Well, hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job my privilege to attempt to deconstruct world-class performers from all different fields. My guest today is a writing icon Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce. Carol Oates is the author of novels short story collections poetry volumes plays essays and criticism including the national bestsellers. We were the Mulvaney's blond and a Widow's story.
Among her many honors are the National book award the Pan America word the National Humanities medal the 2019 Jerusalem prize and the 2020s, you know, Del Duca World prize for literature oats is the Roger s berland distinguished professor of the humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and letters since 1978. So that is the approved by oh, there are few other things. I would like to say though because I think Joyce
Certainly is prone to understandably understating her prodigious talents. She is published. And again, this is getting into semi non fact-check territory. But I think I do have most of these right she's published around 60 novels not to mention all the other formats and genres. She is so prolific that in her Wikipedia entry. There is a separate entry just for her bibliography to give you an idea. So Joyce Carol Oates bibliography is its
on gigantic page her first book was published in 1963 and I have read at least from two sources that on average. She has had two pieces of her work published per year since just let that sink in three of her novels and two short story collections if I'm getting it right. We're all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and her work is incredible. This is just
Endlessly impressive woman endlessly impressive human endlessly impressive writer and teacher and with all that Preamble, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Joyce Carol Oates One very quick note. We had some Wi-Fi connectivity issues for the first 10 minutes or so, so please bear with us as we work through that and then we were able to change a few things and improve it dramatically so might be a little bit of touching go in the
Ting but if you stick with it will get to smooth audio pretty soon thereafter.
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Joyce welcome to the show. I wanted to start with a name that will be familiar. And that's Jonathan Safran for former student of yours. Now a colleague of yours who also happened to be in my same class. I believe of class of 99 at Princeton as an undergrad and you wrote him a letter perhaps his parents at some point, but the way that he recalls it.
Is a specific line that I wanted to ask you about and we can take it any direction you would like and the line is this quote you appear to have very strong and promising Talent coupled with that most important of writerly qualities comma energy and he then later has come to strongly agree with that and man is she right energy is the most important writerly quality. Could you expand on what you mean by that?
You could sort of self-evident that
we had a good deal of energy to be Creator. We need a good deal of spirit and kind of optimism, I think of any kind of positive delusions or Illusions about the worth of what we're doing. I was reading a biography of Walker Evans is very distinguished early 20th century photographer and Walker Evans just makes the point that he would be SI. Why is he doing this? Who's his audience? And he said that he wasn't sick.
Know that he was thinking of the pleasure of the camera and seeing where it led him. And I think that's true of all created effort that there is a kind of spirit are like a flame that leads us somewhere to tell the story. It could be a entire novel to paint a painting of something extraordinary that's never been done before and beyond that is just the the fuel that is the
sheer pleasure in creativity, which is energy and the opposite of that I think is being interrupted many times in situations professional or familial where one is interrupted and one's energy is drained off in different directions so that we don't have the concentration that we need that is really the great enemy of creativity.
If we're looking at maybe enemies is wouldn't be the right label and the way that I'm going to use it but
Obstacles as would-be writers perceive them. I'd like to speak to getting started. So a writer friend of yours think with the initials LM you described as having remarked that she'd like to be married and not get married and in other words and I'll take some Liberty here but not to find the perimeter of the parameters go through the Growing Pains of those first few years, but to be sort of settled.
In the existence of being married and you like into that to creative projects and writing. How do you overcome the the difficulties or advise the students overcome the difficulties in starting a given writing project? You could choose the genre.
Well, if it were all very different some people have a good deal of energy and excitement in the beginning and they can stay up all night long and working on a novel. No reading a complete.
Story, I think as we get older we sort of we guard our energy differently. We don't quite State. We don't stay up all night working, but parcel it out in a more reasonable way. So it does depend upon who the person is. I have I have writing students have a good deal of energy, but I have others who have been working on one one project for some time. And so they're kind of focusing their energy.
But as I said, the one the great adversary is being interrupted and distracted. So distraction is our main adversary right now, I think in in contemporary America in the world of the internet and cell phones at the moment. We have a kind of toxic political situation. It's very draining of Goodwill. So all these distractions make it difficult to concentrate
when you look back at your own creative process.
Red, I don't know if it was in the Paris review. It could have been her elsewhere. And this series called The Art of fiction that you need the title and I want to say last line before you begin writing. Was that true or is there any truth to that was there at some
point? Oh, yes. I need to I need to see the ending of the novel.
I need to see it in a kind of cinematic way to sort of Envision it and then I usually have some words to go with that and I really need a beginning and an end and I need a title the title is what brings it all together. It's sort of like a triangular.
Shape so the title will give you a sense of what the totality is. The beginning obviously is the precipitating factor of the story should be in the first line and then everything is a consequence of that and then the ending is the ending which has been real moving toward that ending for on page 19 or 99 or 100 99 you're moving.
