Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

In the sense that it offers a glimpse of some imagined alternative to “the way we live now,” much of my fiction can be called utopian, but I continue to resist the word. Many of my invented societies strike me as an improvement in one way or another on our own, but I find Utopia far too grand and too rigid a name for them. Utopia, and Dystopia, are intellectual places. I write from passion and playfulness. My stories are neither dire warnings nor blueprints for what we ought to do. Most of them, I think, are comedies of human manners, reminders of the infinite variety of ways in which we always come back to pretty much the same place, and celebrations of that infinite variety by the invention of still more alternatives and possibilities. Even the novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home , in which I worked out more methodically than usual certain variations on the uses of power, which I preferred to those that obtain in our world—even these are as much efforts to subvert as to display the ideal of an attainable social plan which would end injustice and inequality once and for all.

To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.

Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader’s present, actual world. Young people in general welcome this kind of story because in their vigor and eagerness for experience they welcome alternatives, possibilities, change. Having come to fear even the imagination of true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know, or think they know.

Yet, as if it feared its own troubling powers, much science fiction and fantasy is timid and reactionary in its social invention, fantasy clinging to feudalism, science fiction to military and imperial hierarchy. Both usually reward their hero, whether a man or woman, only for doing outstandingly manly deeds. (I wrote this way for years myself. In The Left Hand of Darkness , my hero is genderless but his heroics are almost exclusively manly.) In science fiction particularly, one also often meets the idea I discussed above, that anyone of inferior status, if not a rebel constantly ready to seize freedom through daring and violent action, is either despicable or simply of no consequence.

In a world so morally simplified, if a slave is not Spartacus, he is nobody. This is merciless and unrealistic. Most slaves, most oppressed people, are part of a social order which, by the very terms of their oppression, they have no opportunity even to perceive as capable of being changed.

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.

Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.

It is sad that so many stories that might offer a true vision settle for patriotic or religious platitude, technological miracle working, or wishful thinking, the writers not trying to imagine truth. The fashionably noir dystopia merely reverses the platitudes and uses acid instead of saccharine, while still evading engagement with human suffering and with genuine possibility. The imaginative fiction I admire presents alternatives to the status quo which not only question the ubiquity and necessity of extant institutions, but enlarge the field of social possibility and moral understanding. This may be done in as naively hopeful a tone as the first three Star Trek television series, or through such complex, sophisticated, and ambiguous constructions of thought and technique as the novels of Philip K. Dick or Carol Emshwiller; but the movement is recognisably the same—the impulse to make change imaginable.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

I want to close and crown these inconclusive meditations with the words of a writer who never spoke anything but truth, and always spoke it quietly, Primo Levi, who lived a year in Auschwitz, and knew what injustice is.

“The ascent of the privileged, not only in the Lager but in all human coexistence, is an anguishing but unfailing phenomenon: only in utopias is it absent. It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”

A talk given to a writing workshop in Vancouver, Washington, February 2002.

In order to write a story, you have to trust yourself, you have to trust the story, and you have to trust the reader.

Before you start writing, neither the story nor the reader even exists, and the only thing you have to trust is yourself. And the only way you can come to trust in yourself as a writer is to write. To commit yourself to that craft. To be writing, to have written, to work on writing, to plan to write. To read, to write, to practice your trade, to learn your job, until you know something about it, and know you know something about it.

This can be tricky. I have an eleven-year-old pen pal who has written half a story and is now demanding that I put him in touch with my agent and a publisher. It is my very disagreeable duty to tell him that he hasn’t quite earned that much trust in himself as a writer, yet.

On the other hand I know some very good writers who never finish anything, or finish it and then destroy it with overrevising to meet real or imagined criticisms, because they don’t trust themselves as writers, which means they can’t trust their writing.

Confidence in yourself as a writer is pretty much the same as all other kinds of confidence, the confidence of a plumber or a school-teacher or a horseback rider: you earn it by doing, you build it up slowly, by working at it. And sometimes, particularly when you’re new at the game, you fake it—you act like you know what you’re doing, and maybe you can get away with it. Sometimes if you act as if you were blessed, you will be blessed. That too is part of trusting oneself. I think it works better for writers than it does for plumbers.

So much for trusting oneself. Now, to trust the story, what does that mean? To me, it means being willing not to have full control over the story as you write it.

Which would explain why it takes so long to learn to write. First you have to learn how to write English, and learn how to tell stories in general—techniques, practice, all that: so that you are in control. And then you have learn how to relinquish it.

Let me say here that many writers and teachers of writing would disagree strongly with what I’m saying. They’d say, you don’t learn how to ride a horse, control the horse, make it do what you want it to do, and then take off its bridle and ride it bareback without reins—that’s stupid. However, that is what I recommend. (Taoism is always stupid.) For me it’s not enough to be a good rider, I want to be a centaur. I don’t want to be the rider controlling the horse, I want to be both the rider and the horse.