I’m reading “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art” by Joyce Carol Oates. I like it very much. It makes me think of myself. Not in terms of talent, skills, or potential. It’s the doubts, the questions about the meaning of it all, the acceptance that nobody can come up with answers for my own life that I identify with.
I’m not going to talk about that book today. Instead, I’ll talk about something that caught my eye while reading the Wikipedia entry on Ms. Oates. Here it is.
One review of Oates’s 1970 story collection ‘The Wheel of Love’ characterized her as an author of “considerable talent” but at that time “far from being a great writer.”
I thought that was an awesome review!
It seems that, no matter how successful any writer is, doubts are a constant of his or her life. Stephen King has them. Anne Rice does too. Joyce Carol Oates is no exception.
You finish your writing. You doubt that it’s good. You wonder if anyone would actually enjoy reading it. Worse, you wonder if you have the strength to start over and write another story. And then you read a review like the one I quoted above.
Personally, I would get a big smile out of someone telling me that I have “considerable talent”. That I’m “far from being a great writer” … at this time. It’s a good way to encourage me. To let me know that there is some value to what I’ve written so far. And that my best work is yet to come.
Now I just need to go back to writing and work on becoming that “great writer”. There is a lot of bad writing that I need to get out of the way first. Just like Michelangelo with his sculptures. All the marble he had to chip away before he gave us the Pieta and David!
Hmmm … have I ever mentioned I wasn’t humble?
Ada Ireland is a pen name I came up with for myself. Unashamed Writing is a name I came up with for my blog.