Toward that inexorable ending. So you have a destination that is an ideal way of writing. It may not be possible for everybody. Some people like El doctor or my friend and doctoral. He said that he never knew how his novels were going to end. He thought it was like a car trip. He was he was driving along a road. He didn't really know where he was going, but I'm not like that.
How much do you think about structures if you have the beginning and the end and the title, even if it's a placeholder, I guess two questions do the titles often change after you've decided upon what you think. It might be and then the second is how do you think about or how much do you think about this structure? Once you have those initial points in place
the title could definitely be changed.
It would probably be an equivalent title.
Something that was the same tone and the same symbolism, but maybe it could be different word. I have changed titles a few times. Ideally. If you have the title first, then you have a you have a vision so until you work out this picture of a long work. It's not a good idea to begin a however. I have begun and I have made mistakes that I had to correct as I went on.
So much of writing like all art I think is exploratory. We don't always know what we're going to do. But ideally if you have an outline of a sense of where you're going, it's much easier. I spent a lot of time running and walking every day I go walking or I love to run and when I'm running I think of my writing in structural terms have a spatial sense. So if I don't go running
Everyday, my writing doesn't work as well. It really depends upon this kinetic release an energy. Could you speak
more to that? Is it an active thinking about or considering of the writing or is it moving the body and letting the matically Loosely? Let's just say in the case of structure pointed Consciousness. Just kind of
all up in the process of movement. Could you could you just speak to running and walking because I know it is a seems to have been a huge part of your life.
What about you? Are you a runner?
I used to run I used to run. I do a lot of walking. So I walk and swim and bike I try to walk at least a few hours a day. So I walk a lot.
That's the same. There's a hill near where I live in a semi-rural area. There's a hill near where I live a
Road at the top of the hill I've gotten so many ideas. I ran over there must be about that's about a mile or maybe my own have so it's like waiting for me on top of that Hill will be some idea now. That's obviously a mystical superstitious notion on my part yet. It seems to happen quite often. So if I'm stuck on a trying to work out a plot at my desk, I'm sitting right now at my desk. I really can't
Work it out here. I have to go somewhere else preferably up the baby our hero and I need to be alone with my
thoughts. Let's talk about once you have set foot into this exploratory process of writing. Even if you have some landmarks laid out ahead of time. Let's just say the beginning and the end actually before I hopped that I'm going to ask you about revision. But when you say you have an idea of where it
Is where you know the ending is it just a concept is it finished prose? Is it a finished page? Is that a paragraph? What does knowing the end look like concretely.
It's pretty definite. It's like knowing you get in your car and you're gonna drive to
San Francisco and you want to go to San Francisco. We don't want to wind up in Salt Lake City or you know, so somewhere in Montana your sort of aiming your vehicle for a destination. So it's a sensible to plan that ahead of
time if we look at then charting this path and going from point A beginning to ultimately Z the End San Francisco like you said when you have
An initial draft I've read that your strongly in favor. This is quote strongly in favor of intelligent even fastidious revision, which is or certainly should be an art in itself. How do you describe?
the revision process to
students
Well, I think a revision is so much fun. It's so exciting to me. That first draft is like material and then the second draft the revision is my my use of that material.
And so subsequent revision. I revise all the time. I'm revising an apple now. I don't even know how many times I've gone through it. I tend to write the first chapters over and over and over again and the second chapter is over again. Then as I go on the novel I get more momentum, so I'm going forward a little more fluently. But yet when I come to my desk in the morning, I definitely always revise what I did the day before.
And then I get a little momentum moving forward again, but the revision is really like 99%
I love art. I think they've been very few.
Artists who don't revised or digital artist make sketches. They may do several variants of the same scene and apart from a real very small number of composers just could compose sort of in their heads like Mozart and I guess Chopin sometimes but then Chopin would work on what he had. He would he would work on it anyway and revise it, but I think Mozart was probably the most
He is Creator but almost nobody is like that. I mean Beethoven worked very hard revising and just about everybody that I ever heard of.
Let's speak to the revision process. I would love to hear in more specifics if you're able what you're looking for what you're looking to take out when you revise an end it is I'm sure second nature at this point to the extent that maybe it's hard to describe but
an example some authors or writers look to say first and foremost remove anything that is confusing could that could be confusing right or that is unclear that or they asked proofreaders to help them and ask them to indicate, you know, if they had to cut 10% or 20% what they would cut that's involving other people. But in your case, when you sit down to revise, could you walk us through any of the lenses?
