Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

The previous printing of this work contained incorrect statistics and conclusions concerning the gender balance of the Newbery Award. I apologise for the misinformation.

And, of course, by reading stories. Reading—reading stories other writers wrote, reading voraciously but judgmentally, reading the best there is and learning from it how well, and how differently, stories can be told—this is so essential to being a writer that I tend to forget to mention it; so here it is in a footnote.

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.

I use the verb “to write” here to mean writing literary and/or commercially salable prose. Writing in the sense of how to compose a sentence, why and how to punctuate, etc., can indeed be taught and learned—usually, or at least hopefully, in grade school and high school. It is definitely a prerequisite to writing in the other sense; yet some people come to writing workshops without these skills. They believe that art does not need craft. They are mistaken.