Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Having a clear time to write, often I sit and think hard, forcefully, powerfully, and make up interesting people and interesting situations from which a story could grow. I write them down, I work at them. But nothing grows. I am trying to make something happen, not waiting till it happens. I don’t have a story. I don’t have the person whose story it is.

When I was young, I used to know that I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that’s what it was.

That’s the physical side of storytelling, and it’s still mysterious to me. Since I was in my sixties it has happened again (with Teyeo and Havzhiva in Four Ways to Forgiveness , for example) to my great delight, for it’s an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me, and their world overlapping and interplaying with my world. But I didn’t embody so deeply with anybody in Searoad , nor with most of my characters in the last ten or fifteen years. Yet writing Tehanu or “Sur” or “Hernes” was as exciting as anything I ever did, and the satisfaction was solid.

I still find embodying or identifying most intense when the character is a man—when the body is absolutely not my own. That reach or leap across gender has an inherent excitement in it (which is probably why it is like falling in love). My identification with women characters such as Tenar or Virginia or Dragonfly is different. There is an even more sexual aspect to it, but not genital sexuality. Deeper. In the middle of my body, where you center from in t’ai chi, where the chi is. That is where my women live in me.

This embodying business may be different for men and women (if other writers do it at all—how do I know?). But I incline to believe Virginia Woolf was right in thinking that the real thing goes on way past gender. Norman Mailer may seriously believe that you have to have balls to be a writer. If you want to write the way he writes I suppose you do. To me a writer’s balls are irrelevant if not annoying. Balls aren’t where the action is. When I say the middle of the body I don’t mean balls, prick, cunt, or womb. Sexualist reductionism is as bad as any other kind. If not worse.

When I had a hysterectomy, I worried about my writing, because sexualist reductionism had scared me. But I’m sure it wasn’t as bad for me as losing his balls would be for a man like Norman Mailer. Never having identified my sex, my sexuality, or my writing with my fertility, I didn’t have to trash myself. I was able, with some pain and fear but not dreadful pain and fear, to think about what the loss meant to me as a writer, a person in a body who writes.

What it felt like to me was that in losing my womb I had indeed lost some connection, a kind of easy, bodily imagination, that had to be replaced, if it could be replaced, by the mental imagination alone. For a while I thought that I could not embody myself in an imagined person as I used to. I thought I couldn’t “be” anyone but me.

I don’t mean that when I had a womb I believed that I carried characters around in it like fetuses. I mean that when I was young I had a complete, unthinking, bodily connection and emotional apprehension of my imagined people.

Now (perhaps because of the operation, perhaps through mere aging) I was obliged to make the connection deliberately in the mind. I had to reach out with a passion that was not simply physical. I had to “be” other people in a more radical, complete way.

This wasn’t necessarily a loss. I began to see it might be a gain, forcing me to take the more risky way. The more intelligence the better, so long as the passion, the bodily emotional connection is made, is there.

Essays are in the head, they don’t have bodies the way stories do: that’s why essays can’t satisfy me in the long run. But headwork is better than nothing, as witness me right now, making strings of words to follow through the maze of the day (a very simple maze: one or two choices, a food pellet for a reward). Any string of meaningfully connected words is better than none.

If I can find intensely felt meaning in the words or invest them with it, better yet—whether the meaning be intellectual, as now, or consist in their music, in which case I would, ¡ojalá! be writing poetry.

Best of all is if they find bodies and begin to tell a story.

Up there I said “be” somebody, “have the person,” “find the person.” This is the mystery.

I use the word have not in the sense of “having” a baby, but in the sense of “having” a body. To have a body is to be embodied. Embodiment is the key.

My plans for stories that don’t become stories all lack that key, the person or people whose story it is, the heart, the soul, the embodied inwardness of a person or several people. When I am working on a story that isn’t going to work, I make people up. I could describe them the way the how-to-write books say to do. I know their function in the story. I write about them—but I haven’t found them, or they haven’t found me. They don’t inhabit me, I don’t inhabit them. I don’t have them. They are bodiless. So I don’t have a story.

But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I have that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story. Then I can begin writing directly, trusting the person knows where she or he is going, what will happen, what it’s all about.

This is extremely risky, but it works for me, these days, more often than it used to. And it makes for a story that is without forced or extraneous elements, all of a piece, uncontrolled by intrusions of opinion, willpower, fear (of unpopularity, censorship, the editor, the market, whatever), or other irrelevancies.

So my search for a story, when I get impatient, is not so much looking for a topic or subject or nexus or resonance or place-time (though all that is or will be involved) as casting about in my head for a stranger. I wander about the mental landscape looking for somebody, an Ancient Mariner or a Miss Bates, who will (almost certainly not when I want them, not when I invite them, not when I long for them, but at the most inconvenient and impossible time) begin telling me their story and not let me go until it’s told.

The times when nobody is in the landscape are silent and lonely. They can go on and on until I think nobody will ever be there again but one stupid old woman who used to write books. But it’s no use trying to populate it by willpower. These people come only when they’re ready, and they do not answer to a call. They answer silence.

Many writers now call any period of silence a “block.”

Would it not be better to look on it as a clearing? A way to go till you get where you need to be?

If I want to write and have nothing to write I do indeed feel blocked, or rather chocked—full of energy but nothing to spend it on, knowing my craft but nothing to use it on. It is frustrating, wearing, infuriating. But if I fill the silence with constant noise, writing anything in order to be writing something, forcing my willpower to invent situations for stories, I may be blocking myself. It’s better to hold still and wait and listen to the silence. It’s better to do some kind of work that keeps the body following a rhythm but doesn’t fill up the mind with words.

I have called this waiting “listening for a voice.” It has been that, a voice. It was that in “Hernes,” all through, when I’d wait and wait, and then the voice of one of the women would come and speak through me.