Is you use to look at that draft or the questions you ask yourself as you're going through? Is there any any level of specifics that you might be able to
offer? Well, it does it does depend upon the manuscript for instance. If I'm working in a Gothic mode or a surreal mode. It's a different voice from sociological realism. Sometimes sometimes my writing is social realism and everything in the novel is
Antic, it is really happened in some way. If you go to that City, you can walk around and see those streets. There's a certain pleasure in that verisimilitude of the actual World James Joyce who was in many ways a surrealist writer nonetheless. He believed in the beauty and sanctity of of the of the actual so that one can walk in Dublin and sort of walk through the you know,
Day of Ulysses and that's one way of writing. There's a poetry and realism, there's a beauty and just in things as they are. However, we have of our maybe more than half of our lives are spent in dreams and and the unconscious so that's a surreal landscape every night. We sleep and the perimeters of realism are dissolved, you know with great.
Great extravagant energy. I Thinkin all sorts of images and improbable things sweep into our minds When We're Dreaming. So I like to write in a surreal mode to and if I'm revising work of fiction that surreal I consider that so very exciting because each time I sit down to write or to revise I will get some Goulding some nudging some hints.
Something surfacing from the unconscious so that a sentence that may be relatively simple by the time I revised it might it might be a whole full page long because something else is pushing in it pulling Anna. It's like an octopus with many many legs or limbs or arms or anyway, the pull of the unconscious I think is very powerful and the more we can let that fuel what we're doing.
Doing the more potent. It is also the more enjoyable for the writer
jumping back to Jonathan Safran foer for a moment. It's on a website called identity Theory it probably appears elsewhere, but he mentioned that you gave him a reading list and I don't expect you to be able to remember that necessarily the exact books or pieces of work that you recommended that he read but do you have any recollection of how you chose what you
It was I remember when Jonathan was very young. He made just a better freshman at Princeton. He was already an experimental writer and Artist as you probably know his first book was Joseph Cornell compendium, which he brought together, which is most unusual for a young person to bring together work by my older people. Most Young Writers write their first novel, which is very autobiographical the
Ethan did not do that. He went in a slightly different way. So I saw in him an experimental personality and I like that myself but most Young Writers should not be experimenting. They should just write what they want to write. They may want to write about their parents. They meant to write about their girlfriend or boyfriend is something in the first person. That's funny. No that's droll or witty. They may want to write some satire. But by no means should they try to
Experimental because they're not ready for it. Whereas the Jonathan I think was never really that interested in replicating the actual world. He was more interested in experimenting with the medium of writing which is words. Now. I know that later on he has written much more realistic. He's done autobiographical work. He's written pretty transparently I think about his own life and about his marriage and family life.
So I mean he has done it different kinds of writing but because he had an experimental personality. I probably gave him some I probably gave him cough go through read. I don't remember exactly what it would have been.
I want to stick with Jonathan's just one more question and then move into some different areas, but darkness that also mention and I'm paraphrasing here that you were the first person to take him seriously and
Is that you recognized there was such a thing as his writing his work. So to speak right that he had a work of body of work and development that had never occurred to him. When did you personally first have that feeling about your own
writing all about my own writing about your own writing? No, I probably never had that feeling. I did have teachers who singled me out and said very
nice things to me and I had a professor at Syracuse who even wrote a letter to my parents and because he did that I did that for Jonathan. Also, I always remembered that it was a very short beautiful letter just that Joyce is a born writer and she should be encouraged. I can't remember the details of it and I don't know if the letter even exists anymore. I hope it's somewhere so I thought that I would do that, you know, and when Jonathan came along I wrote this is how I wrote this parents now, I know
Remember exactly what I said, but mimic that original letter. So maybe Jonathan will write a letter or has written. Maybe it's just something we should a tradition we should carry on but not overdue so I don't I have not actually done it since
just one that's quite a quite an honor to bestow upon Jonathan. He's very skilled Rider.
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as I understand it your please correct me if I'm if I'm getting the details here wrong, but your first book was published in 1963 by the north gate, which was a collection of short stories was that impactful or important to you or was just the act of writing and the fact that you are so continuously writing more engaging more important than that type of Milestone would be for
A writer's how did that affect you if it
all all of course was very profound. I was just so very young writer. I had had a number of stories in the best American short stories and the Oh Henry Awards, so I had been published in magazines and then some of the stories were anthologized. So the next step would be a book and it came when I was about I don't I was about 22 years old. I think when I receive notice that my manager
Could have been accepted so I called my husband at the time Ray Smith and told him about this he was at University and I was at home and I was absolutely disbelieving. I mean I was so happy. I was I was overwhelmed I could hardly believe it and it was a it was of course a milestone is tremendously encouraging.
I had been encouraged earlier and in preceding years by various Publications or winning an award or something. So I've had been encouraged. So I try to encourage younger writers to I've endowed a number of awards fiction awards at different universities for Young Writers.
How do you encourage Young Writers?
