From What If?, the book my intro creative writing class is using for fiction, from a Joyce Carol Oates Paris Review interview:
Q: How do you describe the perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?
Oates: One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood." In a sense, the writing will create the mood . . ..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.
(Promise? OK . . .) Jayne
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
She also runs miles every day and recently remarried after the death of her husband. She's published a million-billion-trillion words. She's nuts!
ReplyDeleteBut a good role model nevertheless . . .
she IS nuts--but I definitely know about that soul thin as a playing card, and it does seem to work that it changes the mood.
ReplyDeleteWow, powerful stuff. I do know that I get to "inspired" faster if I run to meet it instead of waiting for it to get to me.
ReplyDelete