Write Your Heart Out

I recently reread a book of essays by Joyce Carol Oates called The Faith of a Writer.  I first read it four years ago after picking it out of the bargain bin at a bookstore.  All I could remember about it from that first reading is that JCO went to school in a one room school house.

I love to read what writers have to say about writing and about their lives as writers.  I am instantly turned off by writers who can’t articulate what it is they spend their lives doing.  Yet, when they do open up, it’s often disappointing.  At least to a girl who has a bad habit of putting people on pedestals.  It’s not just that writers are often unstable and addicted, a stereotype that I think is becoming less true with every new generation, but even the most articulate and present among them can’t say the magic words to make writing easy. ¹  It doesn’t matter how much you know, there will always be anxiety as you stare at the screen or put your pen to paper and never a guarantee that anything worthwhile will come out.

Worse than the missing magic words are the broad statements that ring false.  Uncritical leaps from the personal to the universal about the only way to write and the role of The Writer in society.  Disparaging remarks about the reading public.

More than any broad philosophy I can pick up and run with, I pick up small pieces of insight, often the few encouraging words offered, and I add them to what I already know about writing, what I feel to be true.

So, here are a few quotes from Joyce Carol Oates, a writer I admire at least as much as any other.  As many qualifications as she makes to every statement about how prolific she is, the number of books and articles with her name and the name of her pseudonyms speak for themselves.  On top of which, she is a professor, which endears me to her even more, because while I dream of being a novelist, what I’m working toward is being a professor.  I want both.

“Write your heart out. Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject . . . Read widely, and without apology.  Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”

I must admit that sometimes I get caught up in wanting to write what is clever and unique and artful and worthy of admiration.  I will go through what I’ve written and strip out everything cheesy and cliche until all that’s left is boring and emotionless.  What interests me about fiction is feelings and relationship dynamics.  And as much as I am impressed by Catch-22, I also love Boy Crazy Stacey.

“Your struggle with your buried self, or selves, yields your art; these emotions are the fuel that drives your writing and makes possible hours, days, weeks, months, and years of what will appear to others, at a distance, as “work.”  Without these ill-understood drives you might be a superficially happy person, and a more involved citizen of your community, but it isn’t likely that you will ever produce anything of substance.”

As much as it suits me, I’m not certain that all writers must be tortured and introspective, so I don’t know that this is the only way to produce anything of substance, but I think it is my way of producing substantial writing.  Who you are has everything to do with what you write.  You don’t have to pretend to be happy. You can be real and work out yourself in writing.

“Write for your own time, if not for your own generation exclusively.  You can’t write for “posterity”–it doesn’t exist.  You can’t write for a departed world.  You may be addressing, unconsciously, an audience that doesn’t exist; you may be trying to please someone who won’t be pleased, and who isn’t worth pleasing.”

We like to critique art for not standing up to the test of time, but if you take on the impossible task of trying to be everything to everyone in every time, you’re likely to write something very bland that’s not meaningful to anyone in any time.  If you want depth, then you have to write what you know.  What’s interesting about JCO is the specifically American, 20th century problems she addresses.

“The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.”

If it’s in your head, you have to write it.  Writing a novel is so hard, but you have to do it anyway.

“For what we can make of our own experiences, including even our ambivalent feelings about ourselves, is as legitimate a subject as any for fiction.”

You only have to look closely at the lives of a few famous writers to realize you don’t have to have yourself figured out in order to write about life.  Thank goodness writing about perfect people is not the thing to do.

“I have to tell is the writer’s first thought; the second is how do I tell it? From our reading, we discover how various the solutions to these problems are; how stamped with an individual’s personality.”

The how do I tell it I find so hard.  The scenes play in my head, the emotions are there too, but it just never goes down that smoothly.  And, also, maybe I can stop worrying about all of my characters seeming so autobiographical.  I can’t stand outside myself.

“Writers often have a very blurred conception of how their work is perceived by others, and what their work actually is.”

At the risk of sounding braggy and insecure, I’ll say that I have been praised for my writing for a long time and I have never understood why anyone likes it.  To me, it is tight, but otherwise nothing special.  I know that my style is simple and I like clear writing, but I usually cannot predict how people will react to my writing, my fiction least of all.  More like, my fiction not at all.

“The more we are hurt, the more we seek solace in the imagination. Ironically, conversely, the more imaginative work we create in solitude, and publish, the more likely we are to be hurt by critical and public reaction to it; and so, again, we retreat into the imagination–assuring that more hurt will ensue.”

This depresses me and comforts me at the same time.  When I get burned, I tend to retreat, but it fuels my imagination and motivates me to write.  It’s easier to write with big feelings.

1. I’m talking most about fiction, which is what I find most difficult. [↩]