📝 Joyce Carol Oates’ Writing Routine

"I get a lot of work done in hotel rooms. The one solace for loneliness is work. I hand write and then I type. I don’t have a word processor. I write slowly."

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer, known for her prolific output. Over the decades, she has published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction.

I love to write. It’s a fascinating experience to deal with language and to tell stories involving people who are, for me at least, fascinating.

Joyce Carol Oates on productivity: ‘I love to write’ | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Joyce Carol Oates’ productive writing output has become stuff of legends. When Margaret Atwood was interviewed during the 2015 Guardian Live Members’ event, the Canadian author was asked whether she considered herself prolific. Atwood scoffed at the idea and replied “Joyce Carol Oates is prolific; I’m just old.”

Ever since the Vanguard Press published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall in 1964 when she was 26 years old, Oates’ extensive bibliography now includes 58 novels as well as a number of plays, novellas and volumes of short stories, poetry and non-fiction.

In addition to her prolific output, Oates also balances teaching with her writing. She taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She is also a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches short fiction

In a profile of the author for Tin House, writer Mia Funk compared Oates to Bob Dylan, another artist who’s put out an incredible amount of work over his career.

“Oates almost resembles Bob Dylan, that other poet of American life whose output astonishes and whose song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was the inspiration for her much anthologized ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ Funk writes. “She seems to have embraced the same down-to-earth don’t think twice philosophy about producing work and moving on.”

In the same article, Funk also compares Oates’ writing style to, of all people, Manny Pacquiao — “a fighter who has moved effortlessly between different weight divisions and is known for his fast combinations and not being afraid to rise up and stretch himself even at the risk of leaving himself wide open.”

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Art of Fiction No. 72 | The Paris Review

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