Ideas are well and good. What you need is a voice

“Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don’t want them. What I want is a voice.”
— Joyce Carol Oates

Having turned 88 last month, the American author Joyce Carol Oates is still active. She has published nearly 60 novels (so far) and that does not include essays, poetry, short fiction, plays and anthologized work. Whew. (Wikipedia’s bibliography page takes a while to scroll.)

The lines above come from a 1988 contribution to the now-defunct literary magazine Antaeus. Her insight speaks to me: writers often say they are waiting for the next good idea to appear, but for Oates, ideas are simple enough to obtain. “What I want is a voice” tells me that she is looking for the spine, the authority of the work, the reason for the story to be told.