In your classroom and that might sound like a strange question but you've had a lot of trial and error or maybe just lots of trial. I don't know. Maybe it's mostly success. You've certainly been able to I'm sure test a lot of things in the classroom you've been able to see what students go on to do or how they gravitate to the craft of writing or not. What if you found most important or impactful in terms of
Cultivating and encouraging Young
Writers and illustrators who are in my workshop have already been writing for a while.
Especially at NYU their graduate writers graduate student, so they know what they're doing and they have a project and they have their own stories based on your own lives experience imagination. So I'm a good reader. I mean, I'm a sympathetic reader an editor for what they're writing. I don't tell them what the right we have a workshop situation where everybody critiques a submission for the day. Everyone has an opinion we have a conversation so
It really isn't just a professor. I have opinion and everybody else does too so that a writer young writer might feel well. They liked what I wrote but they didn't quite understand or they thought it should be longer or they thought it was too long. So kind of consensus of editorial suggestions in a typical writing Workshop. I mainly see my role as being a very sympathetic and careful
reader
What does it mean to be a sympathetic reader?
Well, I'm not I'm not critical or judgmental. I'm on the side of the writer. I want to see what they've done. I mean in other another years like in the decades passed there were male professors who told women writers that their subject matter wasn't literary. I mean even at a well-known women writers who went on to become famous and win a Pulitzer Prize, they they were discouraged by the
Buy some of these remarks, I would never think of it and I would never say those things. I don't consider it anything that subject for fiction if its treated if its treated. Well I try to get writers to write about what they really care
about. I read a beautiful line from you describing certain aspect of your creative process. And that is this is from the Paris review The Art of fiction number 72 one must be pitiless about this matter of mood.
In a sense, the writing will create the mood and you continue to say later in that same paragraph. I forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted when I felt my soul is thin as a playing card when nothing has seemed to worth enduring for another 5 minutes and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Could you expand on any of this? I mean, I think it's pretty well put but I know that there are a lot of people who feel they need to get themselves into the mood to write. Is there anything else?
You could add to this.
No, I definitely feel that you create your mood by by working.
And I have a sort of work ethic. I come from the part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it. And so if you feel that you just can't write or you're too tired or this that and the other just stop thinking about it and go and work. I mean, it's life doesn't have to be so over thought we'd have to wait to be inspired just start working particularly. I think first go for our long run and a lot nice walk.
Think about what you're going to do come home and start working but try not to be interrupted. That's that's the problem. Most people are living in families or the living with a partner and the other person has a schedule and expectations. And while you may love your family, they can be the ones who drain your energy for women that's always been a problem women are nurturing. There's nothing wrong with that but women find it very hard to say no.
No, women writers are always being asked to do things pro bono to volunteer their time to do different things, you know to read manuscripts and to be on committees and so forth and the instinct is really to say yes and I say yes and lots of these things but it's really if you are all careful custodian of your own time like Philip Roth for instance or flow Barre. You would never give away a whole lot of your time. They Philip Roth would never heal.
Do one one hundredth of the things that I do he was too smart. He knew how to take care of you us to guard his own privacy. Do you
tend to work on multiple projects at a time or when you're immersed? I've heard you describe a being immersed in a project. And as soon as you finish a novel you get assaulted by all of these new ideas. Do you ever work on multiple projects at the same
time? No, I usually focus on my energy on one project, but I've been working on a novel.
I will right now but I'm taking a little time off to write a review of a biography for the TLs and I'm also writing an introduction to a new edition of Dostoevsky short stories. So I'm taking time off from the novel and then if I'm doing copy-editing for I've been going through a copy edited manuscript for another book that's coming out. I'll take you know, a week off from my novel to work on that
part of the reason I ask is.
A came across comment in the guardian and this is not only in the guardian. This is certainly something I've come across a few different times when doing homework for this conversation and that is something along the lines in different places the quote. I don't have any anxiety about writing not really, you know, it's such a pleasure and our lives are so relatively easy compared to people who are really out there in the world working hard and suffering. That's from the guardian. Could you speak more to that again? I know it's like self-evident on one hand, but also
Also and uncommon contrast to a lot of Lamentations and descriptions of anxiety around writing by other people difficulties writing writer's block Etc. Could you expand on not having anxiety around
writing? Well, I just don't have a knife. I did I won't think I would want to be a writer I would have I would have tremendous anxiety if I were a Performing Artist like
He honest and I had to give a recital I would be overwhelmed with anxiety. But at least I think I would be I suppose by practicing every day, bye-bye playing, you know, three four hours every day. You get to a point where the technique is just totally totally internalized and you don't have to think about it and I would be anxious are for I were an athlete, you know competing with other athletes right in it.
In real time with people watching you, I would find that in immensely anxiety-provoking but writing or or painting drawing and these these Arts are done on our own time. You can take as long as you want. Nobody's watching, you know, nobody cares either. It's a very different Medium as I said, I find it anxiety-producing to even imagine playing piano in front of an audience.
