Notes and quotes from Joyce Carol Oates’ Masterclass on “Art of the Short Story”

Hello world!

I recently finished Joyce Carol Oates’ Masterclass on short story writing. It is a short course and there’s a cool workshop segment at the end where she critiques the short stories of two students.

Here’s a collection of my notes from the lessons, much of it paraphrased

NOTES

It’s about translating instinct into craft
So that instinct… if you feel like you’re a writer, you probably are

Everyone has a fantastic story to tell – and it’s often a mystery story

Writer as photographer, you have a magic camera, and with lens you can see the subject, and the camera is your writing

Characters generate the plot

Why is this character there? If you can’t explain them, then you should get rid of them

If it’s just a few characters, then it’s a short story. But if it’s a theme / larger world / political or sociological, then a novel is better

Short story is meant to be read in one sitting

“Burn through the first draft”

Orwell believed prose should be like a window, very clean
Faulkner, Hemingway were more interested in the language of a story, the “how” of the telling

“Your worst enemy will have the most beloved face” – whether a child, a dog or cat – someone you can’t say no to (the constant distractions)

She started writing around 14, and working with others at 19

Doesn’t recommend writing a novel if you’re a beginner – it’s important to learn how to finish your work
If you write a novel and take 20 years, your whole life will have a cloud over it
Need the psychological uplift from finishing something

If you get rejected, it means that if it was published it may not have been that good – sometimes you’re very lucky if your first novel is rejected (like James Joyce)

recommends writers keep journals because it’s intimate and private, keep in contact with innermost self
she’s kept journal since 18, she adds dialogue, impressions of places and things that happened

try different ways of writing:
-start writing when you only have 40 minutes
-write when you feel very tired
-next morning look at it, might be really worthwhile

she takes tons of notes, for a novel it can be 200 pages (!)
transcribes notes to laptop, adds them into scenes
has checklists of things, if things aren’t used, she can use them for future stories

critics told her she should leave the “social unrest” / “big novels” to Norman Mailer
she was never interested in what’s expected of women writers, the “domestic novel”
she wrote a lot about domestic abuse, wife battering

her father was almost killed because he wanted to try to help a neighbor suffering domestic violence

Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is a novel about taboo, couldn’t express his homosexuality, uses the novel

most powerful writing comes from repressed, each taboo subject has a natural audience who have no outlet
memoirs on such subjects are astonished at the number of readers, eg, about alcoholism, obesity, bulimia
William Styron on depression – had no idea it would be that successful, he just felt a total failure
“secret audiences”

**only rule: “Don’t be boring”

bestsellers move fast, short and declarative sentences

writers want to write their family story, their ancestors, their generation

she memorized alice in wonderland as a kid, deeply imprinted
she thinks about it every day of her life
it’s playful, funny, subversive – inspires her writing

interview your own mother, she was astounded when she did this
found out she was given away at 9 months old to an aunt and uncle

wishes she’d also interviewed her grandmother before she passed

try not to exploit other people, never hurt other people (doesn’t think what philip roth did, writing about women he knew, was the right way)

“an unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart”

take the earliest memory you have, try to evoke it and write it powerfully

Robert Frost: poetry is melting ice on a hot stove

beginning writers should write mini narratives, a paragraph, the shorter the better

really good acting is also an arc of emotion

theater is monologue, eg, Hamlet

good to be young and write an old person’s perspective, or vice versa, or men writing from woman’s PoV, it gives you more objectivity, and is a growing experience

Where are you going, where have you been? is one of her most popular stories, gets questions daily about it
a cautionary tale
based on true story, man who pretended to be a teenager, one by one he was murdering girls he met at the mall
some teens knew, but they didn’t tell anyone, they protected HIM. why?

take your old writing, take 3rd person and make it 1st person, or make past tense into present tense / historic present – this can completely revitalize prose

read from stratosphere to draw upon your mentors / influences

what you read and what intensity will determine how you write

for example, take a summer to read James Joyce – as the weeks go by, your vocab will improve, your language will elevate, etc

Hemingway’s novels are good, but short stories are where he was a master

readers only care about the characters — even though the writer spends so much time on the formal qualities

Hemingway says literature is an iceberg, all his short stories – what’s under the water is implied
Characters don’t have back story, move very quickly – feeling of modernism

for new writers often the story might be too subtle
workshops are helpful in this way, participants are like editors

writers are cooks – keep unused material in fridge, put it later in the casserole

better to have deadline, and readers, talk and revise
more “aerated” instead of isolated

really likes having a window to look out, a garden, natural world outside the window
“i don’t know what i’m gonna see out the window, and that’s part of writing”

hates only having a wall to stare at

think excitedly about what you’ll be working on – something surprising, novel, shocking will happen before noon – and no one will know about it but you

if you write one brilliant short story a year, that’s great!
if you write one novel at all, that’s great too

Notes from Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass on fiction writing: “The best short stories are the last chapter of a novel I didn’t write”

If you haven’t read @neilhimself, start with The Graveyard Book (Newbery, Carnegie winner). An incredible story and a singular storyteller.

