YouSaid · the spoken record

Joyce Carol Oates

lines on the record: 56
first: 2021-02-10
most recent: 2021-02-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, 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 Faulkner and I read virtually everything of Faulkner. So I was like the only person in my age group who was reading Faulkner. But that really helped me immeasurably. Later on, I went through a D.H. Lawrence phase, a Nebuchadov phase. I read a lot of Hemingway. I read a lot of Virginia Wolf. There's sort of like phases that you go through. If you're a writer, that's very natural and very good. Just go out and buy all the paperbacks of Virginia and your wolf and just spend a few months reading Virginia Wolf. That would change your life completely.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writer's story, sort of 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.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 sometimes led to write memoirs. I wrote a widow's story, which I would never have thought, I would never have wanted to think I'd be writing, but I did write that. So you were asking who somebody wanted to read my writing, where would they begin? Some people like memoirs, so I've written two memoirs, widow story, which is very raw and immediate 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 it never really goes away. And then more of all full lifetime memoirs, the lost landscape.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I don't really think in those terms. It's sort of like dreams. We may have had thousands of dreams, but when we fall asleep tonight, we'll have one, you know, I 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 of the new story, 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 help to define you. So when your parents pass away, you start to be a slightly different person. And many people who are older are”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's hard to answer. My novel middle aged romance came out the week of 9 11. So that was a disaster. But there was so much in the world that was really a disaster, you know, and a tragedy that somehow books of fiction 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 set of consensus”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And often my novels will end the very final page or paragraph is in the province of the younger member of a family. We were the Mulvanis was an opera selection. So that's the novel. The more people have read the Mulvaneys than any other novel of mine because it was an Oprah selection. So it sort of guaranteed, I think, like a million copies will sell in the past. It may not be quite like that now with Oprah's book club. And then I have a novel that's sort of about the Vietnam War. I mean, the different subjects. And I have 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 surreal or gothic. Horror, literary horror, some of them have won awards for the Bram Stoker Award for Literary Horror.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is about Marilyn Monroe, is not really driven by a plot. It's her life. Her complete life, I've selected details from her life, but the main parts of Marilyn Monroe's life are treated in great detail in that novel. And then I have them, which is based on my own experience living through the civil disturbance or riot of Detroit and July 1967. So if you read them, you're 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. They're about families and usually starting with the older generation and then ending with the focus on the younger just kind of shift in the novel from one generation to the next generation.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course, that depends upon what they're looking for. I have a long novel called Blonde, which is about the private life, really, the interior life of Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jean Baker, the person who became Marilyn Monroe. But that novel is about 800 pages long, and so some people might feel that's just too long. That's one of my favorite novels of my own. But then I have novellas that are only like 180 pages long. Pursuit is a new novel that came out last year. It's really almost like a novella. It's 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.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three plays of Shakespeare, you would not be teaching Troy Lus and Cresida. You would be teaching Macbeth and Lear 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 is always a very remarkable playwright. So if I've written 50 novels, not all 50 novels are going to be admired by everyone or by 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 somebody might prefer Faulkner's, the Hamlet to Faulkner's sound and the fury. They might prefer sanctuary to light in August. But again, with Faulkner, he wrote a lot and some of it is considered the most important writing in American literature in the 20th century.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's inevitable if a number of books, some books have come to seem traditionally more important than others. That is inevitable. If DH Lawrence wrote a good deal, he's a brilliant short story writer, but probably only a few of his short stories tend to be anthologized over and over. Same with Faulkner and with Hemingway, too. Hemingway wrote many, many short stories, but you'll see the same two or three or four stories reprinted quite a bit. There are probably 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 a play, but it has wonderful things in it. Troy Lis and Crescent is a fascinating play of Shakespeare. But if you're only going to teach two”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 other room, I could show you a huge stack of short stories. And those are stories that were published in magazines, but I never gathered them into a book. Those go back for years. And maybe one or two of them even won some award, like the OHEME Award. 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 there they are. There are many of them there. Probably about 300, 400 pages.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 interested in morality. And they want to know what's right and what's wrong. And I have other assignments too. I mean, many, I have many different assignments. And one of them I did recently at UC Burke, we read Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. And instead of writing a critique of the story, I said, if you want to, you can write a little story from the point of view of one of the characters in the lottery, a minor character. And so they did wonderfully with that.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 enjoy Jack Kerouac. And they find Lovecraft very challenging. But it's sort of like with music, if you have gifted pianists, you could give them assignments and they will do well. Others are just hopeless and demoralized. So I tried to measure the assignments according to”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another assignment which is very difficult for the students, and I often don't give it unless I think the students are up to it. It's a 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 Kerowac.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a textbook, and so I assign stories for them to read. And for instance, one assignment is to write, to introduce a character. To read a number of stories which I have assigned in an anthology might be a story by Margaret Atwood, a story by James Joyce, William Faulkner, and then to write just a page where they're 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. They don't have to worry about writing a story. They're just doing something very basic. And then in another assignment, I have them write a piece that's like a memoir, very short. 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.