Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  So much for secrets. How about ideas?

  The more I think about the word “idea,” the less idea I have what it means. Writers do say things like “That gives me an idea” or “I got the idea for that story when I had food poisoning in a motel in New Jersey.” I think this is a kind of shorthand use of “idea” to stand for the complicated, obscure, un-understood process of the conception and formation of what is going to be a story when it gets written down. The process may not involve ideas in the sense of intelligible thoughts; it may well not even involve words. It may be a matter of mood, resonances, mental glimpses, voices, emotions, visions, dreams, anything. It is different in every writer, and in many of us it is different every time. It is extremely difficult to talk about, because we have very little terminology for such processes.

  I would say that as a general rule, though an external event may trigger it, this inceptive state or story-beginning phase does not come from anywhere outside the mind that can be pointed to; it arises in the mind, from psychic contents that have become unavailable to the conscious mind, inner or outer experience that has been, in Gary Snyder’s lovely phrase, composted. I don’t believe that a writer “gets” (takes into the head) an “idea” (some sort of mental object) “from” somewhere, and then turns it into words and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn’t work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow a story.

  The rest of this paper will be an attempt to analyze what I feel I am actually working with when I write, and where the “idea” fits into the whole process.

  There seem to be five principal elements to the process:

  1. The patterns of the language—the sounds of words.

  2. The patterns of syntax and grammar; the ways the words and sentences connect themselves together; the ways their connections interconnect to form the larger units (paragraphs, sections, chapters); hence, the movement of the work, its tempo, pace, gait, and shape in time.

  (Note: In poetry, especially lyric poetry, these first two kinds of patterning are salient, obvious elements of the beauty of the work—word sounds, rhymes, echoes, cadences, the “music” of poetry. In prose the sound patterns are far subtler and looser and must indeed avoid rhyme, chime, assonance, etc., and the patterns of sentencing, paragraphing, movement and shape in time, may be on such a large, slow scale as to escape conscious notice; the “music” of fiction, particularly the novel, is often not perceived as beautiful at all.)

  3. The patterns of the images: what the words make us or let us see with the mind’s eye or sense imaginatively.

  4. The patterns of the ideas: what the words and the narration of events make us understand, or use our understanding upon.

  5. The patterns of the feelings: what the words and the narration, by using all the above means, make us experience emotionally or spiritually, in areas of our being not directly accessible to or expressible in words.

  All these kinds of patterning—sound, syntax, images, ideas, feelings—have to work together; and they all have to be there in some degree. The inception of the work, that mysterious stage, is perhaps their coming together: when in the author’s mind a feeling begins to connect itself to an image that will express it, and that image leads to an idea, until now half-formed, that begins to find words for itself, and the words lead to other words that make new images, perhaps of people, characters of a story, who are doing things that express the underlying feelings and ideas that are now resonating with each other …

  If any of the processes get scanted badly or left out, in the conception stage, in the writing stage, or in the revising stage, the result will be a weak or failed story. Failure often allows us to analyze what success triumphantly hides from us. I do not recommend going through a story by Chekhov or Woolf trying to analyze out my five elements of the writing process; the point is that in any successful piece of fiction, they work in one insoluble unitary movement. But in certain familiar forms of feeble writing or failed writing, the absence of one element or another may be a guide to what went wrong.

  For example: Having an interesting idea, working it up into a plot enacted by stock characters, and relying upon violence to replace feeling, may produce the trash-level mystery, thriller, or science-fiction story; but not a good mystery, thriller, or science-fiction story.

  Contrariwise, strong feelings, even if strong characters enact them, aren’t enough to carry a story if the ideas connected with those feelings haven’t been thought through. If the mind isn’t working along with the emotions, the emotions will slosh around in a bathtub of wish fulfillment (as in most mass-market romances) or anger (as in much of the “mainstream” genre) or hormones (as in porn).

  Beginners’ failures are often the result of trying to work with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them, or without even knowing how to find the words and string them together. Ignorance of English vocabulary and grammar is a considerable liability to a writer of English. The best cure for it is, I believe, reading. People who learned to talk at two or so and have been practicing talking ever since feel with some justification that they know their language; but what they know is their spoken language, and if they read little, or read schlock, and haven’t written much, their writing is going to be pretty much what their talking was when they were two. It’s going to require considerable practice. The attempt to play complicated music on an instrument which one hasn’t even learned the fingering of is probably the commonest weakness of beginning writers.

