Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don’t vote. They often don’t elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they’re not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That’s a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch’s strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like ‘The Scream.’ Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
I don’t teach literature from my perspective as ‘Joyce Carol Oates.’ I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I’m teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort – these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.
I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and ‘the life of the mind’ – and now, such subjects have become my life.
Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: ‘Keep trying, don’t give up, don’t be discouraged, don’t pay attention to detractors.’ Everyone knows this.
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
I consider tragedy the highest form of art.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it’s not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
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