Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

Maybe nobody can teach anybody how to write, but, just as techniques for attaining profit and prestige can be taught in the commercial and establishmentarian programs, so realistic expectations, useful habits, respect for the art, and respect for oneself as a writer can be

We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something.

The writer at her work is odd, is peculiar, is particular, certainly, but not, I think, singular. She tends to the plural.

Dancing on the brink of the world.

It seems that the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes see all this rather differently. They figure that because the past is what you know, you can see it – it’s in front of you, under your nose. This is a mode of perception rather than action, of awareness rather than progress. Since they’re quite as logical as we are, they say that the future li

These simple little wishes, when they become what people call “ideas” – as in “Where do you get the ideas for your stories?” – and when they find themselves in an appropriate nutrient medium such as prose, may begin to grow, to get yeasty, to fizz. Whatever the “idea” of that story was, it has continued to ferment in the dark vats of my mental cell

workshops. What the instructor has to give is, I think, above all, experience – whether rationalized and verbalized or just shared by being there, being a writer, reading the work, talking about the work.

It is conversation, a word the root of which means “turning together.”

So fiction writers are slow beginners. Few are worth much till they’re thirty or so. Not because they lack life experience, but because their imagination hasn’t had time to context it and compost it, to work on what they’ve done and felt, and realize its value is where it’s common to the human condition.