Craft Chat 10 Writing Tips from Ursula Le Guin

[Pamela Jo]

10 Writing Tips from Ursula Le Guin​

by Joe Bunting | 35 comments
Ursula Le Guin is probably best known for her sci-fi and fantasy, but she also wrote poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary fiction. She won numerous awards for her work, and today, we share a few Ursula Le Guin quotes on writing to inspire you to keep working toward your literary dream.

Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch, modified by The Write Practice
I've been reading Ursula Le Guin for a long time, since I first discovered The Earthsea Cycle, which reinvigorated my love for fantasy.

She's also famous for her science-fiction, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and was one of the first to show the world that women can not only write great science fiction, they can often do it better than men.

Le Guin was a “genre” writer who constantly pushed the boundaries of what we think of as genre. Besides sci-fi and fantasy, she wrote poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary fiction.

We first shared her writing wisdom on The Write Practice back in 2014 when she was honored with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards. It's also just one of many awards she received throughout her career.

I honestly believe she will go down in history as one of the greatest writers, literary or otherwise, of the 20th century.

Ursula Le Guin's Quotes on Writing​

With that in mind, here are ten quotes from Ursula Le Guin on her process as a writer:

1. “Show, Don't Tell” Is for Beginners​

From ursulakleguin.com:

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.

2. So Is “Write What You Know”​

From ursulakleguin.com:

As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.

3. Do Your Job as a Writer, and Do it Really Well​

From Paris Review:

But when people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always was a writer (tweet that, emphasis mine). I didn’t want to be a writer and lead the writer’s life and be glamorous and go to New York. I just wanted to do my job writing, and to do it really well.

4. Shoot for the Top, Always.​

From Paris Review:

When asked what authors she measures her work against, Le Guin says:

Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. And then, when I finally learned to read her, Virginia Woolf. Shoot for the top, always. You know you’ll never make it, but what’s the fun if you don’t shoot for the top? (tweet that)

5. Write Like Who You Are​

From Paris Review:

Hey, guess what? You’re a woman. You can write like a woman. I saw that women don’t have to write about what men write about, or write what men think they want to read. I saw that women have whole areas of experience men don’t have — and that they’re worth writing and reading about.

6. Learn From the Greats​

From Paris Review:

It was Borges and Calvino who made me think, Hey, look at what they’re doing! Can I do that?

7. Writing Is All About Learning to See​

From Paris Review:

A very good book tells me news, tells me things I didn’t know, or didn’t know I knew, yet I recognize them — yes, I see, yes, this is how the world is. Fiction — and poetry and drama — cleanse the doors of perception. (tweet that)

I love this, by the way. It reminds me of Oscar Wilde's quote, “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”

8. Begin Your Story With a Voice​

From Paris Review:

How should you begin your story?

With a voice. With a voice in the ear. That first page I wrote, which the novel progressed from, is simply Lavinia speaking to us — including me, apparently.

9. Focus on the Rhythm of the Story​

From Paris Review:

I want the story to have a rhythm that keeps moving forward. Because that’s the whole point of telling a story. You’re on a journey — you’re going from here to there. It’s got to move. Even if the rhythm is very complicated and subtle, that’s what’s going to carry the reader.

10. Don't Waste Time​

From Paris Review:

And one of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less … My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there. … One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.

How about you? What do you love about Ursula Le Guin? What has she taught you about writing? Let us know in the comments.

PRACTICE​

Use tip #5 and write like who you really are. Write like a woman or a man or an American or an alien or an Ursula Le Guin or a Joe Bunting. Write just as you are.

Write for fifteen minutes. When your time is up, post your practice in the Pro Practice Workshop here. And if you post, please be sure to give feedback to a few other writers.

Happy writing!

 

[Pamela Jo]

On Rules of Writing,​

In his terse and cogent essay, “When Rules Are Made to be Broken ,” (The Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 6, 2002), John Rechy attacks three “rules of writing” that, as he says, go virtually unchallenged in most fiction workshops and writing classes: Show, don’t tell — Write about what you know — Always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to. I read the piece cheering and arguing all the way.

The first two “rules” were developed in response to faults common in the writing of inexperienced writers — abstract exposition without concrete imagery, windy vagueness unsupported by experience. As guides for beginners, they’re useful. Expanded into laws, they are, as Rechy says, nonsense.

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. (I make them read the first chapter of The Return of the Native, a description of a landscape, in which absolutely nothing happens until in the last paragraph a man is seen, from far away, walking along a road. If that won’t cure them nothing will.)

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. They believe the narrator’s voice (ponderously described as “omniscient”) distances the story — whereas it’s the most intimate voice of all, the one that tells you what is in the characters’ hearts, and in yours. The same fear of “distancing” leads writers to abandon the narrative past tense, which involves and includes past, present, and future, for the tight-focused, inflexible present tense. But distance lends enchantment...

As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. Like any other novelist. All this rule needs is a good definition of “know.”

The Brontes are a marvelous example of fictional knowledge, because they show so clearly the relative importance of imagination and experience. Patrick O’Brian is another. I don’t think he ever sailed in a three-master.

Where I wanted to argue a bit with Rechy was over the sympathetic character rule. It’s only silly if you define sympathetic as warm-and-fuzzy. And is it true that we “love hateful, selfish, manipulative characters” — that we love Iago, as Rechy says? Who “we,” white man? I hate Iago. Of course I recognise the power of the portrait, but I despise and fear the man portrayed, recognising the affectless psychopath all too common in the corridors of power.

Cathy and Heathcliff are a totally different matter; they are people overwhelmed by affect, wrecked by passion, and so for all the harm they do we suffer with them. Sympathy doesn’t mean liking. It means feeling with, suffering with. Most of us prefer Milton’s Satan to Milton’s God, because God is invulnerable, but Satan hurts — like us.

Rechy’s examples of great books with unsympathetic main characters — Gone With the Wind, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Lolita , The Turn of the Screw — gave me a clue as to why in fact I think those books over-rated. It’s not that the characters are evil or hateful, it’s that they’re jejune, or shallow, or callow. I’d rather read about grown-ups. (Iago is definitely a grown-up.) Rechy says that Carson McCullers “depises every one of her characters, and so does the reader, but one reads on” — Not this one. I quit halfway, years ago. Now I know why.

Even Gregor Samsa, a shocker the first time you meet him, remains just that. Fable has no characters. A cockroach doesn’t grow on acquaintance, the way Orestes and Electra, or Jim and Huck, or Pierre and Natasha, or Mr and Mrs Ramsay do. Fable can provide the shock of revelation; but the characters of novel and short story fascinate us slowly, deeply, by their passion, their pain, their moral and psychological complexity

 

[Pamela Jo]

Ursula K. Le Guin — Steering the Craft

www.ursulakleguin.com

 

[CarolMS]

Ursula Le Guin was wonderful, as a writer, as a teacher and as a person. She was a longtime member of a writers' group in Portland Oregon, where she lived, called the Mountain Writers, and a couple of years before she passed away, I had the good fortune of meeting her and hearing her read some of her recent poems at a reading in a local coffeehouse. She was such a lovely woman. And she had so much wisdom. In November 2014, I posted on my fledgling (and now much neglected) blog, the acceptance speech she gave upon receiving the National Book Award for her life's work. Here is a link. I hope you can open it up (I think sometimes U.S. YouTube videos don't seem to open in the UK and Europe). Ursula K Le Guin National Book Awards Speech

 

[MattScho]

Been in love with her work since picking up the Wizard of Earthsea in the mid-70s. Love her work, and still keep the opening of one of her short stories in mind whenever I'm thinking of how to open.