Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I can trust myself to write my story at white heat without asking any questions of it—if I know my craft through practice—if I have a sense of where this story’s going—and if when it’s got there, I’m willing to turn right round and go over it and over it, word by word, idea by idea, testing and proving it till it goes right. Till all of it goes right.

Parenthetically: This is the period when it is most useful to have criticism from others—in a peer group or a class or from professional editors. Informed, supportive criticism is invaluable. I am a strong believer in the workshop as a way of gaining confidence and critical skills not only before you get published, but also for experienced professional writers. And a trustworthy editor is a pearl beyond price. To learn to trust your readers—and which readers to trust—is a very great step. Some writers never take it. I will return to that subject in a moment.

To sum up, I have to trust the story to know where it’s going, and after I’ve written it I have to trust myself to find out where it or I got off track and how to get it all going in one direction in one piece.

And only after all that—usually long after—will I fully know and be able to say what, in fact, the story was about and why it had to go the way it went. Any work of art has its reasons which reason does not wholly understand.

When a story’s finished, it’s always less than your vision of it was before it was written. But it may also do more than you knew you were doing, say more than you realised you were saying. That’s the best reason of all to trust it, to let it find itself.

To conceive a story or manipulate it to make it serve a purpose outside itself, such as an ambition to be famous, or an agent’s opinion about what will sell, or a publisher’s wish for instant profit, or even a noble end such as teaching or healing, is a failure of trust, of respect for the work. Of course almost all writers compromise here, to some extent. Writers are professionals in an age when capitalism pretends to be the arbiter of good; they have to write for the market. Only poets totally and sublimely ignore the market and therefore live on air—air and fellowships. Writers want to right wrongs, or bear witness to outrages, or convince others of what they see as truth. But in so far as they let such conscious aims control their work, they narrow its potential scope and power. That sounds like the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. I don’t offer it as a doctrine, but as a practical observation. [2] For example, read War and Peace . (If you have not read War and Peace , what are you waiting for?) The greatest of all novels is interrupted now and then by the voice of Count Tolstoy, telling us what we ought to think about history, great men, the Russian soul, and other matters. His opinions are far more interesting, convincing, and persuasive as we unconsciously absorb them from the story than when they appear as lectures. Tolstoy was a supremely and deservedly self-confident writer, and much of the power and beauty of his book lies his perfect trust in his characters. They do what they must do, and all they must do: and it is enough. But the earnestness of his convictions seem to have weakened his confidence in his power to embody those ideas in his story; and those failures of trust are the only dull and unconvincing portions of the greatest of all novels.

Somebody asked James Clerk Maxwell in 1820 or so, What is the use of electricity? and Maxwell asked right back, What is the use of a baby?

What’s the use of To the Lighthouse ? What’s the use of War and Peace ? How would I dare try to define it, to limit it?

The arts function powerfully in establishing and confirming human community. Story, told or written, certainly serves to enlarge understanding of other people and of our place in the world as a whole. Such uses are intrinsic to the work of art, integral with it. But any limited, conscious, objective purpose is likely to obscure or deform that integrity.

Even if I don’t feel my skill and experience are sufficient (and they are never sufficient), I must trust my gift, and therefore trust the story I write, know that its use, its meaning or beauty, may go far beyond anything I could have planned.

A story is a collaboration between teller and audience, writer and reader. Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion.

Without a reader there’s no story. No matter how well written, if it isn’t read it doesn’t exist as a story. The reader makes it happen just as much as the writer does. Writers are likely to ignore this fact, perhaps because they resent it.

The relationship of writer and reader is popularly seen as a matter of control and consent. The writer is The Master, who compels, controls, and manipulates the reader’s interest and emotion. A lot of writers love this idea.

And lazy readers want masterful writers. They want the writer to do all the work while they just watch it happen, like on TV.

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text—compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping—what is this, electroshock torture?

From commercial writing of this type, and from journalism, come the how-to-write clichés, “Grab your readers with the first paragraph,” “Hit them with shocker scenes,” “Never give them time to breathe,” and so on.

Now, a good many writers, particularly those entangled in academic programs in fiction, get their intellect and ego so involved in what they’re saying and how they’re saying it that they forget that they’re saying it to anyone. If there’s any use in the grab-’em-and-wrench-their-guts-out school of advice, it’s that it at least reminds the writer that there is a reader out there to be grabbed and gutted.

But just because you realise your work may be seen by somebody other than the professor of creative writing, you don’t have to go into attack mode and release the Rottweilers. There’s another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.

Writers who choose to try to establish mutual trust believe it is possible to attract readers’ attention without verbal assault and battery. Rather than grab, frighten, coerce, or manipulate a consumer, collaborative writers try to interest a reader. To induce or seduce people into moving with the story, participating in it, joining their imagination with it.

Not a rape: a dance.

Consider the story as a dance, the reader and writer as partners. The writer leads, yes; but leading isn’t pushing; it’s setting up a field of mutuality where two people can move in cooperation with grace. It takes two to tango.

Readers who have only been grabbed, bashed, gut-wrenched, and electroshocked may need a little practice in being interested. They may need to learn how to tango. Once they’ve tried it, they’ll never go back among the pit bulls.

Finally, there is the difficult question of “audience”: In the mind of the writer planning or composing or revising the work, what is the presence of the potential reader or readers? Should the audience for the work dominate the writer’s mind and guide the writing? Or should the writer while writing be utterly free of such considerations?

I wish there were a simple sound bite answer, but actually this is a terribly complicated question, particularly on the moral level.

Being a writer, conceiving a fiction, implies a reader. Writing is communication, though that’s not all it is. One communicates to somebody. And what people want to read influences what people want to write. Stories are drawn out of writers by the spiritual and intellectual and moral needs of the writer’s people. But all that operates on a quite unconscious level.