Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Once again it’s useful to see the writer’s work as being done in three stages. In the approach stage, it may be essential to think about your potential audience: who is this story for? For instance, is it for kids? Little kids? Young adults? Any special, limited audience calls for specific kinds of subject matter and vocabulary. All genre writing, from the average formula romance to the average New Yorker story, is written with an audience in mind—an audience so specific it can be called a market.

Only the very riskiest kind of fiction is entirely inconsiderate of the reader/market, saying, as it were, I will be told, and somebody, somewhere, will read me! Probably 99 percent of such stories end up, in fact, unread. And probably 98 percent of them are unreadable. The other 1 or 2 percent come to be known as masterpieces, usually very slowly, after the brave author has long been silent.

Consciousness of audience is limiting, both positively and negatively. Consciousness of audience offers choices, many of which have ethical implications—puritanism or porn? shock the readers or reassure them? do something I haven’t tried or do my last book over?—and so on.

The limitations imposed by aiming at a specific readership may lead to very high art; all craft is a matter of rules and limitations, after all. But if consciousness of audience as market is the primary factor controlling your writing, you are a hack. There are arty hacks and artless hacks. Personally I prefer the latter.

All this has been about the approach stage, the what-am-I-going-to-write stage. Now that I know, dimly or exactly, who I’m writing for—anything from my granddaughter to all posterity—I start writing. And now, at the writing stage, consciousness of audience can be absolutely fatal. It is what makes writers distrust their story, stick, block, start over and over, never finish. Writers need a room of their own, not a room full of imaginary critics all watching over their shoulders saying “Is ‘The’ a good way to start that sentence?” An overactive internal aesthetic censor, or the external equivalent—what my agent or my editor is going to say—is like an avalanche of boulders across the story’s way. During composition I have to concentrate entirely on the work itself, trusting and aiding it to find its way, with little or no thought of what or who it’s for.

But when I get to the third stage, revision and rewriting, it reverses again: awareness that somebody’s going to read this story, and of who might read this story, becomes essential.

What’s the goal of revision? Clarity—impact—pace—power—beauty… all things that imply a mind and heart receiving the story. Revision clears unnecessary obstacles away so the reader can receive the story. That is why the comma is important. And why the right word, not the approximately right word, is important. And why consistency is important. And why moral implications are important. And all the rest of the stuff that makes a story readable, makes it live. In revising, you must trust yourself, your judgment, to work with the receptive intelligence of your potential readers.

You also may have to trust specific actual readers—spouse, friends, workshop peers, teachers, editors, agents. You may be pulled between your judgment and theirs, and it can be tricky to arrive at the necessary arrogance, or the necessary humility, or the right compromise. I have writer friends who simply cannot hear any critical suggestions; they drown them out by going into defensive explanation mode: Oh, yes, but see, what I was doing —are they geniuses or just buttheaded? Time will tell. I have writer friends who accept every critical suggestion uncritically, and end up with as many different versions as they have critics. If they meet up with bullying, manipulative agents and editors, they’re helpless.

What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readers—but wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act—there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?

Some ideas written down when I was planning a workshop in fiction, and worked up into a small essay for this book.

Whether they invent the people they write about or borrow them from people they know, fiction writers generally agree that once these people become characters in a story they have a life of their own, sometimes to the extent of escaping from the writer’s control and doing and saying things quite unexpected to the author of their being.

My people, in the stories I write, are close to me and mysterious to me, like kinfolk or friends or enemies. They are in and on my mind. I made them up, I invented them, but I have to ponder their motives and try to understand their destinies. They take on their own reality, which is not my reality, and the more they do so, the less I can or wish to control what they do or say. While I’m composing, the characters are alive in my mind, and I owe them the respect due any living soul. They are not to be used, manipulated. They are not plastic toys, they are not megaphones.

But composition is a special condition. While writing, I may yield to my characters, trust them wholly to do and say what is right for the story. In planning the story and in revising it, I do better to keep some emotional distance from the characters, especially the ones I like best or loathe most. I need to look askance at them, inquire rather coldly into their motives, and take everything they say with a grain of salt—till I’m certain that they are really and genuinely speaking for themselves, and not for my damned ego.

If I’m using the people in my story principally to fulfill the needs of my self-image, my self-love or self-hate, my needs, my opinions, they can’t be themselves and they can’t tell the truth. The story, as a display of needs and opinions, may be effective as such, but the characters will not be characters; they will be puppets.

As a writer I must be conscious that I am my characters and that they are not me . I am them, and am responsible for them. But they’re themselves; they have no responsibility for me, or my politics, or my morals, or my editor, or my income. They’re embodiments of my experience and imagination, engaged in an imagined life that is not my life, though it may serve to illuminate it. I may feel passionately with a character who embodies my experience and emotions, but I must be wary of confusing myself with that character.

If I fuse or confuse a fictional person with myself, my judgment of the character becomes a self-judgment. Then justice is pretty near impossible, since I’ve made myself witness, defendant, prosecutor, judge, and jury, using the fiction to justify or condemn what that character does and says.

Self-knowledge takes a clear mind. Clarity can be earned by toughmindedness and it can be earned by tender-mindedness, but it has to be earned. A writer has to learn to be transparent to the story. The ego is opaque. It fills the space of the story, blocking honesty, obscuring understanding, falsifying the language.

Fiction, like all art, takes place in a space that is the maker’s loving difference from the thing made. Without that space there can be no consistent truthfulness and no true respect for the human beings the story is about.

Another way to come at this matter: In so far as the author’s point of view exactly coincides with that of a character, the story isn’t fiction. It’s either a disguised memoir or a fiction-coated sermon.