Ocean Vuong
Poet, novelist and professor at NYU
Where to hear and read about Ocean Vuong1 episode or test
Ocean Vuong is a poet, novelist and NYU professor, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, who teaches that good writing starts with looking and that the sentence has been flattened by newspaper style, workshops and software. The thing most worth learning from him is estrangement: displace a familiar thing until readers see it again instead of just recognizing it.
Are you satisfied with what the dictionary has given you? That's the central question of a writer.
Ocean Vuong Teaches the Art of Writing (NYU Professor)
Ocean Vuong: the story and the lessons
1How Ocean Vuong teaches seeing instead of recognizing
Vuong says 80% of writing is looking and thinking. Syntax comes last. A strong metaphor can take years of observation, and after that it is arrangement and drafting.
Eduardo Corral spent nine years on a 45-page book, and Vuong says you can tell he looked at moss for a long time. His practical advice is to take a walk and slow down to notice what is in front of you.
He wants readers to see a thing, not merely recognize it. Vuong quotes Shklovsky: art exists to give the sensation of seeing. Babel opens Red Cavalry with 'the low red sun rolls across the hills as if beheaded' where a newspaper would print 'red evening sunset'.
The second clause also changes the sunset's speed, so you can see it move. A time-lapse film could not carry the connotations of a beheading.
Vuong builds metaphors by matching behavior, not only appearance. Corral's moss growing 'like applause' speeds up a growth you cannot see. Richard Siken's stars as 'little boats rode out too far' brings loneliness and being too late into a cosmic image.
Corral's poem is titled for AIDS, so the applause carries the renewal after mass death. A reader feels that without knowing the context.
Vuong holds that cliche lives in the idea, not the subject. Following Shklovsky, he says the rose is not the problem. A rose in a bride's hair is stale, and the same rose in Mike Tyson's ear is not.
Banning roses or a grandmother in a kitchen leaves writers with timid, narrow work. The fix is to displace the idea into a different mode of thinking.
He tests a line by searching it online. His teacher Ben Lerner typed a line from a student poem into Google during office hours and found 300,000 people had written it first.
The goal is sentences the species has never had. Vuong treats a flood of matches as a signal to aim higher.
2How Vuong runs a workshop and a draft
Vuong defers critique and names the writer's patterns first. He begins by noticing tendencies, such as an interest in trees, jammed verbs or a tense switch in paragraph five, instead of correcting lines.
A sentence is consciousness filtered through syntax, so each writer's differs. By week three or four the group can gear feedback to the writer, and recognition can spare them thirty drafts. Some workshops destroy the work instead.
He learned to keep strange lines he does not understand. Early on Vuong censored lines he could not explain because he thought a writer should be in control.
He now follows the Japanese botanist in The Method of Hope, who looked for anything new to him, not what looked like medicine. Vuong digs into the strange line later.
Vuong asks why of any writing rule two or three times. Inherited dogmas like 'a poem shouldn't be like this' usually collapse after two or three whys.
He suspends the rules while drafting and asks why you wrote what you wrote.
He aims to haunt a reader, not only hook one. Vuong still thinks about Browning's Meeting at Night, read in high school 20 years ago.
The poem has no pronouns, so he read it as two boys meeting in secret. He calls syntax the downloading mechanism that decides how a work stains us.
Vuong treats the sentence as satisfying or denying expectation. In a linear art, he says, the sentence works like a DJ choosing when to drop the beat.
When the reader senses the maker thought ahead of them, the denial brings delight.
3Why Vuong thinks the sentence went flat
Vuong calls the plain sentence one historical choice, not a law. After the Civil War, newspapers standardized the sentence for clarity and room for ads. Hemingway, Crane, London and Orwell all came from that world.
He says AI extends a homogenizing that began long before it. Microsoft Word puts squiggles under Shakespeare, and Vuong wants a freer, more Victorian sentence back.
