Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

And so long as ego-tripping is discouraged, the process of the workshop, depending on mutual aid, stimulation, emulation, honesty, and trust, can produce an unusually pure and clear form of that energy.

The participant may be able to carry some of that energy home, not having learned “how to write,” but having learned what it is to write.

I think of a good workshop as a pride of lions at a waterhole. They all hunt zebras all night and then they all eat the zebra, growling a good deal, and then they all come to the waterhole to drink together. Then in the heat of the day they lie around rumbling and swatting flies and looking benevolent. It is something to have belonged, even for a week, to a pride of lions.

This was a talk, first given for Portland Arts and Lectures in October 2000, then for Seattle Arts and Lectures in April 2002. I have revised it slightly for publication. It has not been published before, though bits of it can be found in my book Steering the Craft and elsewhere in my writings about writing. As a talk, it was called “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”—but in my previous collection of talks and essays , The Language of the Night, there’s a different essay with that title (there being many answers to the question). So I have retitled it.

The question fiction writers get asked most often is: Where do you get your ideas from? Harlan Ellison has been saying for years that he gets ideas for his stories from a mail-order house in Schenectady.

When people ask “Where do you get your ideas from?” what some of them really want to know is the e-mail address of that company in Schenectady.

That is: they want to be writers, because they know writers are rich and famous; and they know that there are secrets that writers know; and they know if they can just learn those secrets, that mystical address in Schenectady, they will be Stephen King.

Writers, as I know them, are poor, they are infamous, and they couldn’t keep a secret if they had one. Writers are wordy people. They talk, they blab, they yadder. They whine all the time to each other about what they’re writing and how hard it is, they teach writing workshops and write writing books and give talks about writing, like this. Writers tell all. If they could tell beginners where to get ideas from, they would. In fact they do, all the time. Some of them actually get somewhat rich and famous by doing it.

What do the how-to-write writers say about getting ideas? They say stuff like: Listen to conversations, note down interesting things you hear or read about, keep a journal, describe a character, imagine a dresser drawer and describe what’s in it—Yeah, yeah, but that’s all work . Anybody can do work . I wanna be a writer. What’s the address in Schenectady?

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

So why did I want to try to answer this foolish question, Where do you get your ideas from? Because underneath the foolishness is a real question, which people really yearn to have answered—a big question.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential, durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it’s visible? That is a real question.

One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought of his tunes, and he said, “The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.”

Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery.

And a true one. A true mystery. That’s what it is. For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Then you have to be able to let it tell itself.

First you have to be able to wait. To wait in silence. Wait in silence, and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for it when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world. The artist says, the world will give me what I need and I will be able to use it rightly.

Readiness—not grabbiness, not greed—readiness: willingness to hear, to listen, listen carefully, to see clearly, see accurately—to let the words be right. Not almost right. Right. To know how to make something out of the vision, that’s the craft: that’s what practice is for. Because being ready doesn’t mean just sitting around, even if it looks like that’s what writers mostly do. Artists practice their art continually, and writing is an art that involves a lot of sitting. Scales and finger exercises, pencil sketches, endless unfinished and rejected stories…. The artist who practices knows the difference between practice and performance, and the essential connection between them. The gift of those seemingly wasted hours and years is patience and readiness, a good ear, a keen eye, and a skilled hand, a rich vocabulary and grammar. The Lord knows where talent comes from, but craft comes from practice.

With those tools, those instruments, with that hard-earned mastery, that craftiness, artists do their best to let the “idea”—the tune, the vision, the story—come through clear and undistorted. Clear of ineptitude, awkwardness, amateurishness. Undistorted by convention, fashion, opinion.

This is a very radical job, this dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and craft is what I like to talk about when I talk about writing, and I could happily go on and on about it. But I’m trying to talk about where the vision, the stuff you work on, the “idea” comes from. So:

The air is full of tunes.

A piece of rock is full of statues.

The earth is full of visions.

The world is full of stories.

As an artist, you trust that. You trust that that is so. You know it is so. You know that whatever your experience, it will give you the material, the “ideas” for your work. (From here on I’ll leave out music and fine arts and stick to storytelling, which is the only thing I truly know anything about, though I do think all the arts are one at the root.)

All right, these “ideas”—what does that word mean? “Idea” is a shorthand way of saying: the material, the subject, subjects, the matter of a story. What the story is about. What the story is.

Idea is a strange word for an imagined matter, not abstract but intensely concrete, not intellectual but embodied. However, idea is the word we’re stuck with. And it’s not wholly off center, because the imagination is a rational faculty.

“I got the idea for that story from a dream I had….” “I haven’t had a good story idea all year….” “Here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm….”

That last sentence was written in 1926 by Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a writer friend; and I will come back in the end to it, because what she says about rhythm goes deeper than anything I have ever thought or read about where art comes from. But before I can talk about rhythm I have to talk about experience and imagination.