For a writer this prolific, you might picture a keyboard worn smooth. The truth is slower and more physical. Oates does her first thinking on the page with a pen.
Longhand First, Keyboard Second
Oates was direct about it in a 2001 USA Weekend profile: she hand-writes, then types. She added that she had no word processor and that she writes slowly. That slowness matters. The pen sets the pace, and the typing comes later as a kind of first revision.
The Paris Review noted that her earliest novels were composed on a typewriter, a clean first draft straight through, then revisions, then a final draft. By the time of that interview, the process had flipped. Almost everything now started by hand, and the typewriter had come to feel, in the interviewer's phrase, like a rather alien thing. The keyboard became the place where formality and impersonality entered the work, which is why she pushes it back to a later stage.
The Scale of the Handwritten Drafts
This isn't a few pages of notes. The Paris Review described the stack of handwritten pages and notes behind her novel The Assassins as enormous, somewhere around eight hundred pages or closer to a thousand. She builds the book by hand before it ever becomes type. For a writer this productive, that's a staggering amount of physical penmanship sitting underneath the printed result.
Notes come first, and because she travels, she takes those notes by hand too. The pen is portable, and it keeps the early stages of a book close to the body. There's nothing precious about the method for its own sake. It simply suits how she thinks her way into a story.
The slowness is the point. She has said outright that she writes slowly, and longhand enforces that pace. When the draft moves to the keyboard, that retyping becomes a built-in editing pass, a second look at every sentence before it ever counts as finished. The method costs time and gives back revision for free.
See the rest of the picture in the full Joyce Carol Oates writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Draft the first version by hand. A pen slows you down enough to actually think.
- Treat typing as your first edit. Moving longhand to the keyboard is a free revision pass.
- Keep a notebook with you. She takes story notes by hand because she travels, so the work is never stranded.
- Don't fear a messy, oversized draft. Hundreds of handwritten pages can be raw material, not waste.