Once I did that once I was a I took piano lessons for quite a while for about 11 years and I was playing I would be the student who played the piano when the students marched into the assembly and in my middle school, and so I actually did this and it wasn't too bad but being on a stage performing in front of people who know the music I was is fine that overwhelmingly
terrifying. Is it the real Time That's my dog
Working in the background if if you can hear that but is is it the real-time nature of that the necessity to deliver in front of an audience in real time versus being able to take your time without people really necessarily paying attention or caring is that the largest distinction between those
two? Well, yes, but some pages and my novels I've Rewritten so many times so there would not be any one time.
That anyone could watch anything like that. You know, I think when really good professional musicians are playing the probably replicating what they've done before I know actors.
Almost exactly and precisely do the same the same performance night after night. So they've sort of its internalized in their brains and they just have to go through it another time. Well with writing every time I every time I look at a page, I can revise a there has to come an end to this eventually you just have to stop doing it, you know, but in theory James Joyce could still be working on Ulysses and
Meg does he was like that he was experimental and every morning you wake up with some new ideas and you could write you could write another another novel the whole different novel would come out of your your mood that morning, but we can't allow ourselves to do that. That's just too Fantastical. How do
you decide when something is done or when you need to stop because you could just continue otherwise
indefinitely I try to use common sense. I'm going through an operation.
Well now that I've gone through probably 10 times. It's in the computer. So I go through our scroll through it and I'm still changing it and changing sentences. I'm taking out paragraphs. I'm moving things around but this has got to be the last time because the novel is coming out in August. So the time is lat. I've been working on it for a year off and on and it has metamorphose quite a bit from the beginning.
The main structure was always there and two main characters, but the sentences sentences always change, but I'll be done with it by Monday so that I'll send that to my my editor and I'm not going to change that anymore looking at
10 tips of yours for writing. I believe these were originally tweets at one point. It's Dimension a list of 10. I want to ask about a few of these and if any of these are incorrect,
Please correct me. Number one is right your heart out number four is keep in mind Oscar Wilde quote a little sincerity is a dangerous thing in a great deal of it is absolutely fatal and then it goes on but could you explain why the Oscar Wilde quote
about sincerity? Well, yes, he's being funny. I think he's requiring against the kind of deadpan overwhelming boring rectitude that one
Encountered in the Victorian world where literature was seen as a vessel for ethics and for Morality. So it's a lot of preaching the used to be a good deal of preaching and the doctor says, 'I'm in prose fiction.
and he was probably relating to that so that kind of sincerity is just
it's just very boring. I mean one doesn't want to hear much of that literature should be interesting. I should I think it should be dramatic and characters should be colorful and unusual and each sentence should be as original as possible. And then write your heart out is something that we're not Bernard malamud said, I really quoting him. It's just right, you know, write and write and write and don't
Don't hold that.
So Joyce, I would love to ask you about a few more of these and then we can move on. The number three in this this top 10 list is you are writing for your contemporaries not for posterity. If you are lucky your contemporaries will become posterity. Could you expand on that, please?
This is probably aimed for people who were English majors and who were reading the great classic, you know, if you're reading Paradise Lost or great plays of Shakespeare.
Spear or middlemarch or Ulysses? You're overwhelmed those audience is also no longer exist. So you're writing for your own time. You're writing for your own generation. Usually maybe people little older than you are and then people younger than you are but basically the audience that that revered Paradise loss is long gone. So this probably doesn't even have to be told to people in the year 2021, that's me.
Yeah that you're writing for your own time.
Sometimes people are writing to impress a parent. Sometimes people are trying to be outstanding and and distinguish to impress someone who's not even a living any longer could be a parent, you know, people have many unconscious motives, but that could this can be impediments and I think there's a natural voice if you
think back on your own experience as a writer, are there any impediments short-lived or long-lived?
That come to mind for
you.
Well, I think was a little self-conscious in the beginning to write very freely and openly because my parents would read what I wrote so I may have been a little inhibited but I tried I definitely tried to overcome that or to ignore it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to be a writer.
But I did begin writing under different names one name was JC Smith.
So I had married Raymond Smith. So I use JC Smith as a name for a while and I was JC oats, which is not necessarily a woman kind of androgynous person and finally just settled on Joyce Carol Oates.
So for a while I had a couple of pseudonyms, but they were women they were women's
names and why did you decide to use this the pseudonyms was that to sort of preempt any type of criticism directed at you? Was it a creative exercise? Did it give you more Liberty in your own mind to push to the edges? What? Why did you use those
pseudonyms?
