5 Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates’ “Faith of a Writer”

Joyce Carol Oates is an incredible writer of literary fiction. She’s written 58 novels so far, she’s won piles of awards, and she’s active on X. I’m currently working my way through her impressively lengthy novel Blonde about Marilyn Monroe. Amid the many hats she wears, she’s been an Artist-in-Residence at NYU, and has given many readings at the Lilian Vernon House over the years.

I just recently graduated from NYU’s low-residency MFA, but since I live in Brooklyn, I attend the reading series as often as possible. She’s so well known in the NYU writing community that we call her JCO. I attended her reading of Blonde and loved hearing about her writing process during the Q&A after the reading.

Not long after, I was assigned The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art as a part of my reading list in my first semester of the program. I’ve picked through craft books before, but as you might guess from JCO’s prolific writing career, her book on the topic is phenomenal. I’m going to share a few quotes from the book that have particularly stuck with me.

“Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject. Your ‘forbidden’ passions are likely to be the fuel for your writing.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

This message in the chapter To a Young Writer jumped out at me since I love speculative fiction. I’m captivated by the intersection of science fiction and literary fiction. I was nervous upon embarking into my MFA that this literary love of mine might make me a little bit of an outcast with my novel jumping between Earth and colonies out in space.

But fortunately, people have been excited to read something a little different. I’ve also found this to be profoundly true in my writing practice; you need to love your subject to keep writing and revising.

“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.’”

— JCO

I’ve been thinking a lot about how writing and my mental health intersect. I have my writing that I approach as a professional practice, but then I have all sorts of mental health journaling I do as well. Even though they exist in separate camps in my mind, the more I try to capture themes and topics I’m passionate about in my creative/professional work, the more my personal struggles are explored as well.

To me, that’s the darker spectrum of what JCO is talking about in this passage. When I’m writing about things that really matter to me, like enmeshed families and intergenerational trauma, it is my buried selves working things out through my art.

Your reasons to write don’t have to be dark and heavy. I do sometimes write fun, lighter things as well, as a palette cleanser. But I do think there’s something to taking those dark struggles and working through them in your craft. It is so integral to who we are as people that it can make showing up to your work consistently a little more feasible.

“To write is to invade another’s space, if only to memorialize it; to write is to invade angry censure from those who don’t write, or who don’t write in quite the way you do, for whom you may seem a threat.”

— JCO

I loved the perspective JCO took in this quote. It’s so defiant and determined. I particularly resonated with the idea of invading angry censure. I grew up in and later left an enmeshed family where the norm was to project an illusion of perfection and hide any hint of dirty laundry from everyone, even close relatives like grandparents. If my father read even a fraction of what I’ve written about my mental health journey over the years, his short temper would go volcanic.

We often need to get things off of our chests. We, as humans, aren’t meant to suffer in silence about everything. Since our greatest hurts as often the things we explore through characters in fiction, we often have to be the voice for those who have endured similar but haven’t written about them.

“The artist is born damned, and struggles through his (or her) life to achieve an ever-elusive redemption, by way of art; a sense of one’s incompleteness or inadequacy fuels the instinct for ceaseless invention, as in extension of the very self’s perimeters.”

— JCO

I love this quote, though this does come from the camp of tortured writers. But also, look at JCO’s bibliography — she is both brilliant and prolific.

I personally am working toward approaching my practice with a little more gentleness. I’m trying to dismantle that pervasive sense of inadequacy. While I want to have a healthier relationship with my work than I do now, this quote still deeply resonated with me.

“I have to tell is the writer’s first thought; the second thought is How do I tell it? From our reading, we discover how the various solutions to these questions are; how stamped with an individual’s personality. For it’s at the juncture of private vision and the wish to create a communal, public vision that art and craft merge.”

— JCO

This is where we move from the emotional of why we write to how we should write. I’ve been writing for nearly twenty years (yikes, I’m getting old!) and remember the days when I wrote with absolute literary abandon. I still do sometimes, usually when I specifically commit myself to freewriting. When I sit down to edit and rewrite, that’s when I get into the nitty-gritty of asking myself those how questions.

Being “stamped with an individual’s personality” is such a beautiful notion, too. This is where voice and tone really come through in anything you write. It’s part of that equation of how to tell something effectively; discovering where to let your voice and uniqueness shine through.

These are quotes that stuck out to me, but there’s so much great content in this book.

I will confess — I was slightly disappointed in this book; you can tell this was a bit cobbled together. It’s pulling together different essays JCO has written over the years and some are less focused on the book’s thesis of being a craft book.

Nonetheless, JCO is such a brilliant and skilled writer that every essay imparts useful information, even if some do feel like they get a hair mired in literary analysis. You can tell that these were published in deeply scholarly literary journals of academia. There’s absolutely value to reading this kind of analysis from a brilliant writer, but some of the essays just go a little deeper into different works of fiction than I expected them to in a craft book. JCO drips writing knowledge though — I imagine you could find yourself learning from her even in small talk.

I strongly suggest buying a copy of this book. Despite my earlier (very small) disappointment about the compilation of this book, it’s completely worth reading. It’s interesting to learn more about JCO’s life, her approaches to the craft, and her individual writing process. These quotes are a tiny slice of all the wisdom in this slim book’s pages.