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I convicted my drawer and look at some of these assignments. I've always skipped an assignment to introductory writers. So I teach on different levels. I'm teaching advanced fiction at Rutgers this 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 the assignments really work very well. I'll see if I can find some and just read some.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essays are really classics. I mean, they're wonderful. So writing for The New Yorker for him was perfect. Somebody else may be writing for a pulp magazine and one is criticized for having a complex sentence structure. But when John Mafee 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 it has its own voice. And I don't usually think of there being a particular audience for fiction.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 famous, you know, they're very, very careful. So John McFee writing for the New Yorker, he would write a certain kind of work. If he were writing for TV guide, you know, or Time magazine or the New York Times book review would have been very different. That's a good example and non-fiction of aiming for a 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's”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The work itself has its own integrity. You have to express the word. Each work is different. I mean, if you think of one novel of mine, they're really quite different from one another. They're totally different and the voices tend to be different. They're different in each novel. So there will be no way that I could be writing for one audience. I'm not really thinking of an audience Can you suggest anyone now of mine that you've read that you might have a particular question about the tone or the voice? Because I can't seek so much in abstract terms.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. I think it's pretty self evident. There's an integrity to the work, you have to express the work and you shouldn't be curtailing it or shaping it. To impress some person.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first pseudonym was Rosamond 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 in movement and structure without much exposition or background, not as much description. Each chapter seen in a movie moving forward. These were tonally different. And so I just wanted to have a Outlet for a sort of imaginative writing that wasn't so much in the mainstream or my usual writing, my conventional or whatever my own writing is. It's a little more maybe mainstream. And this was more like suspense, psychological suspense navels.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it 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. I did begin writing under different names. One name was J.C. Smith. I had Marion Raymond Smith, so I used JC Smith as a name for a while and was JC Oates, which is not necessarily a woman, kind of androgynous person. And finally just settled on Joyce Carroll Oat Though for a while I had a couple of pseudonyms, but they were women, they were women's names.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could be a parent. You know, the people have many unconscious motives, but this can be impediments. And I think there's a natural voice.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is probably aimed for people who were English majors and who were reading the great classics. You know, if you're reading Paradise Lost or Great Plays of Shakespeare or Middle March or Ulysses, you're overwhelmed. Those audiences also no longer exist. So you're writing for your own time. You're writing for your own generation usually. Maybe people a little older than you are and then people younger than you are. But basically The audience that revered Paradise Lost is long gone. So this probably doesn't even have to be told to people in the year 2021. That's mainly it, that you're writing for your own time. Sometimes people are writing to impress a parent. Sometimes people are trying to be outstanding and distinguish to impress someone who's not even living any longer.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About sincerity. Well, Being funny, I think he's recoiling 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 there's a lot of preaching. There used to be a good deal of preaching and didacticism in prose fiction. He was probably relating to that, so that kind of sincerity is just Is very boring. I mean, one doesn't want to hear much of that. Literature should be interesting. 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 as something that Bernan Malam had said, I'm really quoting him. It's just right, you know, right and right and right and don't hold back.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try to use common sense. I'm going through a novel now that I've gone through probably 10 times. It's in the computer. So I go through, I 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 let I've been working on it for a year off and on. And it has metamorphosed quite a bit from the beginning. The main structure was always there and the main character was about the sentences. The sentence has always changed. But I'll be done with that by Monday so that I'll send that to my editor and I'm not going to change that anymore.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time I look at a page, I can revise it. 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 Finnegan's Wake because he was like that. He was experimental. And every morning you wake up with some new ideas and you could write another novel, the whole different novel would come out of your mood that morning. But we can't allow ourselves to do that. That's just too fantastical.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, but some pages in 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, they're probably Replicating what they've done before. I know actors. Almost exactly and precisely do the same performance night after night. So they've sort of, it's internalized in their brains and they just have to go through it another time. But with writing, every time I...”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Painting, drawing. These arts are done on our own time. You can take as long as you want. Nobody's watching you. 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. I did that once. I took piano lessons for quite a while, for about 11 years and I was playing. 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 always find that overwhelmingly terrifying.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just don't have it. If I did, I don't think I would want to be a writer, I would have. Have tremendous anxiety if I were a performing artist like a pianist and I had to give a recital, I would be overwhelmed with anxiety, or at least I think I would be, I suppose by practicing every day, by playing three, four hours every day, you get to a point where the technique is just totally internalized and you don't have to think about it. And I would be anxious if I were an athlete you know, competing with other athletes. In real time, with people watching, you know, I would find that immensely anxiety provoking. But writing or”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I usually focus on my energy on one project, but I've been working on a novel 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's 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 edit and manuscript for another book that's coming out. I'll take you know a week off from my novel to work on that”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's nothing wrong with that, but women find it very hard to say 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 to lots of these things, but it's really if you are careful custodian of your own time like Philip Roth, for instance, or Flaubert, you would never give away a whole lot of your time. Philip Roth would never, he wouldn't do one hundredth of the things that I do. He was too smart. He knew how to take care of his own privacy.