A YOUNG WRITER

will be artificial and pointless. Better to invent wholly an alter- and "yearning." If you yearn for people who won't recipro-
nate life. Far better! cate your interest in them, you should know that your yearn-
Most of us fall in love with works of art, many times dur- ing for them is probably the most valuable thing about them.
ing the course of our lifetimes. Give yourself up in admiration, So long as it's unrequited.
even in adoration, of another's art. (How Degas worshipped Don't too quickly prejudge classics. Or contemporaries.
Manet! How Melville loved Hawthorne! And how many Choose a book to read, now and then, against the grain of
young, yearning, brimming-with-emotion poets has Walt your taste, or what you believe is your taste. It is a man's
Whitman sired!) If you find an exciting, arresting, disturbing world; a woman whose sensibility has been stoked by femi-
voice or vision, immerse yourself in it. You will learn from it. nism will find much to annoy and offend, but perhaps
In my life I've fallen in love with (and never wholly fallen out there's much to learn, and to be inspired by, if only in know-
oflove from) writers as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Emily Bronte, ing what it is to be an outsider gazing in. Such great works
Kafka, Poe, Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, as Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses) read from the
Charlotte Bronte, Dostoyevsky ... In reading the new edi- perspective of the twenty-first century, the one primitive in
tion of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn not long ago, I dis- its genius, the other unnervingly "modern," strike male and
covered I'd memorized entire passages of this novel. In female readers in very different ways. A woman should
rereading the now virtually unread Studs Lanigan trilogy, by acknowledge her hurt, her anger and her hope of "justice";
James T. Farrell, I discovered I'd memorized entire passages. even a hope for revenge might be a good thing, in her work
There are poems of Emily Dickinson I probably know more if not in her life.
intimately than Emily Dickinson herself knew them; they are Language is an icy-cool medium, on the page. Unlike per-
imprinted in my memory in a way they would not have been formers and athletes, we get to re-imagine, revise and rewrite
imprinted in hers. There are poems of William Butler Yeats, completely if we wish. Before our work is set in print) as in
Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence that leave me stone) we maintain our power over it. The first draft may be
chilled with excitement decades after I'd first discovered stumbling and exhausting, but the next draft or drafts will be
them. soaring and exhilarating. Only have faith: the first sentence
Don't be ashamed of being an idealist, of being romantic can't be written until the last sentence has been written. Only

27
 THE FAITH OF A WRTTER

then do you know where you've been going, and where

you've been.
The novel is the affliction for which only the novel IS

the cure.
RUNNING
And one final time: Write your heart out.
A D WRITING

R unning! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarat-

ing, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think
what it might be. In running, the mind flies with the body; the
mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the
brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
Ideally, the runner-who's-a-writer is running through the
land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.
There must be some analogue between running and
dreaming. The dreaming mind is usually bodiless, has peculiar
powers of locomotion and, in my experience at least, often
runs or glides or "flies" along the ground, or in the air. (Leav-
ing aside the blunt, deflating theory that dreams are merely
compensatory: you fly in sleep because in life you crawl,
barely; you're soaring above others in sleep because in life oth-
ers soar above you.) Possibly these fairy-tale feats of locorno-