The Faith of a Writer:
Life, Craft, Art

Excerpt

From "To a Young Writer"

Write your heart out.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

Your "forbidden" passions are likely to be the fuel for your writing. Like our great American dramatist Eugene O'Neill raging through his life against a long-deceased father; like our great American prose stylist Ernest Hemingway raging through his life against his mother; like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton struggling through their lives with the seductive Angel of Death, tempting them to the ecstasy of self-murder. The instinct for violent self-laceration in Dostoyevsky, and for the sadistic punishment of "disbelievers" in Flannery O'Connor. The fear of going mad in Edgar Allan Poe and committing an irrevocable, unspeakable act—murdering an elder or a wife, hanging and putting out the eyes of one's "beloved" pet cat. Your struggle with your buried self, or selves, yields your art; these emotions are the fuel that drives your writing and makes possible hours, days, weeks, months and years of what will appear to others, at a distance, as "work." Without these ill-understood drives you might be a superficially happier person, and a more involved citizen of your community, but it isn't likely that you will create anything of substance.

What advice can an older writer presume to offer to a younger? Only what he or she might wish to have been told years ago. Don't be discouraged! Don't cast sidelong glances, and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is not a race. No one really "wins." The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) And again, write your heart out.

Contents

Introduction

My Faith as a Writer

District School #7, Niagara County, New York

First Loves: From "Jabberwocky" to "After Apple Picking"

To a Young Writer

Running and Writing

"What Sin to Me Unknown . . ."

Notes on Failure

Inspiration!

Reading as a Writer: The Artist as Craftsman

The Enigmatic Art of Self-Criticism

The Writer's Studio

Blonde Ambition: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates, by Greg Johnson

"JCO" and I (After Borges)

Acknowledgments

Reviews

• Buffalo News, September 7, 2003, p. H4
• Library Journal, October 1, 2003, p. 75
• Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 2, 2003, p. J11
• Columbus Dispatch, November 16, 2003, p. F7
• Boston Globe, November 23, 2003, p. D7
• New York Times Book Review, December 21, 2003, p. 20
• Boston Herald, January 11, 2004, Sec: The Edge, p. 45
  

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