Joyce Carol Oates Interview (page: 4 / 9) National Book Award	Print Interview

What kept you going when you felt like a failure?

Joyce Carol Oates: I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end. There was one project I was working on once.

I was doing a book on boxing with a photographer. And I was very fascinated by the material. And I wanted to write the book very, very badly. So I was in a state of anxiety and tension about writing it. And it seemed that I could not even begin it. And I tried and tried for days to get a way into this book. And I had different openings. And I simply couldn't do it. And so I finally felt that I'd given up. And I was very disintegrating and very depressed. I thought it was the beginning of the end, that I would never be able to do anything again. So I went to bed, and all night long I was thinking about these distressing thoughts. And towards the morning, I started thinking, "Well, failure is actually what most people experience in boxing." Most athletes inhabit failure, but particularly boxers. And they're punished -- extremely punished -- for instance, for failure, or a little bit of carelessness. So I started writing about a boxing match I had seen in which somebody failed ignominiously, and the crowd in Madison Square Garden was vicious. And I thought, "There. I can identify with those two boxers." And I found a way to write about the whole sport by way of beginning with failure, with the image of failure.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

That's the most powerful example in my memory of how I had given up. But then, by way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.

What did that project turn into?

Joyce Carol Oates: It turned into a book called On Boxing with photographs by John Reiner. It's gone through a number of editions. It's been translated and published in many countries and was recently updated with some pieces about Mike Tyson, who is the only boxer whom I really got to know.

The topics of your books are so varied, you must do a lot of research. Are you especially drawn to research?

Joyce Carol Oates: I like to research very much. However, if I'm doing a short novel, like Black Water -- a novel of several years ago which was stimulated by the Chappaquiddick incident of July, 1969 in which Ted Kennedy was involved -- I would write the novel first, because it's only about two hundred pages, working with emotion and memory and this mimetic impulse of which I spoke a few minutes ago. And then I might do the research afterward. I don't do the research initially because it would be too distracting. Because to write, you have to have an emotional thread. For the longer novel, I would do the research simultaneously with writing.

Do you ever leave spaces blank? Like "To be filled in after I find out about corporate law."

Joyce Carol Oates: That's not the way I write. I usually am so intensely involved emotionally that I have to forge through and get a kind of workable first draft. Then I go back and rewrite that.

Joyce Carol Oates Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9