He says editors and house styles sand off a writer's strangeness. Editors find it easier to edit when everyone sounds alike, and house styles at magazines are also brands. Eleven publishers wanted his novel, but each flagged its baroque style.
One asked about 'the reader in the Midwest', which Vuong calls elitist. Editing his 2018 New Yorker piece showed him what clarity can look like, though it did not feel like him.
Vuong tells writers to write for readers across time. Using Yuri Lotman's synchronic and diachronic reading, he says publishing runs in seasons but readers read across centuries.
A reader who was reading Melville, Baldwin and Annie Dillard last week finds a same-sounding book familiar. Rotten Tomatoes shows the same split, with a critic score of 96 against an audience score of 31.
He reminds students that a word means its use. Citing Wittgenstein, Vuong says the dictionary has to catch up to speakers, which is how 'throwing shade' and 'edging' became entries.
Students who feel they must master the rules first should know their own use is what changes the rules. Change starts at the margins.
4Vuong's case for daring, and where he doubts writing
Vuong learned from skateboarding to risk the sentence. He says writing school teaches technique but rarely daringness and disobedience. From skating he learned to throw himself off the eight stairs without expecting to land it.
His family came from factories and nail salons, so low expectations made it easy to try everything. A book is the set of tricks that happened to land.
He uses poetry and nature writing as a lab for the sentence. Poetry owes nothing to plot or character, so a writer can experiment and then return to the assignment. Cormac McCarthy lets metaphors run wild and comes back to the story.
In J. A. Baker's mud passage, the mud piles up as 'octopus mud' and ends with 'nowhere for fear to hide', so it is no longer about mud.
Vuong reads the Oxford English Dictionary to widen words. Tracing a word's family tree through French and Latin shows meanings a modern definition fences off.
Passion comes from suffering, so the question becomes what you are willing to suffer for. Webster's solitude is melancholy and inward reflection, while Google reduces it to loneliness.
He keeps a skepticism ceiling on what language can do. Language made Vuong's life and let him support his family, but he says it does not reliably save anyone.
Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican slaver, kept one of the largest libraries of his day, and tyrants seize newspapers and radio first. Sometimes literature does change things: Lincoln credited Uncle Tom's Cabin with helping bring the Civil War.
Ocean Vuong Teaches the Art of Writing (NYU Professor)
Ocean Vuong argues that most good writing is looking and thinking, and that the sentence has been tamed by newspaper style, workshops and now software. The technique worth hearing is estrangement: take a familiar thing and displace it until readers see it again instead of just recognizing it.
Vuong says 80% of writing is looking and thinking. Syntax comes last. A strong metaphor can take years of observation, and after that it is arrangement and drafting.
Eduardo Corral spent nine years on a 45-page book, and Vuong says you can tell he looked at moss for a long time. His practical advice is to take a walk and slow down to notice what is in front of you.
He wants readers to see a thing, not merely recognize it. Vuong quotes Shklovsky: art exists to give the sensation of seeing. Babel opens Red Cavalry with 'the low red sun rolls across the hills as if beheaded' where a newspaper would print 'red evening sunset'.
The second clause also changes the sunset's speed, so you can see it move. A time-lapse film could not carry the connotations of a beheading.
Vuong builds metaphors by matching behavior, not only appearance. Corral's moss growing 'like applause' speeds up a growth you cannot see. Richard Siken's stars as 'little boats rode out too far' brings loneliness and being too late into a cosmic image.
Corral's poem is titled for AIDS, so the applause carries the renewal after mass death. A reader feels that without knowing the context.
Vuong holds that cliche lives in the idea, not the subject. Following Shklovsky, he says the rose is not the problem. A rose in a bride's hair is stale, and the same rose in Mike Tyson's ear is not.
Banning roses or a grandmother in a kitchen leaves writers with timid, narrow work. The fix is to displace the idea into a different mode of thinking.
He tests a line by searching it online. His teacher Ben Lerner typed a line from a student poem into Google during office hours and found 300,000 people had written it first.
