who is joyce carol oates:

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over forty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing. Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978. She expects to teach her last Princeton writing seminar in the fall of 2014, and to formally retire from teaching the following July. 

Here are her 10 Tips on Writing:

1. Write your heart out.

2. The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.

3. You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

4. Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

5. When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun (This is Raymond Chandler's advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

6. Unless you are experimenting with form - gnarled, snarled & obscure - be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

7. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

8. Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

9. Read, observe, listen intensely! - as if your life depended upon it.

10. Write your heart out.