A Conversation With Joyce Carol Oates on the 4-Part Formula for Writer Success (Killer Writers)

I first met Joyce Carol Oates when she was the John Seigenthaler Legends Award winner at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. She is a prolific writer, a modern-day legend, and a professor at NYU and Princeton, where her fortunate students learn from one of the best living writers today. 

(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

When her new collection of short stories came out, Flint Kill Creek, I reached out to her to see if we could chat about the new book, writing in general, and how to prepare oneself for a career as a writer. My goal, because she is both a prolific writer and a teacher, was to see if there was some Holy Grail that writers could discover to create a successful career. Fortunately, we may have stumbled upon it. 

“Joyce, I read your new book. It’s a wonderful collection of short stories. And before you ask, I loved them all. And before you ask, my favorite was probably ‘Friend of My Heart.’”

“Oh, that’s interesting!”

“That was the one that resonated the most with me, probably because of my college teaching days, but there’s not a stinker in the bunch. Every one of them is good.”

“Thank you. ‘A Friend of My Heart’ is very close to my heart. It’s a story that doesn’t really have any violence in it. It’s one of the more normal stories. The woman who tells the story is an adjunct English teacher, and it’s a normal world. Just two women.”

“It’s a good study of backstories and development, as all your stories are.”

“In the world that I live in, which is the university world, there are so many very, very smart, deserving people who, for some reason, wind up being adjuncts. They don’t have tenure. They don’t have health insurance. They’re kind of on the periphery of life, but there’s no real reason. I mean, it’s not that they’re not deserving, so something happens in somebody’s life, and they get derailed, and I’m very sympathetic with people like that.”

“I know many. Interestingly, you say something happens, and they get derailed. I find that throughout your character’s lives. Let’s get back to that in a moment, but I want to ask you about your inspiration and start laying the groundwork for our discussion. We’re all inspired by something. So, what books, authors, or experiences sparked your passion for writing initially? Something that has carried you to where you are today?”

“I was given a beautiful copy of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass when I was about nine years old. That was memorable. My grandmother gave it to me, and I don’t think anybody could have anticipated its profound influence on my life. I thoroughly loved the books and memorized both. I had these big nets in my mind: Alice is meeting Jabberwocky, Alice is meeting Humpty Dumpty, and Alice is meeting the Red Queen and the White Queen. All these kinds of big nets in my mind, and when I look at the books now—the actual book is over on my shelf—everything comes back to me. It’s just some strange, deep imprint in my brain. Of course, you have little else in your brain when you’re nine, so things lodge very deeply.”

“Said a bit like Lewis Carroll. Giving you that book is one of those things we discussed earlier. That one gift sent you on the road.”

“It did. I look upon the world today as an adult, pretty much as a world of absurdity. I don’t mean it flippantly. I don’t mean talking superficially, but there’s a lot of inborn absurdity in the world. It’s not a logical world or a world that makes a lot of sense. People behave very irrationally as individuals but even more irrationally, I think, as nations. I think it was Nietzsche who said that madness in individuals is relatively rare, but in nations, it’s quite common. I thought that was a good insight.”

“There are a lot of Mad Hatters about.”

“People taking advantage of other people. They are what Jonathan Swift called knaves, and the people who are taking advantage of them are, quote, ‘Fools.’ Jonathan Swift said, ‘The world’s divided in between knaves and fools.’ Now we like to think that we might be in the middle. You know that we’re not manipulating people, taking advantage of them, but we don’t want to think that we are being manipulated. I think there is a center band of decent, well-intentioned people who mean well and mean to help others, but the task of keeping civilization going seems difficult because so many people are destructive. So, in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the absurdity of adults is the norm. Alice is a little girl. She’s only seven but she’s a common sense, no-nonsense, British girl, and she sees through the hypocrisy and subterfuge. For me to read that when I was just a little girl myself was eye-opening. I had never experienced children judging adults, let alone seeing them in such sharply analytical ways. I carry that attitude through my whole life. And then, when I was in high school, I was reading Henry David Thoreau, who is also very skeptical and questions the establishment and the very basis of the compromises that people make in adult life. I think I also read Edgar Allan Poe when I was quite young, maybe 12 to 13. Then I read Lovecraft. Somewhere around that time I probably read Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, and I read some Hemingway when I was in high school, particularly the early short stories, which I still love. Then I discovered Faulkner, probably in high school and college. And Kafka and Thomas Mann made a strong impression on me. When I was in college and a young assistant professor, I was writing about Thomas Mann, Stendhal, and Flaubert, and so they’ve all been probably in some strange way all influences, but Alice in Wonderland probably is as much of an influence as anything.”

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“You mention these authors and books. I’m thinking back on your work, your writing, and to some degree, you write about the absurdities of adulthood.”

“Yes, each one of my novels takes up some moral issue, sometimes more than one. I get deeply immersed in it. What I’m writing about now, to me, is emotionally grueling. I’m way far from finishing this novel, but what does one do if you know that someone is molesting a child? A mother might be doing something to her own child, and you know about it, but you don’t really have proof, and it’s a moral quandary because you can’t make accusations against people without getting into a lot of trouble, yet not to do anything is very upsetting. I am writing about that difficult, ambiguous area. It’s not crime fiction. It’s more like a mystery or thriller kind of fiction.”

“I’m thinking about your stories, too. We were talking about the adjunct professor, but in “Flint Kill Creek”—I don’t want to do any spoilers—towards the end, something happens that causes grief. And then in, I think it’s “***”, just one little step changes the entire trajectory of one’s life. We are a mass of plot points.”