The first pseudonym was Rosamund Smith and I had probably been writing about 20 years. So I wanted to Embark upon a new voice with a different Focus. These were more suspense novels rather like movies cinematic and in movement and structure with and without much Exposition or background not as much description each chapter scene in a movie.
moving forward these were totally different and so I just wanted to have a an outlet for a sort of imaginative writing that wasn't so much in the mainstream or Michael my usual writing like conventional whatever my own writing is it's a little more mean maybe mainstream and this was more like suspense psychological suspense novels
number eight on these this
this top 10 list. This will be the last one on the list that I'd love to hear you expand on and it is don't try to anticipate an ideal reader or any reader he/she might exist, but is reading someone else. What does don't try to anticipate an ideal
reader? Well, do you I think it's pretty self-evident just there's an Integrity to the work you have to express the work and you shouldn't be curtailing in are shaping a
To impress some person.
So when you write the you do not have any reader in mind. It is really just a creative process for you and you
alone. Well this the the work itself has its own Integrity. You have to express the work each work is different. I mean if you think of one novel of mine, they're all they're really quite different from one another the totally different and the voices.
Tend to be different they're different in each novel. So do we no way that I could be writing for one audience, or I'm not I'm not really thinking of an audience.
Can you suggest any one novel mind that you've read that you might have a particular question about like the tone of the voice because I can't speak so much in abstract terms.
Sure. Yeah. No, it was more a question of when you work on any given piece. If you ever think of sort of who is targeted towards not to necessarily curtail your creative boundaries. So to speak I just I think of it in contrast to something I know.
A much more familiar with which is nonfiction fiction. I really have no experience with whatsoever. But within the world of fiction thinking about just as an example what levels of expertise you assume in your audience right as a way of determining how much terminology you need to explain or omit or include to make it compelling and I mean this this I guess just makes me think of say John McPhee writing about geology, right?
Leave it be very easy to lose the reader depending on how close you zoom in on some of the details of something like that. So it was really just a broader
question. So let me talk about that. You see you've just suggested a particular work. He wrote that for the New Yorker. He was working with William Sean who was an editor who wanted many many details and everything had to be very authentic and the fact checking at the New Yorker is is famous you
You know, they're very very careful. So John McKee writing for the New Yorker, he would write a certain kind of of work if you were working if you were writing for TV Guide, you know are Time magazine or the New York Times book review would have been very different. That's a good example and nonfiction of aiming for particular market. So John McPhee would be given like the whole issue of the New Yorker for one of his long nonfiction pieces.
And it was tailored for that magazine and then they all became books and some of John McPhee. These essays are really Classics. I mean, they're wonderful though writing for the New Yorker for him was perfect. Somebody else may be writing for you know, a pulp magazine and one is criticized for having a complex sentence structure, but when John Murphy was writing for the New Yorker and other people write for the New Yorker for nonfiction and I have written for the
New Yorker reviews and essays you definitely are aiming for a certain kind of reader but that's a little different from fiction fiction is in its own world and has its own voice and I don't usually think of there being a particular audience for fiction.
How do you
Give assignments or think about giving assignments to students.
Well, I can reach in my drawer and look at some of these assignments. I've always given assignments to introductory writers. So I teach on different levels. I'm teaching Advanced fiction at Rutgers is semester and I taught in The Graduate writing program at NYU and they're all older students, but at Princeton sometimes I have taught introductory writers.
So I give them assignments. They want assignments. They're very happy to have assignments and there and the assignments really work very well. I'll see if I can find some and just read some perfect. We have a textbook and so I assign stories for them to read and for instance one. What assignment is to write to introduce a character.
To read a number of stories which I have assigned and in ethology might be a story by Margaret Atwood is sort of a James Joyce William Faulkner and then to write just a page where the introducing a character and then at the end of the introduction. They have the character say something. So that's not really a story. They don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about writing a story. They're just doing something very basic and then in another assignment I have them right up.
Piece that's like a memoir very sure it doesn't have to be a literal Memoir but it's like a memoir like something that happened when I was six years old when I was 10 years old last week.
Then another assignment which is very difficult for the students and I often don't give a unless I think the students are are up to it. It's mimicry of prose style. First example is to write a few pages in the style of Hemingway. And then write the same story again the same material again in the style of Jack Kerouac.
And then finally in the style HP Lovecraft now, that's an assignment as I said, I don't always give because it's demoralizing for some students. They just cannot do it. So I didn't give it recently I probably gave it a couple of years ago when I have good students that's assignments terrific. They really enjoy mimicking Hemingway and writing a little Hemingway short story and they really enjoyed Jack Kerouac
And they find Lovecraft very challenging but it's sort of like with music. If you have gifted pianist, you could give them assignments and they will do well others are just hopeless and demoralized. So I tried I tried to measure the assignments according to the aptitude of the students but then one assignment that I always give the last assignment in the course would be to write a short story that turns upon moral decision some ethical or moral.
Decision in somebody's life and they do very well with that young people have a natural moral Instinct and they're they're interested in Morality and they want to know what's right and what's wrong and I have other assignments to I mean many I've many different assignments and what one of them I did recently at UC Berkeley. We read Shirley Jackson's the ladder and instead of writing a critique of the story. I said if you want to you can write
Little story from the point of view of one of the care and the lottery a minor character and so they did wonderfully with that how
much of your writing have you for lack of a better term thrown away finished writing could be a short story could be a poem could be anything or never looked at. Once you finished it unpublished. I'd come across mention of I believe you.
So tucking away or getting rid of a fair amount of at least your early work. Do you have any guests on or commentary on on how much of your finished work never gets shown to anyone
else?
Well now I probably publish everything that I do when I was younger and had more material. Sometimes I just didn't like something and I would take it out of circulation now in the in the other room. I could show you a huge stack of short stories. And those are stories that were published in magazines, but I never gather them into a book those go back for a years and maybe one or two of them even won some award like the oh had me reward, but I never felt
That I really wanted to put them into a hardcover collection for one reason or another. I'm not sure why but they are they are there many of them. There are about 300 400 pages of I never
published. This is also a Segway and really just have a handful of additional questions I could keep going but I think just a few more would be really fun for me.
This leads to a question about productivity or it's really a question about a comment that I've read of yours on productivity and that is productivity quote productivity is a relative matter and its really insignificant. What is ultimately important is a writer strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones just as the young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one. Do you have any additional comments on the relationship between volume?
Of writing and enduring quality or if you want to take that question in different directions you could as well, but do you have any thoughts thoughts to add to that?
Well, it's inevitable. If a number of books, some books have come to seem traditionally more important than others that is inevitable. If the H Lawrence wrote a good deal. He's a brilliant short story writer, but probably only a few of his short stories tend to be ontology sized, you know over and over.
Over same with Falkner and with Hemingway to Hemingway wrote many many short stories, but you'll see the same two or three or four stories reprinted quite a bit. They're probably on Jane Austen novels that are Pride and Prejudice and Emma and then you get to Mansfield Park not as many people would read that same with Shakespeare measure for measure just not as popular as Hamlet. It's not as important to play but it has wonderful things in it.
Troilus and Cressida is a fat a very fascinating play of Shakespeare. But if you're only going to teach two or three plays of Shakespeare, you would not be teaching troilus and Cressida you would be teaching Macbeth and Lyra and Hamlet and maybe Othello. Those are the ones that come to the surface but the other place of Shakespeare, I mean every one of them even Titus andronicus they have much to them. He was always a very remarkable play right? So if I written 50 novels, not off.
Denials are going to be admired by by everyone or anyone that's just not the way it is. So some things just seem to come to the surface and maybe there's a perversity of somebody might prefer Faulkner's the Hamlet to Fox News sent the sound and the fury, they might prefer Sanctuary to light in August. But again with Falkner he wrote a lot and some of it is considered the most important writing and American literature in the
20th century but usually just two or three or four titles you
have an incredible body of work novels short story collections poetry volume two plays essays criticism. I mean, the list is extensive the the number of Publications even more so for someone listening if they have no familiarity with your work, do you have any recommended starting points? I know that you could you could probably just as easily pick any number of
Of different pieces of your work, but are there any that come to mind off hand as places if people want to get an idea and appreciation for the range of your
work? Well, of course that depends upon what they're looking for. I have a long novel called blonde which is about the the private life really the interior life of Marilyn Monroe Norma. Jean Baker the person who became Marilyn Monroe, but that novels about 800 page.
Ages long and so some people might feel that just too long. That's one of my favorite novels of my own but then I have novellas that are only like a hundred eighty pages long pursued is a new novel that came out last year. It's really almost like a novella is a short novel. It's probably only about 200 Pages. That's a novel that's more like a suspense psychological suspense novel so that it's a mystery and you're not really sure.
What has happened until the very end, so somebody might prefer a much shorter novel that's driven by a plot blond, which is about Marilyn Monroe isn't that really driven by a plot? It's her life her complete life. I've selected details from her her life, but the main parts of Marilyn Monroe's life are treated in great detail in that novel and then I have a none of them, which is based on my own experience.
Living through the Civil disturbance or a riot of Detroit and July 1967. So if you read them your plunged into Detroit in that era and it's a family novel some people like family novels and I love family novels myself and I write them too. Many of my novels are family novels there about families and usually starting with the older generation and then ending with the focus on the younger this kind of shift in a novel from
One generation to the Next Generation and often my novels will end the very final page or paragraph is in the province of the younger a younger member of the family. We were the maldini's was an Oprah selection. So that's the novel that's more people have read and we were leaving the Mulvaney's than any other novel in mind because it was an Oprah selection. So it's sort of guaranteed. I think like a million copies will sell.
The past that may not be quite like that now with Oprah's Book Club and I have a novel that sort of about the you know, the Vietnam War. I mean the different from subjects and I had many short stories that are gothic like the haunted.