The goal is sentences the species has never had. Vuong treats a flood of matches as a signal to aim higher.
Vuong defers critique and names the writer's patterns first. He begins by noticing tendencies, such as an interest in trees, jammed verbs or a tense switch in paragraph five, instead of correcting lines.
A sentence is consciousness filtered through syntax, so each writer's differs. By week three or four the group can gear feedback to the writer, and recognition can spare them thirty drafts. Some workshops destroy the work instead.
He learned to keep strange lines he does not understand. Early on Vuong censored lines he could not explain because he thought a writer should be in control.
He now follows the Japanese botanist in The Method of Hope, who looked for anything new to him, not what looked like medicine. Vuong digs into the strange line later.
Vuong asks why of any writing rule two or three times. Inherited dogmas like 'a poem shouldn't be like this' usually collapse after two or three whys.
He suspends the rules while drafting and asks why you wrote what you wrote.
He aims to haunt a reader, not only hook one. Vuong still thinks about Browning's Meeting at Night, read in high school 20 years ago.
The poem has no pronouns, so he read it as two boys meeting in secret. He calls syntax the downloading mechanism that decides how a work stains us.
Vuong treats the sentence as satisfying or denying expectation. In a linear art, he says, the sentence works like a DJ choosing when to drop the beat.
When the reader senses the maker thought ahead of them, the denial brings delight.
Vuong calls the plain sentence one historical choice, not a law. After the Civil War, newspapers standardized the sentence for clarity and room for ads. Hemingway, Crane, London and Orwell all came from that world.
He says AI extends a homogenizing that began long before it. Microsoft Word puts squiggles under Shakespeare, and Vuong wants a freer, more Victorian sentence back.
He says editors and house styles sand off a writer's strangeness. Editors find it easier to edit when everyone sounds alike, and house styles at magazines are also brands. Eleven publishers wanted his novel, but each flagged its baroque style.
One asked about 'the reader in the Midwest', which Vuong calls elitist. Editing his 2018 New Yorker piece showed him what clarity can look like, though it did not feel like him.
Vuong tells writers to write for readers across time. Using Yuri Lotman's synchronic and diachronic reading, he says publishing runs in seasons but readers read across centuries.
A reader who was reading Melville, Baldwin and Annie Dillard last week finds a same-sounding book familiar. Rotten Tomatoes shows the same split, with a critic score of 96 against an audience score of 31.
He reminds students that a word means its use. Citing Wittgenstein, Vuong says the dictionary has to catch up to speakers, which is how 'throwing shade' and 'edging' became entries.
Students who feel they must master the rules first should know their own use is what changes the rules. Change starts at the margins.
Vuong learned from skateboarding to risk the sentence. He says writing school teaches technique but rarely daringness and disobedience. From skating he learned to throw himself off the eight stairs without expecting to land it.
His family came from factories and nail salons, so low expectations made it easy to try everything. A book is the set of tricks that happened to land.
He uses poetry and nature writing as a lab for the sentence. Poetry owes nothing to plot or character, so a writer can experiment and then return to the assignment. Cormac McCarthy lets metaphors run wild and comes back to the story.
In J. A. Baker's mud passage, the mud piles up as 'octopus mud' and ends with 'nowhere for fear to hide', so it is no longer about mud.
Vuong reads the Oxford English Dictionary to widen words. Tracing a word's family tree through French and Latin shows meanings a modern definition fences off.
Passion comes from suffering, so the question becomes what you are willing to suffer for. Webster's solitude is melancholy and inward reflection, while Google reduces it to loneliness.
He keeps a skepticism ceiling on what language can do. Language made Vuong's life and let him support his family, but he says it does not reliably save anyone.
Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican slaver, kept one of the largest libraries of his day, and tyrants seize newspapers and radio first. Sometimes literature does change things: Lincoln credited Uncle Tom's Cabin with helping bring the Civil War.