Faith of a Writer

by Joyce Carol Oates, subtitle: Life, Craft, Art

Introduction and Acquisition: part of our writing group's guiding books, reintroduced when we saw Joyce Carol Oates do a reading a few days ago - borrowed from Queens Library, September 2007

The Good: she references a lot of other writers, their writing and thoughts about their own writing, and parallels between their lives and what they write about, when it's autobiographical and not. some cute advice for beginning writers, granting the permission to read whatever one finds delight in and not what someone else suggests is wise for reading.

The Bad: In criticizing this book I run the risk of looking foolish, for I as the beginning writer am criticizing the advice and thoughts on writing by a writer who writes not only prolifically but successfully as well, and does not look to be stopping any time soon. In our day and age, being not only a successful writer but a professor at prestigious university as well teaching of all things her very craft, is a mark of high distinction and respect that is hard to shake. I shall look like a fool with my disagreements. So now, disclaimer aside, I shall procede.

I disagree, quite hardily, with many things she claims about the inspiration and instinct of a writer. I should clarify that I disagree with the nature of her academic analysis of literature and inspiration and autobiography. I find in my own unpublished, unrecognized (and thus unsuccessful) writing that her take and analysis is quite off, or, at best, irrelevant. It's too academic, and for those things that are intangible and thus fall out of the bounds of analysis, they are dismissed as mysterious, unknown. It sounds too like school work to me, having written many a paper on the basic formula of say it, say it again with supporting out of context blurb, then say it again to end it. And such formula works remarkably well in the academic setting for it suggests some sort of thought process, linking this to that, the teasing out of patterns and how it applies to said genres. But... but.... academic is all to well known for being an inaccurate depiction of reality, a false portrait, one done for the sake of the painter and not for the good and well being of the world in which the portrait's subject is living. Sublime at best, irrelevant at worst. I find many of the essays irrelevant.

So says the unsuccessful writer about the musings of the prolific, successful professor/author.

Later Note: I confess I wrote this review before I finished the book, since I had not intended to finish the book, but after reading the last essay on her studio, it's made up for some of the shortcomings, felt a little more humane.