The Faith of a Writer–Joyce Carol Oates
Hi, Rebekah here, and I chose a fascinating book by Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. She collected a variety of her essays about writing that she had written and put them together. I loved it. Each “chapter” provided much inspiration, mostly because she constantly discussed how other writers write. She referred to some of my all-time favourite writers (William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, etc.) and thoroughly demonstrated how writing truly is a process. Much of what she wrote about furthered my belief that writing has much to do with faith—faith in ourselves as writers, faith in what we do with our craft is not only valuable but effective, faith in our readers. She covered topics of inspiration from our first memories of school and writing to our first loves of literature. She wrote how inspiration comes in such a variety of forms and places, and that failure isn’t quite failure at all: “Is the artist secretly in love with failure?” (60). And her dissertation on the pitfalls and joys of failure was eye-opening and heartening at the same time.
So, my major questions that have sprung from the reading…..first, if inspiration comes in so many different forms and from so many places which are specific to the individual writer, how can we as teachers create lessons and plans that spark inspiration? What if there is someone we don’t reach? What is a writing teacher to do? And tied in with that, how do we feel about failure? What does it truly mean? Oates repeats that writing is a solitary act and that what we perceive as failure might actually be our best works and what we consider our best often isn’t. She mentions several authors who feel this way as well as authors who even tried other writing niches that didn’t work (for instance William Faulkner considered himself a failed poet and Henry James was a failed playwright). What does that all mean for us as writers and as teachers? If I (or my students) feel that we are “failures” at writing, are it that we just haven’t found our niche or is it something more? Overall, after reading this book, I have come away with much more faith (so to speak) in my own writing but am wondering even more how this translates into the classroom…..any thoughts?
Hi Rebekah,
I liked your questions about our faith, or lack of faith when when we consider ourselves failures. I am reminded of the book, Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. It is a collection of essays by writers for writers and an entire section is devoted to the feelings of failure and rejections. I think that is a major theme that writers deal with. Why? From what I read, it is because much of what we write is no big deal. In fact, so much of what we write is no big deal that we logically tell ourselves to abandon the foolishness. But… after we do a brain dump sometimes we do write something valuable. And if you compare writing to piano lessons it becomes much easier to see that of course a lot of the words we plunk out are just scales, wrong notes and silly phrases, but that happens to be the only path to playing well. So for me, when I reframe the task and liken it to something that takes lots of practice, I don’t ponder the failures, I see them as warm ups, drills and easy pieces. I try to remind my students that writing is like art. There is some skill, some passion and some lousy pictures that we just toss. Experiment, have fun, it’s the only way to develop the skill that will allow you to express yourself.
Bye for now,
Terry
First of all this books sounds like it would be a really good one to read, I love the theme of “faith”. When I think of creating that spark for the students, this is a challenge. But, I think if we give them opportunities to be inspired they will. My first thought in response to how we might do this is to personalize the writing prompt, a topic I am a little familiar with. I think that if we do provide them with prompts, giving them ideas of how to expand (for example, by showing a picture) than hopefully they will become inspired to write. I do think that it is important to try and reach all of the students, recognizing they all learn differently and come from different backgrounds. Having said that, I think it is impossible to reach 100% of the students. I think we ought to try, but the reality is, there will be some that we don’t, unfortunately. About failure, I do think there are times when kids fail, but that is their own choosing. We must ensure that we have given all that we possibly can to try and prevent their failure. If we give 200%, at the end of the day, I think we can say, they failed, we did not. But, it is important to not ever give up on a kid. I think as soon as we do, or let on that we are headed in that direction, that is when they truly give up. When they have lost the faith of their teacher, although they will not voice this, it is hard for them.