Here are my edited notes from his Masterclass:

  • For story ideas, you can take fairy tales but flip the perspective: eg, from her Stepmother’s perspective, Snow White could be a villain, a vampire princess, with a necrophiliac prince, and the stepmother is a HEROINE for trying to save the world
  • He writes down random, everyday conversations – as fodder for the mental “compost heap”
  • Jerry Garcia: “Style is the stuff that you get wrong”
  • He wrote a children’s book at 22, never saw light of day – much later, he went back to read it, and he realized that a very small piece of it really sounded like him – but the rest didn’t
    • “The voice was there, I just had to do a whole lot more writing”
  • He wrote maybe 100-200 first pages, short stories, setups, characters
    • Eventually he realized he had to start finishing them – the improvement was QUANTUM
  • He thinks a lot about what kind of narrator will be telling the story, what kind of writing voice he’ll use
  • Whenever he’s stuck, he ask “what does my character want?” this is always your way through – you can put two of the strongest and most developed characters together, have them battle over what they want, discuss it, search for it, find it
    • Characters always get what they NEED, not what they WANT
    • Give them explicit and conflicting desires – each character wants something, and they should clash
  • “A good short story is a magic trick”
  • “The best short stories are the last chapter of a novel I didn’t write” – Roger Zelazny (sp?)
  • Give each character at least one distinguishing characteristic – sounds obvious, but most new writers don’t have the confidence to do it – you don’t want your characters to sound and act indistinguishable outside of their names!
    • Can be jewelry, hair, behavioral tics, tall vs short, fat vs skinny, accents, words or phrases they like to use (mono vs polysyllabic), what they eat
  • The Graveyard Book is “the Jungle Book but in a graveyard”, inspired by walking with his 2-yo son through a graveyard one day, and noticing how comfy his son was riding his little tricycle among the headstones
    • Had the idea at 25 yo, wrote the first chapter, realized his chops weren’t there yet, and came back to write it 20 years later (!)
  • “Once a thing is jotted down, it’s rotting away – usefully – on the compost heap of my imagination, and they’re there if I need them”
  • Don’t listen to people who tell you to avoid exposition and description – there are no rules other than to TELL A GREAT STORY
  • Humor
    • “Whenever you’re writing, you want some humor, because humor is recognition”
    • Humor is also surprise
    • Humor is funny words eg, the word “lard”
    • Where in the sentence a word lands can make the difference in whether it’s funny or not funny
  • What are your reader’s expectations? What are they there for?
  • Understanding genre is a HUGELY valuable tool
  • For writing graphic novels / comics, he starts with thumbnails – literally a book of blank paper, and begins sketching and writing
    • The key units of info are the PANEL and the PAGE – which is why he mocks out each page like a comic book
    • Writes a letter to the illustrator to inspire them, give context, describe characters, develop goals
  • E L Doctorow: Writing a novel is like driving through the fog with one headlight out
  • Neil recommends EXPLODE onto the page, all your thoughts, ideas, then you start shaping and structuring
  • He likes to take long breaks between phases, especially when he’s stuck – do other things – then come back to it, re-read it with fresh eyes, preferably printed out
  • For him, the most important step is between FIRST and SECOND DRAFT
    • Ask yourself: what’s it about? Then, do more of what it’s about, do less of what it’s not about
    • “The process of doing a second draft is process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along”
  • When people tell you it doesn’t work for them, they’re right; and when people tell you how you should fix it, they’re almost always wrong – know the difference
    • Usually when something is wrong, the fix comes earlier
  • Rules to getting published (via Robert Heinlein)
    1. Write
    2. Finish
    3. Share it with someone who can publish it
    4. Listen to their feedback, make changes
    5. Continue writing
  • On bad days, you’ll feel like a very tired bricklayer
  • But the funny thing is, when something of yours gets published, and you read the work, you realize that there really isn’t any difference between the words you wrote on the good days, and those you wrote on the bad days…and that’s incredibly humbling
  • Get so good that nobody can reject you…but expect and be ok with rejection
  • What are a writer’s responsibilities? Or of anyone who creates art?
    • Neil shares incredibly sad anecdote about someone committed suicide, and left a note that said, “The Sandman did it” (the Sandman is one of Neil’s most famous works)
    • But it turns out, it wasn’t a suicide, his boyfriend had murdered him, and left a fake note…and then the boyfriend also killed himself