Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet the polar opposite of this uninformed interviewer. A couple of sessions with Bill Moyers set my permanent standard of The Good Interview. It’s the one you wish could go on. It’s a conversation between people who have thought about what they’re talking about, and are thinking about it now in the light of what the other person is saying. This leads each of them to say things that they may be just discovering.

The good interview is like a good badminton rally: you know right away that the two of you can keep that birdie in the air, and all you have to do is watch it fly.

That I know the immensity of my ignorance doesn’t mean I like to display it.

We met at the studios of KBOO, a largely volunteer-run community radio station in Portland’s inner eastside, to have this conversation, and my first impression of Ursula there was one of matter-of-fact groundedness. Of someone who didn’t suffer fools. Someone whose wealth of experience had not merely accumulated over a long life well-lived, but had become something else altogether, had alchemized into a sort of lived-in wisdom. And with this wisdom there seemed to be no patience for masks, for pretense. Confirmed again and again as we talked, my first impression of her became my lasting one.

Despite her stature in the world at large—named a “Grandmaster of Science Fiction” by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress—she continues to publish with small independent presses, from the anarchist PM Press in Oakland to the feminist science fiction publisher Aqueduct Press in Seattle, as well as appear on stations like KBOO that share with her a certain communitarian ethos and a concern for amplifying the voices of the marginalized and underrepresented.

And I was soon to discover that even the seemingly most mundane of things—grammar, syntax, sentence structure—even these are animated by something unseen, dare I say, magical, behind and beyond them. That the length of our sentences, their gait, their sound, that our use of tense, of point of view, of pronouns, all have their histories, their stories, their political and cultural implications, and each could be a building block, a concrete gesture, for good or for ill, toward an imagined future world.

I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don’t seem to hear it, don’t listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual. But if it’s happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear. And what young writers always talk about—“finding your voice”—well, you can’t find your own voice if you aren’t listening for it. The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it’s doing. Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry. And so we get prose that goes clunk, clunk, clunk. And we don’t know what’s wrong with it.

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

UKL: That is something that I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it most wonderfully in a letter to her friend Vita. Style, she says, is rhythm—the “wave in the mind”—the wave, the rhythm are there before the words, and bring the words to fit it.

DN: You’ve cited Woolf as perhaps the best example of the use of rhythm. UKL: She’s an amazing example of the use of a long and subtle rhythm in prose. But there are many, many others. I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkien’s writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; there’s a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is ...

UKL: As a freshman in college I read George Orwell’s great essay about how writing English clearly is a political matter. It went really deep into me. Often I’m simply rephrasing Orwell.

DN: Can you discuss the cost/benefit trade-off when choosing past or present tense? You’ve talked before about how past tense allows for more ready movement back and forth in time, that it more closely mimics the ways our minds and memories work. UKL: And it is particularly connected to telling a big story, a story with some real depth. But it is a complicated issue. Obviously the present tense has certain uses that it’s wonderfully suited for. But recently it has been adopted blindly, as the only way to tell a story—often by young writers who haven’t read very much. Well, it’s a good way to tell some stories, not a good way to tell others. It’s inherently limiting. I call it “flashlight focus.” You see a spot ahead of you and it is dark all around it. That’s great for high suspense, high drama, cut-to-the-chase writing. But if you want to tell a big, long story, like the books of Elena Ferrante, or Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy, which moves year by year from 1920 to 2020—the present tense would cripple those books. To assume that the present tense is literally “now” and the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve.

UKL: Henry James did the limited third person really well, showing us the way to do it. He milked that cow successfully. And it’s a great cow, it still gives lots of milk. But if you read only contemporary stuff, always third-person limited, you don’t realize that point of view in a story is very important and can be very movable. It’s here where I suggest that people read books like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to see what she does by moving from mind to mind. Or Tolstoy’s War and Peace for goodness’ sake. Wow. The way he slides from one point of view to another without you knowing that you’ve changed point of view—he does it so gracefully. You know where you are, whose eyes you are seeing through, but you don’t have the sense of being jerked from place to place. That’s mastery of a craft.

DN: You’ve mentioned that in writing workshops the most common mistake you’ve seen is what you call “inconsistent point of view.” UKL: That’s when you shift from one person’s mind to another’s, the way Tolstoy and Woolf do so splendidly, but you do it awkwardly or you do it without knowing you are doing it. The thing about point of view is awareness. Changing it requires intense awareness and a certain amount of practice and skill in the shifting. Successful shifting gives binocular or more than binocular vision. Instead of a single view of an event, you do what Rashomon does, offer multiple perspectives, but without having to retell the story multiple times as Rashomon does. You can do it as you tell the story, and the multiple points of view lead to greater puzzlement or greater clarity about what is going on, depending upon what you want. I think the authorial point of view, because it allows such shifting, is the most flexible and useful of all the points of view. It’s the freest.

DN: You’ve said that modernist writing manuals often conflate story with conflict. What do you mean by this? UKL: Well, to preach that story is conflict, always to ask, “Where’s the conflict in your story?”—this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you’re limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I’m not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it’s not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things.

DN: It’s amazing how quickly we fall into battle metaphors in common speech when speaking about almost anything. UKL: I do try to avoid saying “the fight” for such and such, “the war” against such and such. I resist putting everything into terms of conflict and immediate violent resolution. I don’t think that existence works that way. I’m trying to remember what Lao Tzu says about conflict. He limits it to the battlefield, where it belongs. To limit all human behavior to conflict is to leave out vast, rich areas of human experience.

