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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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...