All language subtitles for Masterclass Joyce Carol Oates Teaches the Art of the Short Story - 03.Journals Observing the World

Artists usually resist um analyzing

themselves, but I've really found that

there are some predominant motives for

writing that

really have guided me through my life.

One motive for writing

is self-expression. And maybe that's one

of the most original. It's the it's the

self that you're expressing when you

write in a diary. And I always encourage

my students to keep a journal. I think

we all need to keep journals to write

quietly and calmly at the end of the day

before you go to bed to write in a

journal. If you can write in longhand,

that's really nice because it's so

intimate and so private and to keep in

contact with your innermost self. So

this self-expression in a journal could

turn into a work of art.

I've kept a journal since I've been

about 21 years old. Before that I had a

di diary sporadically and I started

keeping a journal which is just

immensely helpful. The journal is

helpful in ways that you can't

anticipate because when you're traveling

particularly you're moving so swiftly

through space and time that you don't

really have time to absorb very much. So

whatever whatever you can write down in

a journal that's descriptive. It doesn't

have to be elegant writing. It can lots

of dashes and breathless writing is

really best to take notes very quickly

impressionistically

describing places and your own reactions

to the places. And if you can put a

little dialogue in of some exchanges

you've had with people. Well, keeping a

journal um sharpens our senses. It's

like an exercise in writing.

If you're describing a scene, you are

practicing the act of writing, which is

very important and thinking in language.

Otherwise, you just sort of go through

the day with the stray thoughts are

floating around in your head of of no

particular distinction. But if you're

writing things down and really thinking

about something and observing, that

gives a certain sharpness to your powers

of observation. As time goes by, when

you look back over those entries that

had seemed so ordinary, they become

really interesting to look back like 15,

17, 20 years. Some people can look back

40 years like looking back through a

tunnel into into the depths of time. It

is so interesting, but as I said, you

can't anticipate how important it will

be when you're doing it because you're

just caught up in the moment. So you

have to have faith that sometime in the

future you'll look back upon this one

really really interesting.

The kind of writing people do when they

don't have time is also important. So I

suggest to my students you start writing

when you only have 40 minutes and write

really really fast.

So you don't have time like you have

eight hours

you're intimidated. it's too much time.

Well, I could also say that writing when

you're feeling uh very tired is a good

idea. Writing when you've been up late,

writing when you're ready to go to bed

and you're really really tired or you're

feverish or not feeling well, say to

yourself, I'm only going to write for

six minutes

or eight minutes. You know, well, I'll

write for 12 minutes. and then write

very quickly and then the next morning

when you see what you've written that

might be really worthwhile. Don't fuss

and don't take too much time. It's like

the opposite of another course you know

where you work hard say do this fast.

Particularly with a short story or or a

nolla which is basically a short novel.

It's very very helpful to know what your

first sentence is and the first scene

and then go for a long walk or a run or

a bicycle ride and try to see the whole

thing as a movie. Now, you can't really

do that with a novel because it's just

too complicated. But a story or nolla,

you could tell tell the whole story to

yourself without any language, but like

a like a little movie without any any

any dialogue. Then when you come back

home, you rapidly take notes. I take

them in longhand, just as fast as I can

write, but you could type on a laptop.

And just take any notes,

no chronological order, just anything,

little snatches of dialogue, anything

that you remember that's that's

memorable and important will come

floating back up. And then the next time

you'd go on a a run or a walk or a

bicycle ride, you sort of do the whole

thing over again. And this time you get

different different things come to you

and things that you maybe weren't

working on the first time you work on

the second time, you know. So basically

you're accre acrewing all these notes

and I have a lot of notes. So, as I

said, I write it in long hand on I fold

I take a piece of paper and fold it

lengthwise. So, I have a piece of paper

and I just write a lot of notes. So, my

archives at Syracuse are filled with all

these notes basically like thousands of

pages of these things. Once I've

accumulated a lot of notes for a novel

could be 200 pages. It's a big folder.

But for a short story, it won't be it

won't be that long. I accumulate these

notes and then I go to the laptop and I

transcribe them from my handwriting to

the laptop. So then I have scenes

and um could be 12 pages, could be 20 20

pages and then I have something I can

work with.

A lot of my notes are just jottings and

typically I would have lists of things I

wanted to put in a novel and like the

certain kind of furniture. If you're if

you're populating a novel set in the

19th century, you have to have special

furniture. You have to do a little

research. So I have the brocade and the

ba braid carved mahogany

tfile piercing. I don't even remember

what that is but I knew that Turkish

over stuffed chairs rosewood

1830s French empire period things that

notes you know that I would check them

off what I put in the novel. So here

I've only have a couple checks so I

didn't I didn't use most of it.

Black wood and gill. That means that I

can take this and use it now because I

didn't use much.

Laminated carved rosewood. I checked

that. Cottage furniture. Hickory rocker

with a rush seat. I never used it. So I

can put in my next story. Stuffed birds

under glass dome. I use that one.

Jenny Lind type cherry spool

bed 1850. So I never use that. So

anybody can have it. Walnut over stuffed

tetat lounging shelves for samuri

puppets.

So weird hanging kerosene kerosene

burning lamp alabaster paper weights

rice paper lanterns I didn't use that so

people can use that a lot of here things

I never used sienna marble

but I did use a seti with a haircloth

upholstery and carved tendrils so I use

that all these things are in the novel

somewhere

all sorts of things I got out of

research books

and then little notes about characters.

A certain kind of flower, a white

flower,

insecttovous,

carnivorous, waxim, pal, lilyike flower.

