The Faith of a Writer

The Faith of a Writer is a 2003 collection of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, drawn from talks and lectures she had given over the previous decade about the craft and life of writing. Oates is one of the most prolific serious American writers of the past sixty years, with over fifty novels, dozens of story collections, plays, poetry volumes, and works of nonfiction to her name, and the perspectives she offers in this slim book come from someone who has spent more or less every waking hour of her adult life either writing or thinking about writing.

The essays cover a range of topics that working writers will recognize. The relationship between reading and writing. The mystery of inspiration and the much less mysterious necessity of discipline. The role of childhood in shaping a writer’s voice. The strange experience of returning to old work and finding yourself a stranger to it. Oates writes about all of this with the precision and the slight chill that her readers will recognize from her fiction. She is not given to easy reassurances. She believes the writing life is hard, demanding, often unrewarded, and absolutely worth the doing if you cannot find it in yourself to do anything else.

What distinguishes the book from other writers on writing is Oates’s range as a working artist. She moves easily between literary fiction, genre work, criticism, drama, and poetry, and her thoughts on craft draw from all of those modes. The essay on her early relationship with the work of Lewis Carroll is a particular highlight. So is the late essay on the writer’s responsibility to the truth, both factual and emotional, and the costs of telling it.

For working writers, students, or readers who want to understand how a serious novelist thinks about her craft, The Faith of a Writer is a useful and bracing book.