DN: I may be reading too much into this quote of yours, but this felt like it evoked something about Buddhist philosophy with regard to the relationship of self to art. You say: “Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this, in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end. I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way, and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself . . .” This feels like a very different approach to story than one of willfulness to put something down on the page. UKL: Yes, that’s fairly Taoistic. That is wu wei, or doing by not doing. It seems very passive. Of course, Lao Tzu strikes the Western conflict-oriented mind as incredibly passive. “Don’t do something, just sit there.” That’s where he is so tricky and so useful. There are many different ways of just sitting there.

UKL: That deeper meaning is where poetry approaches music, because you cannot put that meaning in words in an intellectually comprehensible way. It’s just there and you know it’s there, and it is the rhythm and the beat, the music of the sound that carries it. This is extremely mysterious and rightly so. DN: Robert Frost talks about it, or compares it to hearing somebody having a conversation on the other side of the wall. You’re able to tell what they’re saying through their intonation and their rhythm, but you don’t actually hear any of the individual words.

Over the past decade, it is in-the-world Ursula, as public figure and public thinker that has risen to prominence. During that time, she publicly resigned from the Authors Guild to protest the settlement with Google that allowed them to digitize books in disregard of copyright. She also gave what is widely regarded as the most ferocious speech in National Book Foundation history, using her acceptance of the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to lambast the deepening corporatization and commodification of books and their authors by the likes of Amazon.

You’ll discover, as I did, that Ursula feels most at home in fiction and poetry, more uneasy in the world of declaration and assertion. In her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, she writes, “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” And yet, in her essay collections, her literary criticism, her speeches—this arena where she delivers her views on things—whether about science and the environment, Google and Amazon, or feminism and the canon, she seems to do so in defense of the voiceless and in the spirit of the unanswerable inside every artist, every person.

FROM “Living in a Work of Art” . . . I don’t know what novel our Maybeck house could be compared to, but it would contain darkness and radiant light; its beauty would arise from honest, bold, inventive construction, from geniality and generosity of spirit and mind, and would also have elements of fantasy and strangeness. Writing this, I wonder if much of my understanding of what a novel ought to be was taught to me, ultimately, by living in that house. If so, perhaps all my life I have been trying to rebuild it around me out of words.

I have nothing against ideas per se—I am an intellectual, after all—but when they become didactic, self-righteous, or just opinion then they get tiresome. What I was struggling against was not the reception of The Dispossessed in particular, though it is often treated as if there is nothing in it but ideas, but the tendency to intellectualize not only science fiction but all literature. It is often taught with questions like “What is the author saying?” and “What is his message?” [Sighs with exasperation.] Any work of art consists of more than verbal thoughts that can be paraphrased verbally. There is something more going on that has got to be included in the criticism. You can’t reduce any novel or poem to an intelligible single meaning.

The thing is we don’t live with animals as we did. The relationship has changed immensely in the last two hundred years. You didn’t used to be able to get away from the animals. They were part of your life, absolutely essential to your well-being as fellow workers in the field, as your food supply, your wool supply, and so on. Now we get all that at an enormous distance. Now there are people who can’t be in a room with an animal. What would they have done a hundred years ago? I really don’t know. They would have to like it or lump it, I guess. Children grow up never touching any living being except another human being. No wonder we are alienated. We can live in the cities as if there were no other living beings on Earth. No wonder people get indifferent and think it doesn’t matter if you extinguish a species. You have to be in touch and we are not.

UKL: Mary Foote was a novelist and short story writer of no particular literary distinction but some popularity. She wrote some very good stories. Fairly well-known in her own lifetime, which was basically two generations before Wallace Stegner’s. She wrote a very fine autobiography, which was not published during her lifetime. [Note: It was published in 1972 under the silly and misleading title A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.] Stegner was given a copy of this book and some of Foote’s letters by her grandchildren. He took it and built his novel Angle of Repose on it, on her book, her life story. I believe he took even his title from it. It’s a geologist’s term. It’s the angle of a hill at which a rock can come to rest. Beautiful title. And the only credit he gave to Mary Hallock Foote was to thank her grandchildren for the “loan” of their grandmother. He didn’t even name her. I hold this as unforgiveable. I cannot forgive Wallace Stegner, who was very well-known, very popular, very much adored by the intelligentsia, who easily could afford to give credit where credit was due. And he didn’t. I do not forgive.

What are your thoughts on writing across difference, writing as a different race, gender, or otherwise, the risks and potential rewards of it? UKL: Oh, David, that’s a real can of worms. People have been talking about this for decades now. How far can you speak for a person of a culture not your own? My father was an anthropologist and ran smack into this. When does an attempt to understand become co-optation? This was of course extremely, egregiously visible when white people wrote in the person of Indians, from Fenimore Cooper on. They were co-opting the voice of the Indians, who had no literary voice at that time, but certainly had their own oral literature, their own voice and their own opinions. Those went unheard. They had to be interpreted through the whites. This goes on. Men have been speaking for women for thousands of years, when women had no voice whatsoever, in literature or anywhere else. And that still goes on. But then, okay, if you politicize that to the extent that you say nobody can speak for anybody else, then you get into a mess. Because what we need to say is nobody can speak for anybody who doesn’t have a voice. Of course this is where it gets sticky with animals. Of course, they don’t have a voice. That is their being. They don’t use language as we do. So to what extent can we speak for them? To a very limited extent. On the other hand you don’t have to be like the behavior scientists who say that because we don’t understand their feelings they don’...