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I definitely feel that you create your mood by working. And I have a sort of work ethic. I come from a 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, life doesn't have to be so overthought. You don't have to wait to be inspired. Just start working, particularly, I think, first go for our long run and a nice walk and think about what you're going to do come home and start working, but try not to be interrupted. That's the problem. Most people are living in families or they're 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 you of energy. For women, that's always been a problem. Women are on your church.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 years, like in the decades past, there were male professors who told women writers that their subject matter wasn't literary. I mean, even had a well-known women writers who went on to become famous and when the Pulitzer Prize, they were discouraged by some of these remarks. I would never think it and I would never say those things. I don't consider anything that subject. For fiction, if it's treated well. Try to get writers to write about what they really care about.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most writers who are in my workshop have already been writing for a while. Especially at NYU, they're graduate writers, graduate student. So they know what they're doing and they have a project and they have their own stories based on their own lives, experience, imagination. So I'm a good reader. I mean, I'm a sympathetic reader and editor for what they're writing. I don't tell them what to write. 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, a young writer might feel, well, they liked what I wrote, but they didn't quite understand it. Or they thought it should be longer or they thought it was too long. It's a kind of consensus of editorial suggestions in a typical writing workshop. I mainly see my role as”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had been encouraged earlier in preceding years by various publications or winning an award or something. So I've had been encouraged. I tried to encourage younger writers too. I endowed a number of awards, fiction awards at different universities for young writers.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, it was very profound. I was just a very young writer. I had had a number of stories in the best American short stories and the O'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 know, I was about 22 years old, I think, when I received notice that my manuscripts had 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 overwhelmed. I could hardly believe it. And it was, of course, a milestone. It's tremendously encouraging.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I probably never had that feeling. I did have teachers who signaled me out and said very nice things to me, and I had a professor at Syracuse who even read 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 to his parents. Now, I don't remember exactly what I said, but mimicked 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 overdo. So I don't, I have not actually done it since.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They may want to write some satire, but by no means should they try to be experimental because they're not ready for it. Whereas 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 different kinds of writing. But because he had an experimental personality, I probably gave him some, I probably gave him Kafka to read. I don't remember exactly what it would have been.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I remember when Jonathan was very young, he made just a better freshman at Princeton. He was already an experimental writer, an 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 older people. Most young writers write their first novel, which is very autobiographical, but Jonathan 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 may want to write about their girlfriend or boyfriend and something in the first person that's funny that's droll or witty.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, the pull of the unconscious, I think, is very powerful. And the more we can let that fuel what we're doing, the more potent it is. Also, the more enjoyable for the writer.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surreal landscape. Every night we sleep and the perimeters of realism are dissolved, you know, with great, great extravagant energy. I think in all sorts of images and improbable things sweep into our minds when we're dreaming. So I like to write in a surreal mode too. And if I'm revising work of fiction that's surreal, I consider that so very exciting because each time I sit down to write or to revise, I will get some golding, some nudging, some hints, something surfacing from the unconscious so that a sentence that may be relatively simple by the time I revise it might be a full page long because something else is Is pushing at or pulling at it. It's like an octopus with many, many legs or limbs or arms or”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, 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 my writing is social realism and everything in the novel is authentic. It 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 the actual so that one can walk in Dublin and sort of walk through the day of Ulysses. And that's one way of writing. There's a poetry in realism. There's a beauty and just in things as they are. However, half of our, maybe more than half of our lives are spent in dreams and the unconscious. So that's a”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Artists who don't revise or visual artists may make sketches, they may do several variants of the same scene. And apart from a 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 work on it anyway and revise it. But I think Mozart was probably the most spontaneous creator. But almost nobody's like that. I mean, Beethoven worked very hard revising and just about everybody that I ever heard of.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So subsequent revision, I revise all the time. I revising a Navil 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 in 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%. Of art, I think there have been very few.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think a revision is so much fun. It's so exciting. Me, the first draft is like material, and then the second draft, the revision, is my use of that material.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty definite. It's like knowing you get in your car and you're going to drive to San Francisco, and you want to go to San Francisco, you don't want to wind up in Salt Lake City or somewhere in Montana, you're sort of aiming your vehicle for a destination. So it's just sensible to plan that ahead of time.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's just say there's a hill. I live in a semi-rural area. There's a hill near where I live, a country road. At the top of the hill, I've gotten so many ideas. I run over there. It must be about a mile or maybe a mile and a half. 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 hill. And I need to be alone with my thoughts.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if I don't go running every day, my writing doesn't work as well. It really depends upon this kinetic release and energy.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a different word. I have changed titles a few times. Ideally, if you have the title first, then you have a vision. So until you work out the structure of a long work, it's not a good idea to begin. 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 and a sense of where you're going, it's much easier. I spend 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.”
2021-02-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #497: Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT