Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is,”

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

The poem that works better orally can be dismissed as a “performance piece,” with all the usual disparagements of oral texts: primitive, crude, repetitive, naive, etc., etc., etc.

Fine’s splendid The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),

First myth: There is a secret to being a writer. If you can just learn the secret, you will instantly be a writer; and the secret might be where the ideas come from. Second myth: Stories start from ideas; the origin of a story is an idea.

The “secret” is skill. If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In a fairly simple art, such as making pie crust, there are certain teachable “secrets” of method that lead almost infallibly to good results; but in any complex art, such as housekeeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, so many “secrets,” some teachable and some not, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice—in other words, by work.

The rest of this paper will be an attempt to analyze what I feel I am actually working with when I write, and where the “idea” fits into the whole process. There seem to be five principal elements to the process: 1. The patterns of the language—the sounds of words. 2. The patterns of syntax and grammar; the ways the words and sentences connect themselves together; the ways their connections interconnect to form the larger units (paragraphs, sections, chapters); hence, the movement of the work, its tempo, pace, gait, and shape in time. (Note: In poetry, especially lyric poetry, these first two kinds of patterning are salient, obvious elements of the beauty of the work—word sounds, rhymes, echoes, cadences, the “music” of poetry. In prose the sound patterns are far subtler and looser and must indeed avoid rhyme, chime, assonance, etc., and the patterns of sentencing, paragraphing, movement and shape in time, may be on such a large, slow scale as to escape conscious notice; the “music” of fiction, particularly the novel, is often not perceived as beautiful at all.) 3. The patterns of the images: what the words make us or let us see with the mind’s eye or sense imaginatively. 4. The patterns of the ideas: what the words and the narration of events make us understand, or use our understanding upon. 5. The patterns of the feelings: what the words and the narration, by using all the above means, make us experience emotionally or spiritually, in areas of our being not directly acc...

Ignorance of English vocabulary and grammar is a considerable liability to a writer of English. The best cure for it is, I believe, reading.

The novelist-poet Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from “the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.” I think that prose makes itself the same way, if you will allow “sounds” to include syntax and the large motions, connections, and shapes of narrative. There is a relationship, a reciprocity, between the words and the images, ideas, and emotions evoked by those words: the stronger that relationship, the stronger the work. To believe that you can achieve meaning or feeling without coherent, integrated patterning of the sounds, the rhythms, the sentence structures, the images, is like believing you can go for a walk without bones.

But first sentences are doors to worlds.

Conrad’s “struggle” and Jo March/Lu Alcott’s “vortex” are descriptions of the same kind of all-out artistic work; and in both cases the artist is looked after by the family. But I feel an important difference in their perceptions. Where Alcott receives a gift, Conrad asserts a right; where she is taken into the vortex, the creative whirlwind, becoming part of it, he wrestles, struggles, seeking mastery. She is a participant; he is a hero. And her family remain individuals, with cups of tea and timid inquiries, while his is depersonalized to “an affection.”

And it is feminism that has empowered me to criticize not only my society and myself but—for a moment now—feminism itself. The books-or-babies myth is not only a misogynist hang-up, it can be a feminist one. Some of the women I respect most, writing for publications that I depend on for my sense of women’s solidarity and hope, continue to declare that it is “virtually impossible for a heterosexual woman to be a feminist,” as if heterosexuality were heterosexism; and that social marginality, such as that of lesbian, childless, Black, or Native American women, “appears to be necessary” to form the feminist. Applying these judgments to myself, and believing that as a woman writing at this point I have to be a feminist to be worth beans, I find myself, once again, excluded—disappeared.

This section contains the only pieces I have ever published under a nom de plume. Some persons who shall be nameless, including myself, co-edited a brief-lived (two issues) journal of reviews of science fiction, called Venom. We felt that sf reviewing had become awfully milquetoasty; it was hard to tell the reviews from the blurbs—everything the greatest, the biggest, the best. Venom was to be an antidote (“Mithridates, he died old”). The precondition for becoming a reviewer for Venom was that you do a killer review of one of your own books, to be published in the magazine. Then you could cut loose on somebody else. So that nobody could know which were the suicides and which were the murders, you had to use a nom de plume. Mine was Mom de Plume.

The symptoms include inability to experience pleasure, impaired ability to think and remember, indecisiveness, irritability, fatigue (or frenzied activity), sleep problems, impotence or frigidity, sadness, and lack of interest in anything outside one’s self and one’s pain. “The mood state itself is a filter of experience, allowing nothing cheerful or gratifying to come through.”