Haunted short stories tales of the grotesque the corn Maiden. These are collections of short stories that are that are surreal or gothic horror literary horror. Some of them have won awards for I like the Bram Stoker award for for literary
horror, are there any particular whether it's short stories novels or otherwise of yours that
There's so many elements that go into the publication and release of a book sometimes things get just overwhelmed by the news cycle. There could be any number of things happening in a any given point in time. Are there any pieces of work that you have published that you are particularly proud of that? You wish had received the same or higher degree of attention, right? You you see you have we were the Mulvaney's like you mentioned that was an Oprah pick and boom all
of a sudden you've got a dozen reprints of this particular work. Are there any others that you're hurt you're particularly proud of and wish had slightly greater visibility when people are citing The better-known Works of
yours. Well, that's hard to answer my novel middle-aged or romance came out that week of 9/11. So that was a disaster but suppose so much in the world is really a disaster, you know in a tragedy that somehow books books of
Action didn't seem that important at the time writing has a way of making its own. It makes its own way somehow. I think there's a sort of
consensus what remains in your mind to be done. I mean you've done so much many people would argue and have argued many lifetimes of other writers you've compressed into your own in terms of work. What are the the items that remain to be done if
If any or does that is that just simply not enter your mind as a as a question. Is it is it really just continuing with the craft as you
have? No, I guess I don't really think in those terms. It's sort of like dreams. We may have had thousands of dreams. But you have let me fall asleep tonight. We'll have one, you know, I'll have a succession of dreams tonight are waiting. So it somehow doesn't matter that you've had dreams in the past. You know, it's the kind of novelty and originality and the intensity and urgency.
A of the other new story in the new the new dream the new novel. We always have stories to tell and we are evolving all the time and we're discovering things as we get older our perspective starts to change. We start losing many people when you start losing people in your own family and people who are very close to you your parents helped to Define you so when your parents pass away you start to
be a slightly different person and many people who are older are thinking back over their lives and they have a new perspective. So they may want to write a memoir women who lose their husbands are so traumatized by that that the sometimes led to write Memoirs. I wrote a Widow's story which I would never have thought I would never wanted to think I'd be writing but I did right there. So you were asking who you know somebody
Wanted to read my writing, where would they begin? Well, some people like Memoirs. So I've who Memoirs widows story which is very raw and a media based on my journal of the first three months of being a widow, which is the most painful grief. It starts to diminish a little bit after that but never really goes away but and then a more of all full lifetime Memoirs the Lost landscape,
Our writers story sort of looking at my looking at my life from the perspective of being a writer but looking at my parents and the farm that I lived on and many people have read that Memoir and they can identify with it.
Well Joyce, this has been so much fun for me. Thank you for writing your heart out. Certainly. Thank you exemplify that and I would love to just ask if there's if there's anything else that you would like to
Say to those people listening any closing comments or any requests of my audience anything at
all. Well, if you are if anyone is listening as a writer, I think you basically just have to do a lot of reading and read what you like to read and read for pleasure and often it's a good idea to read a number of books by the same writer. Like when I was in high school, I just fell in love with Falkner and I read virtually everything of Falkner. So I was like the only person in my
age group who was reading Falkner, but that really helped me immeasurably later on. I went through a DH Lawrence phase and nevikov phase. I read a lot of Hemingway where a lot of Virginia Woolf the sort of like phase is that you go through if you're a writer that's very natural and very good just go out and buy all the paperbacks, you know of Virginia Woolf and just spend a few months Reading Virginia Woolf ever change your life completely.
I love that.
That is excellent advice. I'm doing that with Barry Lopez right now. Wonderful. It's just incredible. Yeah just recently passed away. But what and what an amazing amazing amazing human being an amazing writer Joyce. I really I did not have the opportunity to interview him. I actually read of wolves and Men which so impressed me and I then started to look into reaching out to him and I found out he was
In hospice, and he passed away just a week into my reading of wolves and men just a few weeks
ago. Yeah, that's so sad. How old was he?
He was I'm not going to Hazard a guess. I mean, he wasn't he wasn't extraordinarily young because I know that I mean he must have him I'm just imagining that he was probably my
Age when he published of wolves in Men in I want to see 1978. I'm 43 now. So so you wouldn't have been yeah, I think he would have been been older but I believe believe it was cancer. I can't recall the cause but but just getting acquainted with Barry and reading I'm about to start his Memoir what you might consider a memoir. It's really wonderful. I mean, I do feel like reading.
His collected works could really change how not not just how I view the craft of writing but how I look at life just the lens through which I look at life and your work is done that for many people as well. So I want to thank you for
that. Thank you. Yeah, that's what we all hope for. Yeah. Okay. Well goodbye.
Yeah. Thanks so much Choice. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take.
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