Q: What inspired you to be a writer?
A: "Learning to write, at five."
A fresh answer to one of the most hackneyed questions writers get.
For another take on (almost) the same question, we have this:
"But when people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always was a writer."
Is there anyone better than Ursula K Le Guin for sharp, un-pompous, and enlightening thoughts on the business of writing?
And is there anyone better than Ursula K Le Guin at actually doing that same business?
Not for me, and I think that’s been true ever since I read The Left Hand of Darkness half a century ago.
Ursula K Le Guin. Image by Marian Wood Kolisch. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve already posted about Ursula K Le Guin, mostly tracing my progress in reading her novels. This time I’d like to explore some of what she has to say, and what she shows in her work, about the craft of writing.
It would have been hard for me, having loved her work for so long as a reader, to find that what she says about the craft is at odds with how I feel about it. I’ve been writing for quite a long time too!
In that earlier post, I did refer to one of Ursula’s comments about writing: “None of them (the first three Earthsea books) was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led.” I think the whole business of plotting vs pantsing calls for a post of its own soon.
Moving on, if only slightly, we have this observation:
"Some characters seem to simply present themselves to you and demand that you let them speak."
This is from an excellent BBC audio interview with Naomi Alderman Ursula did in 2015, to coincide with an (also excellent) audio dramatisation of The Left Hand of Darkness (which doesn’t now show up in a search on BBC Sounds).
Again, it absolutely resonates with my experience. Just as some characters seem to come alive when you read—Nancy Blackett being an early example for me—some do it when you write them. In the case of The Shattered Moon series, it won’t surprise anyone who’s read Three Kinds of North that the one who did this for me was Jerya. I referred to this in my post on 'Writing Women': I never made a conscious decision to write a book, let alone a series, that centred on a female character. It hardly feels as if I had a choice. I might have intended for Jerya and Rodal to share the limelight equally, but it wasn’t long before she was telling me, in that decided way she has, "This is my story."
This may seem a bit hard on poor old Rodal, though one of the incidental benefits of my decision to split the original Shattered Moon into two novels was that it gave me more room to explore his journey (literal and metaphorical) and the choices he faced. And if there are any Rodal fans out there, I can tell you that his cameo appearance in Vows and Watersheds isn’t quite the last you’ll see of him… If things go according to my (very vague) plan.
To return to Ursula, another of her observations also rings true for me:
“I start pretty much with places and then the people grow up in the place.”
Certainly my picture of Delven was at least as clear when I started as that of Jerya herself, though both, of course, grew and developed as time went on.
Orsinia: Map by Ursula, ©Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust, Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Here’s a snippet from the official Le Guin website, framed as a response to the question, "Do you do research, visit places, when you are writing your books?"
“Stories and books have grown directly out of places that I happened to visit (my first trip to the Eastern Oregon desert led straight to The Tombs of Atuan.) If there is science in a science-fiction story I’m writing and I need to check my facts, I do. But most of my research is into the geography of my own imagination, where Earthsea, and Gethen, and Orsinia, and all my other subworlds are.”
The importance of places, real and imagined, as the wellspring of story, is clear time and again in Ursula’s writing and in her thoughts about writing. In the BBC interview already referred to, she also says:
"It is more like a process of discovery: I go there and I look around and wait, and see what I see; and I am really learning the place as I live there. Often I have glimpsed the character and the place, but that’s it; it’s just a glimpse, and then my job is to find out who that person is and what they’re doing there."
It’s interesting to relate this to the innumerable discussions I’ve seen and heard about worldbuilding. Rather like the plotter/pantser distinction in story, there are people who talk about worldbuilding as a process of discovery, and others who talk about it more as a process of construction. I’m sure that in reality most of us are somewhere in between, but I’m much nearer the discovery end of the scale, and I think Ursula was too.
When people discuss worldbuilding, too, you can be sure it won’t be long before someone trots out the old saw: "show, don’t tell". Like pretty much every other 'rule' of writing, this of course needs to be taken with a healthy pinch of salt, as Ursula sees with her usual clarity:
"Thanks to 'show don’t tell,' I find writers in my workshops who think exposition is wicked. They’re afraid to describe the world they’ve invented. … This dread of writing a sentence that isn’t crammed with “gutwrenching action” leads fiction writers to rely far too much on dialogue, to restrict voice to limited third person and tense to the present."
This must be why no one reads The Lord of the Rings any more… Or if they do, they obviously skip past the twenty-page Prologue, Concerning Hobbits, and Other Matters, much of which is pure exposition.
Now, I do like limited third person narration (which may be partly the influence of Arthur Ransome); but I don’t think Ursula’s saying it’s bad. After all, that’s exactly the voice she employs in both The Left Hand of Darkness and Malafrena. I think the real key takeaway from this particular quote is not to fetishise 'gutwrenching action’.
Ursula sees a clear difference between Tolkien’s modus operandi and her own:
"Now, with Tolkien, that history and geography already existed in his writings before The Lord of the Rings. But in my fantasies, I have often mentioned events or places which I didn’t yet know anything about — for example, some of the later exploits of Ged mentioned early in A Wizard of Earthsea. These were, when I wrote them, merely words — 'empty' nouns. I knew that if my story took me to them, I would find out who and what they were. And this indeed happened. . .
"In the same way, I drew the map of Earthsea at the very beginning, but I didn’t know anything about each island till I 'went to' it."
Earthsea: Map by Ursula, ©Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust, Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Did I know what Jerya, Rodal, and Railu would find when they completed the crossing of The Sundering Wall? Absolutely not; not until they got there, anyway, and then it was almost as big a surprise to me as it was to them.
I could go on picking out gems from Ursula’s thoughts on writing, but something else she seems to have understood very well is when to stop. Let me just say, then, that in my head, Ursula is the greatest inspiration for, and the greatest influence on, my own writing. I can only hope a little of that shows through.
And, finally, leave you with one last quote that gives us all (all writers, that is) something to aspire to:
“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
© 2014 Jack Liu, used with permission via Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust
I love that last quote. I haven’t read as much of hers as I probably should have, but what I have read I’ve enjoyed. I often find out about a fictional location by ‘going there’ too.