Developing the Write Attitude

Over the past 40 years, novelist Joyce Carol Oates has published more than 100 books, marking her as one of America's most prolific contemporary writers. For this reason, she is often asked about her writing habits. Almost 20 years ago, in a Paris Review interview, she explained how she must sometimes force herself to write:

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.
("Joyce Carol Oates" in George Plimpton, ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1989)

A few years earlier, in an interview with The New York Times, Oates rejected the notion that she was a workaholic. “I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of ‘working’ at all," she observed. "Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don’t think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.”

Though our ambitions may not include writing novels and short stories in the manner of Joyce Carol Oates, we might still pick up from her a lesson or two. In thinking about our own attitudes toward writing and in examining our own writing process, perhaps we ought to consider this: a writing project does not always have to be approached as a chore. It might actually turn out to be rewarding. And instead of draining our energy, a writing project just might help to restore it.

A final piece of writer's advice from Oates: "Beginning writers . . . should read widely, and they should write every day. Like learning to play a musical instrument, learning to write has much to do with practice."