This is a flower. I may have made that

up because I think that's in my novel,

The Occurs. It's a poisonous beautiful

flower that I probably that I actually

made up because it doesn't have any name

here. So, nobody I guess nobody can use

that because I've used that.

There are a number of distinguished

writers among them Virginia Wolf and

Nathaniel Hawthorne and and Henry David

Thorough and actually John Chver. many

many many writers actually there's a

very there's a profound distinction

between their written fiction and the

journals they didn't write the journals

to be published the written fiction and

and the example of Virginia Wolf for

instance the fiction is very very

polished and very mannered Virginia Wolf

perfected a style that some people think

is very beautiful and and other people

can't even read it's extremely fidious

and and sort of floating

impressionistic.

It's beautiful in a way, but it doesn't

have much body. Uh she doesn't really

see things. She feels a lot of things.

Now, by contrast, the journal is almost

the opposite. In a journal, she's sharp,

she's funny, she's nasty, she's very

catty, she's sarcastic, she says things

about people she would never have said

in her novel, her novels. and she would

never have said I think in real life but

in the journal she just is completely

uncensored

these journals were published by Leonard

Wolf her her husband after she died and

they're called A Writer's Diary and I

recommend them for young and new writers

because they're just wonderful. You

start reading the the writer's diary of

Virginia Wolf immediately you start

thinking about keeping a diary because

they're so good.

So I'll read just a little bit here, but

the whole thing is wonderful. So this is

Tuesday in in March 1930

and it's just all one long paragraph

and it just sort of goes on. She's

talking to herself all because I have to

buy myself a dress this afternoon and

can't think what I want and cannot read.

I have written fairly well but it's a

difficult book but can't keep on after

12 and now she'll write here for 20

minutes. So she's been working on the

waves which is one of these very

eloquent fidious novels and she's

exhausted with that. So now she takes up

her pen and she's just writing in this

journal. She's really enjoying it

because she she doesn't have to make it

into this fiction. My impressions of

Margaret Davies and Lillian Harris at

Monk's house were of great lumps of gray

coat, straggling wisps of hair, hats

floppy and homemade, thick woolen

stockings, black shoes, many wraps,

shabby handbags, and shapelessness and

shabess and dreiness and drabness

unspeakable.

A tragedy in its way. Margaret at any

rate deserve better of life than this

disheveled and undistinguished end.

They're in lodgings as usual have as

usual wonderful Christian Science

landlady are somehow rejected by active

life sit knitting perhaps and smoking

cigarettes in the parlor where they have

their meals where there's always left a

dishes of oranges and bananas. I doubt

if they have enough to eat. They seemed

to me flabby and bloodless, spread into

rather toneless chunks of flesh, having

lost any commerce with looking glasses.

So we showed them the garden and gave

them tea. And then, oh, the dismal sense

of people stranded, wanting to be

energized, drifting, all woolly and

hairy.

There is a J blue spark in Margaret's

eye now and then, but she had not been

out of the lodgings for five weeks

because of the east wind. Her mind has

softened and wrinkled, sitting indoors

with the oranges and cigarettes. Lillian

is almost stoned deaf and mumbles and

crumbles, emerging clearly only once to

discuss politics.

Something has blunted Margaret's edge,

rusted it, worn it long before its time.

Must old age be so shapeless?

Now, she never thought anybody would be

reading this, let alone reading it out

loud. But you see the contrast between

her writer self and the journal. Her

characters tend to live more elevated

and more educated than these people. But

when she wanted to cast the sharp eye on

other people, she was really

devastating. Now I personally prefer her

diary to her fiction. And I know people

will be very upset to hear that because

Virginia Wolf is one of these saints of

the 20th century. I like her diary

better. And I like the I like the voice.

She's much more of a woman in a journal

than she is in her fiction. In the

fiction, she she's very asexual. There's

no erraticism and no sense of people. Uh

not no romance really. But in the

journal, she's sort of down there

looking at people's flesh and looking at

their their hair and and noticing

smells.

She said Katherine Mansfield smelled

like a cat. some awful thing that she

would never have said in in actual life.

So I think if we could bring that kind

of honesty and directness to the

journal, it's a pros style that's really

very wonderful.

An assignment I definitely recommend for

for a new writer is to read Virginia

Wolf's wonderful essay, Moments of

Being. And this is another another work

from her diary where she's writing so

candidly and and so directly. A moment

of being is a time in your life um maybe

rare when you have a real insight, a

real epiphany. Sometimes people get

these they get these overwhelming

feelings in times of stress or there may

be a death in the family. And Virginia

Wolf writes about having heard that

somebody had died or somebody committed

suicide and she has she had she gives

three examples. Two of them are very um

shocking

and the other is is mystical. She's

looking at a garden and she sees how the

flowers are part of a mystic hole. And

when I read that I understand that

Virginia Wolf is having a mystical

experience such as people have when they

meditate on a mandala. So Virginia Wolf

suggests which I would suggest to you

also to take a moment of being in your

own life. You could have been a child.

I'd like to think that the first

awareness of mortality in a child is

absolutely profound because I remember

when I was told my grandfather had died.

I was stunned. I didn't think my

grandfather could die. I I had no idea

what that meant. And then when my

grandfather didn't come home, that was

utterly astonishing, you know, like he

he wasn't there anymore. And people feel

that way about pets, like a dog, a cat

has died.

Um something's missing, you know, it's

so

palpable an absence. The absence is a

presence, you know. So, a moment of

being doesn't have to be more of it. It

could be a happy, it could be happiness

also. Or you could have a a a

reconciliation

when you reconciled with somebody you

thought you hated, hated you, and then

you reconciled and and there was this

burst of happiness. That could be a

moment of