{"id":79141,"date":"2014-11-05T16:45:22","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T21:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=79141"},"modified":"2014-11-05T16:18:05","modified_gmt":"2014-11-05T21:18:05","slug":"nonfiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/05\/nonfiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Nonfiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_79155\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/in_gedanken_19_jh.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-79155\" class=\"wp-image-79155\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/in_gedanken_19_jh.jpg\" alt=\"In_Gedanken_19_Jh\" width=\"600\" height=\"476\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/in_gedanken_19_jh.jpg 625w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/in_gedanken_19_jh-300x238.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-79155\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An anonymous nineteenth-century painting.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The hard truth is that not everyone has a novel in them. \u201cI have no gift for invention,\u201d I say to anyone who ever asks after my own ambitions\u2014and why <em>do<\/em> people ask? For that matter, is my response even appropriate? I\u2019m not sure what that means, \u201ca gift for invention\u201d: certainly I\u2019ve never visited the Genius Bar without concocting some elaborate and gratuitous lie to explain the condition of my computer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Which is not to say I\u2019ve never written any fiction. I have, under duress. It was a requirement for my degree. The instructor was an older lady in caftans and arty jewelry with pumpkin-colored hair who had at one point written an epic women\u2019s best seller with a lurid, seventies-style jacket. She\u2019d also written a book of cat poetry. I didn\u2019t mind any of that; the problem was that every detail of the class was as lazy and clich\u00e9d as that constellation of characteristics.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A few people in the class were predictably pretentious. They turned out derivative takes on macho writers and they were unnecessarily confrontational when discussing others\u2019 submissions. One guy\u2019s work was disturbing, but tritely disturbing. A few in the class spoke and wrote poor English. One girl was writing a fantasy novel; she was my favorite. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>We were required to write a story every week. As much as I hated other people\u2019s work, I hated my own more. I resented being forced to show writing I knew to be bad, and I went to ever-greater lengths to avoid committing myself to anything resembling earnestness or feeling. There were multipage descriptions of meals. There was this weird period piece \u201cwritten in the style of 1850s potboilers,\u201d whatever that meant; I hadn\u2019t actually read any in preparation. There was a series about a dollhouse decorated for different obscure liturgical holidays; one of the dolls abruptly committed suicide at the end, just to shake things up. The teacher and the fellow students seemed oblivious to my hostility\u2014I admit, it was something of a deep game\u2014but they frequently urged me to express more emotion in my work.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Our final project was a longer piece. Mine was\u2014well, I guess you\u2019d call it slash fiction, though it defied easy characterization. First I\u2019d attempted a novella about Kay Thompson, the author of <em>Eloise<\/em>, going crazy and drinking a Negroni in Florence with a concerned gay man. That didn\u2019t really come together, so I switched my energies to a fictionalized account of Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s first year as a graduate student. In this piece, \u201cIn Which a Fictionalized Joyce Carol Oates TAs Her First Class,\u201d Joyce Carol Oates really hates everyone in her writing seminar and develops an obsessive crush on a mature student, despite her scorn for his terrible writing. She contemplates murder. She is an excellent dancer. At the end she walks across the campus resolutely. I worried it read as too conventional so I threw in a dollhouse and set the whole thing on Shrove Tuesday. \u201cOf course gritty reality always wins,\u201d says Oates in the story\u2019s final lines. \u201cBut I don\u2019t understand why everyone assumes the smart people get to plot life \u2026 romances and fantasy novels are best sellers. Why don\u2019t those women get to write the plot sometimes? Escapism is a reality too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The hard truth is that not everyone has a novel in them. \u201cI have no gift for invention,\u201d I say to anyone who ever asks after my own ambitions\u2014and why do people ask? For that matter, is my response even appropriate? I\u2019m not sure what that means, \u201ca gift for invention\u201d: certainly I\u2019ve never visited [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[14668,873,1072,71,2015,13713,75],"class_list":["post-79141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-cliches","tag-college","tag-creative-writing","tag-fiction","tag-joyce-carol-oates","tag-workshops","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>In Which a Fictionalized Joyce Carol Oates TAs Her First Class<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the hard truth that not everyone has a novel in them.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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