Урсула Ле Гуин - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

And do you want to know where that thing came from? I had gotten a microscope about six years ago to look at animals in drops of water. I put a drop of water from some moss on the slide and got it into focus and there it was! It looked like a furry bear with six legs but no face. It looked very large under the microscope—a monster. There it was, staring up at me, with no face. It was terrifying. Have you ever felt that? I looked it up later and found out what it was—they’re called water bears. Eight or ten cells, I think.

ZELTZER:You write scary scenes well. That one in Planet of Exile about the snowghoul was really effective.

LE GUIN:That’s a nice compliment. I’ve never been able to do villains very well so I guess I do monsters. I haven’t had too many villains.

JENSEN:Davidson, in The Word for World is Forest, was a villain.

LE GUIN:Yes, Captain Davidson is my only real villain. I don’t know why I can’t write villains. I enjoy them in other people’s books. Dickens has the best villains.

ZELTZER:The wizard Cob, at the end of the Earthsea trilogy, the one that was pulling the plug on the world…?

LE GUIN:The wizard that went wrong. But you don’t see very much of him. He wasn’t really developed as a villain.

JENSEN:It didn’t take Ged much to overcome him.

LE GUIN:It took Ged everything. He had to give up all his power.

MCPHERSON:One of your major themes seems to be distinguishing truth from lies—the idea that there exists some basic, unassailable truth.

JENSEN:There’s a Vietnamese saying that it’s impossible to lie in poetry…

LE GUIN:That’s a nice one. Well, you’re not supposed to be able to lie in mindspeech—this appears in many of my books—how can you lie when you’re communicating directly mind to mind? And in the Earthsea books the old language which the dragons speak is the language in which things have their true names. This is the source of the magic and power of the wizards of Earthsea. They learn the true names. This is where Ged derived his power.

ZELTZER:In The Left Hand of Darkness you use another psycho-spiritual concept. How did you come up with the business of foretelling the future in that book?

LE GUIN:The means I gave the foretellers for foretelling the future actually came from reading some stuff about schizophrenia. Some people think that schizophrenics may be slightly displaced in time, which is perhaps a little mystical for most psychologists to swallow, but it seems to work sometimes. And so I threw in a couple of schizophrenics among the foretellers and tried to play with that idea. Philip K. Dick plays with it, you know, in a marvelous book called Martian Time-Slip. And if you want to know—I hope you don’t know—what it’s like to be mad from inside, read that book. Because he knows, and he puts it down, and he brings you out the other side. I think he’s one of our best SF writers, and one of the best American novelists.

HALDERMAN:What do you think of Harlan Ellison?

LE GUIN:Harlan is very strong meat, and if you like it, of course you love it. Harlan is a volcano in perpetual eruption, and if you can take a lot of lava in the face, if you don’t mind that, it’s tremendous. If you get a little singed sometimes you have to draw back now and then.

HALDERMAN:Have you ever been approached about making a movie from any of your books?

LE GUIN:Oh yeah, everybody’s approached about movie rights, and then they go away again. I personally don’t think my books are film stuff. Except I have a dream. If you have read my book The Lathe of Heaven, I would like to see Mel Brooks make a movie out of it. With Gene Wilder as George. Gene Wilder is George.

MCPHERSON: The Lathe of Heaven is a very funny book.

LE GUIN:I’ve been locked into an image of being either depressing or extremely moral, and that’s boring. The Lathe of Heaven was the first funny book I wrote and the most despairing. I think a lot of writers take refuge in humor when it’s something that is pretty horrible or that they’re scared of. And humor is a marvelous defense, isn’t it? Well, look at dirty jokes; everybody’s kind of scared of sex one way or another so we all tell dirty jokes and laugh at them wildly.

MCPHERSON:When did you first get a sense of yourself as a writer?

LE GUIN:I always wrote. And I was so arrogant. I didn’t even say I wanted to be a writer. I thought to myself: I am a writer. I took a creative writing course in college. It was taught by a man who wrote for The Saturday Evening Post under a feminine pen name. I decided I was allergic to creative writing at that point. Writing my books has had nothing to do with any teaching. I qualified myself to earn a living otherwise, because I knew I wouldn’t do it with my books. And I just wrote and sent it out to editors and got it back again. For about ten years. I hate to tell people that. It sounds so discouraging.

KRAMER:Do you ever sit down to write and nothing comes?

LE GUIN:Yeah, it’s a disease all writers have, and it’s called writer’s block. The longest period I have had it, so far, was over two years. And it’s miserable.

MCPHERSON:Once you’re into a major work, like a novel, that has to be written over an extended period of time, how do you maintain the creative flow and deal with the constant interruptions?

LE GUIN:Hemingway, l think it was, had a definite and useful word of advice here. When you stop in the middle of a story or a novel, he said, never stop at a stopping place; go past it a little or stop short of it. Stop even in the middle of a sentence. Tomorrow when you come back to it you can read back the last few paragraphs, or pages, until you come to the “oh yeah, this is what happened next” and you can hook back up into your unconscious flow. That starting and stopping is sometimes a very hairy business.

MCPHERSON:How about the problem of never seeming to finish anything?

LE GUIN:This happens to young writers in particular (though I hate to use terms like “younger writers”), but the real trouble again may be getting started. It’s not that you don’t have an idea. But you write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is—Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. Then take it and tear it to pieces and squeeze it till the blood runs and rewrite it fifty times. But I think what you’ve got is perfectionism trouble, and perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.

MCPHERSON:But I suppose the other danger is that you will write two hundred pages of something and then have to admit that it won’t work, that you’re going to have to trash it completely.

LE GUIN:I’m much more that kind of writer. I do many, many false starts. In fact, everything I wrote before I was twenty-nine is like that. I keep it in boxes. That’s what big empty attics are good for. But it was all learning. I was a late bloomer. There were at least four novels in those early years. They were probably the worst novels that have ever been written.