What Can We Learn From Ursula K. Le Guin
on writers and writing
This is the fourth book that offers writing advice which I have reviewed, recapped, and shared as we navigate our writing adventures together.
Following this recap find #1–3 linked below.
I went into Ursula K. Le Guin Conversations on Writing having never read Ursula K. Le Guin.
This drought ends now!
I’ve ordered The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969 and celebrating more than 50 years on the shelves of readers addicted to world building stories.
Le Guin was a novelist, science fiction and fantasy writer, short story writer, translator, book reviewer, children’s writer, essayist, poet and kick-ass. She took on Amazon and the big publishing houses well into her 80s.
She was fierce.
She warned: “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
Ursula K. Le Guin Conversations on Writing is a collection of interviews with David Naimon host of Between the Covers, in which they discuss not only Le Guin’s work but her influences and interpretations of how her works have evolved since her earliest days as one of the few female sci-fi writers published broadly.
She started with the placement of a few small poems in magazines, which led to writing for more magazines, leaping then to snagging an agent and then a publisher.
She reminds writers who are dabbling, searching for their voice as a writer, that they won’t find it if they aren’t listening for it.
Le Guin loves grammar rules. She instructs writers on how to find the skeleton that holds a sentence together by working through an exercise that diagrams the sentence.
I didn’t know sentence diagraming. Effectively, diagraming forces the writer to examine each word to determine if it is properly placed to convey what is intended. If all the ligament words properly tether bone-to-bone, they will hold your sentence upright.
This is what it looks like.
Her advice is to get rid of everything else. Adverbs and adjectives are extraneous.
(Hint: don’t write extraneously).
This is precisely the case with poetry, the construction of which I know little about. Le Guin explains the rules for developing a villanelle poem and differentiates between a curtal sonnet and a Petrarchan sonnet.
She cites poetry as a political tool and reminds us that “dictators are always afraid of poets.”
Le Guin worried about present day writers abusing the present tense, attributing this to our overuse of social media in which “flashlight focus” is narrow and brief.
She writes in an essay Living in A Work of Art that writers write to explore. I’m going to hunt that one down.
Time to explore!
My first recap was Save the Cat! Writes a Novel found here in The Wordy Wombats.
My second recap A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty is here in Creative Writing 101
A third recap What Can Margaret Atwood Teach Us about writers and writing is published here in Writers Daily.
