{"id":3382,"date":"2014-11-16T08:31:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-16T13:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3382"},"modified":"2014-11-16T08:31:39","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T13:31:39","slug":"joyce-carol-oates-not-in-a-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3382","title":{"rendered":"Joyce Carol Oates: \u201cNot in a Car!\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tracy,<\/a>

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib (photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

The most specific piece of writing advice I gleaned at the Princeton University event celebrating Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s teaching career last week was this: Never let your characters have a conversation while riding in a car. Her former students laughed in a way that suggested they\u2019d heard this one\u2014and other clich\u00e9-avoidance tips\u2014before, more than once.<\/p>\n

The event included two panels involving 10 of Oates\u2019s former students\u2014all successfully published writers today\u2014who offered wide-ranging reminiscences about their experiences with their teacher and mentor. In last week\u2019s First Draft blog post, I collected their thoughts on what she taught them about \u201cbeing a writer.\u201d They also let the audience glimpse a bit of what they learned from her about the craft of writing.<\/p>\n

Julie Sarkissian, author of the novel Dear Lucy<\/a><\/em>, long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, recounted how she grounded some of her early writing in her own experiences and how Oates wanted her to separate this work from the lived reality, to make the fiction whole and entire in itself. Apparently the teacher wasn\u2019t swayed at all by Sarkissian\u2019s argument that what she\u2019d written was \u201ctrue.\u201d Sarkissian learned right then that \u201cthe fact that something is true is a pretty pathetic defense when it comes to fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it going too far, then, to say fiction is about lying? Deftly? Another of Oates\u2019s students present was Pinckney Benedict, author of the collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories<\/a> <\/em>(my review<\/a>), and apparently Oates once said something like, \u201cPinckney seems like the kind of person who would lie to an interviewer.\u201d A startled Benedict found this a revelation: \u201cYou can LIE to an interviewer?!\u201d and swore he\u2019s included two or three whoppers in every interview since.<\/p>\n

Now I wonder what lies lurk in his excellent Glimmer Train<\/em> interview from Winter 2013, which has him saying, \u201cI am not trying in my own work to demonstrate that my heart is in the right place because, quite frankly, it is not.\u201d [Is that one?] Trying to establish a common ground with readers\u2014\u201cwe\u2019re all well-meaning people together\u201d\u2014he says, \u201cis the antithesis of a powerful or worthwhile literature.\u201d That statement underscores the \u201cdon\u2019t pull your punches\u201d approach to writing Oates encouraged in her students.<\/p>\n

Former Oates student Jonathan Safran Foer recounted how he\u2019d once turned in a set of pages on which Oates wrote: \u201cConfusing, but uninteresting,\u201d with the latter charge the more piercing. Even unpleasant and essentially boring characters have to be made interesting, she said, in the context of fiction. They become interesting through their uniqueness. (Paradoxically, \u201cThe more unlike anyone else you make a character, the more universal that character becomes,\u201d says Donald Maass\u2019s in Writing 21st Century Fiction<\/a><\/em>.) Benedict, originally from rural West Virginia, sets his stories in an Appalachian region so vividly portrayed the reader can reach out and touch the surrounding mountains and smell the barns and fresh-turned earth. In commenting on his skill in this, Oates echoed Maass\u2019s counterintuitive statement, \u201cThe regional, if it\u2019s intensely felt, is the universal.\u201d<\/p>\n

A conversational thread I especially related to was Oates\u2019s dictum that \u201cWriting is about solving problems.\u201d How do you get this character from here to there (believably)? If you need a character out of the picture a while, where does she go? Why? How to get from here to there is what Oates taught her students. Despite having written more than a hundred books, when she has to identify her profession, \u201cIf I have to put it down on some form,\u201d she said, \u201cI write \u2018teacher.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most specific piece of writing advice I gleaned at the Princeton University event celebrating Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s teaching career last week was this: Never let your characters have a conversation while riding in a car. Her former students laughed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,40,174,29],"tags":[31,28],"class_list":["post-3382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-author","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-Sy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3386,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3382\/revisions\/3386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}