Joyce Carol Oates — A Writing Icon on Creative Process and Creative Living | The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss interviews legendary author Joyce Carol Oates about her creative process and the discipline behind her extraordinary output. She explains why energy is the most important writerly quality, how she needs the title, beginning, and ending in place before writing, and why revision is roughly 99 percent of art. Oates describes using running and walking to think through structure, the central threat of distraction and interruption, and her teaching philosophy of being a sympathetic reader. She also discusses writing without anxiety, using pseudonyms, recommending entry points to her work, and the natural reading phases that shape a writer.

• Oates says energy is the most important writerly quality, framing it as a kind of positive delusion or flame that leads a creator toward telling the story.
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• She reveals she needs to see the ending in a cinematic way, plus a beginning and a title, before she begins writing, describing it as a triangular shape.
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• Oates explains that running and walking are essential to her process; she thinks of her writing in structural, spatial terms while moving, and it doesn't work as well if she doesn't run.
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• She declares revision is basically 99 percent of art and that she revises constantly, rewriting first chapters over and over.
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• Oates states she has no anxiety about writing, contrasting it with the real-time pressure she would feel as a performing pianist or competing athlete.
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• She discloses she began writing under pseudonyms including J.C. Smith, J.C. Oates, and Rosamond Smith to explore new voices, such as psychological suspense.
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• She emphasizes interruption and distraction as the great adversary of creativity, noting families and partners can be the ones who drain a writer's energy.
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• Jonathan Safran Foer's first book was a Joseph Cornell compendium he assembled, unusual because most young writers begin with autobiographical novels.
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• A professor at Syracuse wrote Oates's parents a short letter saying she was a born writer; she later mimicked that gesture by writing Foer's parents.
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• Oates was about 22 when her first book, By the North Gate, a short story collection, was accepted for publication in 1963.
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• One of her hardest student assignments is to write the same material in the styles of Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and then H.P. Lovecraft.
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• Oates has roughly 300 to 400 pages of short stories that were published in magazines but never collected into a book, some of which won awards.
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• Her novel Blonde, about Marilyn Monroe's interior life, runs about 800 pages and is one of her own favorites.
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• We Were the Mulvaneys was an Oprah selection, making it her most-read novel and effectively guaranteeing around a million copies sold.
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• Her novel Middle Age: A Romance came out the week of 9/11, which she calls a disaster for the book's reception.
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• Oates notes John McPhee would be given an entire issue of The New Yorker for one long nonfiction piece, tailored to that magazine's famous fact-checking.
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• Oates advises immersing in one author at a time, recalling reading nearly all of Faulkner in high school and going through D.H. Lawrence, Nabokov, Hemingway, and Woolf phases.
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