From Publisher's Weekly:

Writers' Reel is a weekly video feature. This week, we're sharing the great Joyce Carol Oates giving excellent advice on writing characters. "If you allow your people to talk," she says, "they will express themselves in a way that the writer herself might not have thought of."

PEN Center USA will honor JCO this year at its Literary Awards Festival with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.

I must have missed it in my creative writing education. Maybe I tuned it out because it seemed so obvious. Or maybe I submitted some work early on that made it seem like I understood how  all-important conflict is to our characters - like when I speak a small amount of a foreign language without an American accent and lead native speakers to assume I'm fluent, only to invite a barrage of speech I don’t fully understand. I never got the lesson.

I had my mid-project review over the weekend. It was gently suggested that I might be on the wrong track, which I heard as, “You’ve left the track entirely and wandered away into the woods surrounding the track, naked and without a bag of breadcrumbs.” My brain is a serious paraphraser.