“Yes, the story with the asterisks is based on some things, like sometimes you have something marked on a calendar, but you’ve forgotten what it is. Sometimes, I discover something, like 3 p.m., and I don’t have any other information. Or a Zoom call coming at 11 a.m. on a Monday, and I’ve sort of forgotten who’s calling. I think we all have that experience. So that was the inspiration for that.”

“And those little moments for characters and people change lives. You’ve read a lot, but how pivotal is upper formal education for a writer, like English MFA programs? How pivotal is that to a writer?”

“I think it facilitates the career. For instance, in writing workshops, people read text from one another. If you’re reading a story by somebody, and you don’t know what happened because it’s too elliptical or not explained, then that comes out in the discussion. The writer hears that maybe five people didn’t know what happened. That’s something to know about. But if you’re working on your own, you can go ahead in a blind, intuitive way, not getting an objective, critical perspective. You can lose a lot of time with that because you have a manuscript that you think is finished. You send it to editors or agents, and they’re not getting something, or they like it, but they don’t quite understand the ending, so that could take years of your life, whereas, in a workshop, one workshop will tell you the major problem is clarity. Sometimes a title isn’t so good. I’ll ask a writing student, ‘Do you have any other titles?’ We’ll talk about the titles and how important they are. Some people can’t think of good titles. Other people have titles that are good, but they’re not appropriate for the book. All these things that come out in a friendly, constructive conversation could be very helpful.”

“As a professor and a working writer, what do you view as the essential writing skills you think your students should have mastered when they leave in order to pursue a career as a writer?”

“I wouldn’t say there’s any essential writing skills that anybody has because everybody’s different. Some writers are very poetic and somewhat surreal and hallucinatory, others are much more spare in a kind of Hemingway manner, but I wouldn’t say there’s any one that’s preferable.”

“I meet so many writers who don’t have time to read, and I’m thinking, ‘Then I’m not sure you have time to write.’”

“Oh, that’s so true. I read almost a book a day. I hate to say it, but I wake up very early, sometimes like six a.m., and I don’t want to get up yet because it’s pitch black and the house is very empty, and my cats are usually with me in bed, so I’ll just put on the light and read an entire novel in a couple of hours. Then, around eight a.m., I’ll get up and start doing my own work. I do a lot of reading of poetry online. Oh, that’s wonderful. But on my bedside table, I have paperback books and galleys, books that will be published next year, and I’ll just sort of reach for something, look at it, and maybe spend the next hour just reading—no purpose to it. I’m just reading.”

“Do you recommend analyzing specific genres, styles, or periods for writers? Or just read.”

“It depends on who you are. I think if you’re interested in a subject, you should do research on the subject, like nonfiction, and then you might want to set your novel in that place or with that kind of activity. The one thing about a novel that a novel can do that other works can’t really do is to give a sense of verisimilitude, like in a particular place, a particular time, particular way of life. Joseph Finder is a writer of thrillers and mysteries, and he’s focused on the financial world and with some connection to Russian oligarchs. His next novel is called The Oligarch’s Daughter. When you read a novel by Joseph Finder, you’re not just reading a story with a plot and some suspense. You’re reading about a world of finance and legal connections and betrayals, and so forth. That’s one thing a novel can do. It can provide interesting information to people who are absorbing it as they’re reading a story. In fact, the word novel meant the news. You’re getting the news from a book. Centuries ago, people didn’t have television and radios. Of course, they didn’t have computers or cell phones. They got their news from books, and sometimes fiction and nonfiction were mixed together. People were learning about the world by reading. Today, there’s the same impulse. When James Michener was popular, his big, long novels, they were all researched. People would read about Hawaii and learn a lot about Hawaii or the South Pacific, and you know it was a way that people were learning things. And that’s still true. I have some students at NYU who write about interesting things. One of them is a young woman. She’s writing about the gaming world. About girls and young women who are gamers, because that’s a man’s world. Fascinating. I didn’t know any of this. I have another young woman writing about stand-up comedy in New York, and mostly that’s a male world, too, though there are some women. But if you read their books, you’re sort of taken into an interesting world that many people don’t know about.”

“So, we’ve got writing and reading a good deal. Are there other practices a want-to-be writer should be doing other than those two? Investigating something or exploring something?”

“I always say read where your heart takes you, where your instincts lead you. I do a lot of reading that’s spontaneous. I’ll sit down in a library, find a book I’m interested in, and start reading. I spend a lot of my time just reading. I was always like that as a girl, too. Maybe most writers and readers are like that. I do reread. I often reread D. H. Lawrence. I find him very inspiring. I have reread so much of Kafka. I reread James Joyce, John Updike, Saul Bellow. I do a lot of rereading Emily Dickinson. I have probably read her poems a thousand times.”

“Do you have advice for writers who get slapped in the face while trying to progress?”

“I think people tend to go forward and keep trying. As a young writer, I would have many stories out in the mail. It was a different world where we had to send things out in manila envelopes. We didn’t have an online way of sending things, so I might have 12 stories out. When you have 12 stories out, one or two might likely be accepted. It’s sort of like fishermen. Sometimes they have a number of lines out, so the more that you try, the more likely you are to have something good happen. If you invest all your energy in just one thing, like a really long novel, that’s probably not a good idea for a young writer. It’s too focused on one thing.”

“So for people starting out, basically, we’ve just summed up, read, write, and send it out.”

“Yes. And if you can go to writing conferences and just kind of meet people and take a course, that’s very positive.”

“Read, write, send it out plenty, and go to writer’s conferences. There’s the formula. And who better from than Joyce Carol Oates?”

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Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel Them. https://celestialtimepiece.com/