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.

That I know the immensity of my ignorance doesn’t mean I like to display it. I’m grateful to an interviewer who respects the limits of my learning and my intellect, and who doesn’t require me to act the Oracle of Delphi.

And imagination, to her, is not something we merely do in our spare moments, an idle act, but the very faculty that makes us who we are. So much so that she warns us that “people who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

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.

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.

We’re not equipping people to write; we’re just saying, “You too can write!” or “Anybody can write, just sit down and do it!” But to make anything, you’ve got to have the tools to make it.

The game that is being played there is a game of social class. It has nothing to do with the morality of writing and speaking and thinking clearly, which Orwell, for instance, talked about so well. It’s just affirming that I am from a higher class than you are. The trouble is that people who aren’t taught grammar very well in school fall for these statements from these pundits, delivered with vast authority from above. I’m fighting that.

It didn’t exist in English before then; Shakespeare used “they” instead of “he or she”—we all do, we always have done, in speaking, in colloquial English. It took the women’s movement to bring it back to English literature. And it is important. Because it’s a crossroads between correctness bullying and the moral use of language. If “he” includes “she” but “she” doesn’t include “he,” a big statement is being made, with huge social and moral implications. But we don’t have to use “he” that way—we’ve got “they.” Why not use it?

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.

I envy the Finnish, and I think the Japanese at least in some respects, that they can speak genderlessly.

C. J. Cherryh.

To assume that the present tense is literally “now” and the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve.

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.

To limit all human behavior to conflict is to leave out vast, rich areas of human experience.

But I think the exclusion of genre writing from literature is in the past now. It’s hard for me to stop talking in those terms, though, because I had to keep arguing for so long that genre is literature just as much as The Grapes of Wrath is. Of course most of it isn’t as good—but most realism isn’t as good as The Grapes of Wrath either. Judgment by genre is just wrong—stupid, wasteful. Most people know that now.

But that sense that everything is always moving and changing—well, if you ask me what story is about, it’s about change.

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

Gabriela Mistral?

After all, dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.

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.

Interviewer's commentary.

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.”

I feel that, for any piece that is a matter of opinion, you really have to try to leave the door open at the end of the piece.

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.

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.

To stint or stunt or be contemptuous of the imagination is a terrible thing to do, particularly to a young developing mind that needs to be able to think about anything—to imagine things, and be clear about the difference between what is imagined and what is real.

But still, both reason and imagination need training. They need exercise just like the body does. We train some of the rational faculties, but less and less is the imaginative given any place in American education. I think that is very scary.

I think that kids’ stories and animal stories are an imaginative way at least of being in touch. Therefore they are very important. But my opinion is not shared by a lot of literary people. Literary people tend to assume if it is about animals, it is probably sentimental. And sentimentality is the worst possible sin.

But what is it the kid is after—the baby wild with excitement at the sight of a kitten, the six-year-old spelling out Peter Rabbit, the twelve-year-old weeping as she reads Black Beauty? What is it the child perceives that her whole culture denies?

This whole thing about writing about the other—animals are just the tip of the iceberg.

C. J. Cherryh

But all we can do is imagine our way into the other. And be very, very, very careful at every step, that we are not co-opting that other. Taking it over and putting our voice where we are trying to imagine what its voice is or would be. Eternal vigilance is required.

The sense that you are in touch with something really different—completely human and extremely understandable emotionally—but really different. That’s one of the great things novels do.