Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Message about Messages

Reading is a passionate act. If you read a story not just with your head, but also with your body and feelings and soul, the way you dance or listen to music, then it becomes your story. And it can mean infinitely more than any message. It can offer beauty. It can take you through pain. It can signify freedom. And it can mean something different ev... See more

Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete.

This is because a work of art is understood not by the mind only, but by the emotions and by the body itself.

Readers — kids and adults — ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, “Your question isn’t in the right language.”

As a fiction writer, I don’t speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms su... See more