  A rarer kind of failure is the story in which the words go careering around bellowing and plunging and kicking up a lot of dust, and when the dust settles you find they never got out of the corral. They got nowhere, because they didn’t know where they were going. Feeling, idea, image, just got dragged into the stampede, and no story happened. All the same, this kind of failure sometimes strikes me as promising, because it reveals a writer reveling in pure language—letting the words take over. You can’t go on that way, but it’s not a bad place to start from.

  The novelist-poet Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from “the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.” I think that prose makes itself the same way, if you will allow “sounds” to include syntax and the large motions, connections, and shapes of narrative. There is a relationship, a reciprocity, between the words and the images, ideas, and emotions evoked by those words: the stronger that relationship, the stronger the work. To believe that you can achieve meaning or feeling without coherent, integrated patterning of the sounds, the rhythms, the sentence structures, the images, is like believing you can go for a walk without bones.

  Of the five kinds of patterning that I have invented or analyzed here, I think the central one, the one through which all the others connect, is the imagery. Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in “the imagination,” which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn’t physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader’s? the writer’s?) while reading.

  This illusion is a special gift of narrative, including the drama. Narration gives us entry to a shared world of imagination. The sounds and movement and connections of the words work to make the images vivid and authentic; the ideas and emotions are embodied in and grow out of those images of places, of people, of events, deeds, conversations, relationships; and the power and authenticity of the images may surpass that of most actual experience, since in the imagination we can share a capacity for experience and an understanding of truth far greater than our own. The great writers share their souls with us—“literally.”

  This brings me to the relationship
of the writer to the reader: a matter I again find easiest to approach through explainable failure. The shared imaginative world of fiction cannot be taken for granted, even by a writer telling a story set right here and now in the suburbs among people supposed to be familiar to everybody. The fictional world has to be created by the author, whether by the slightest hints and suggestions, which will do for the suburbs, or by very careful guidance and telling detail, if the reader is being taken to the planet Gzorx. When the writer fails to imagine, to image, the world of the narrative, the work fails. The usual result is abstract, didactic fiction. Plots that make points. Characters who don’t talk or act like people, and who are in fact not imaginary people at all but mere bits of the writer’s ego got loose, glibly emitting messages. The intellect cannot do the work of the imagination; the emotions cannot do the work of the imagination; and neither of them can do anything much in fiction without the imagination.

  Where the writer and the reader collaborate to make the work of fiction is perhaps, above all, in the imagination. In the joint creation of the fictive world.

  Now, writers are egoists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.

  I beg you please to attend carefully now to what I am not saying. I am not saying that you should think about your audience when you write. I am not saying that the writing writer should have in mind, “Who will read this? Who will buy it? Who am I aiming this at?”—as if it were a gun. No.

  While planning a work, the writer may and often must think about readers; particularly if it’s something like a story for children, where you need to know whether your reader is likely to be a five-year-old or a ten-year-old. Considerations of who will or might read the piece are appropriate and sometimes actively useful in planning it, thinking about it, thinking it out, inviting images. But once you start writing, it is fatal to think about anything but the writing. True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; it takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium. What a teacher or editor or market or critic or Alice will think of it has to be as far from the writing writer’s mind as what breakfast was last Tuesday. Farther. The breakfast might be useful to the story.

  Once the story is written, however, the writer must forgo that divine privacy and accept the fact that the whole thing has been a performance, and it had better be a good one.

  When I, the writer, reread my work and settle down to reconsider it, reshape it, revise it, then my consciousness of the reader, of collaborating with the reader, is appropriate and, I think, necessary. Indeed I may have to make an act of faith and declare that they will exist, those unknown, perhaps unborn people, my dear readers. The blind, beautiful arrogance of the creative moment must grow subtle, self-conscious, clear-sighted. It must ask questions, such as: Does this say what I thought it said? Does it say all I thought it did? It is at this stage that I, the writer, may have to question the nature of my relationship to my readers, as manifested in my work. Am I shoving them around, manipulating them, patronizing them, showing off to them? Am I punishing them? Am I using them as a dump site for my accumulated psychic toxins? Am I telling them what they better damn well believe or else? Am I running circles around them, and will they enjoy it? Am I scaring them, and did I intend to? Am I interesting them, and if not, hadn’t I better see to it that I am? Am I amusing, teasing, alluring them? Flirting with them? Hypnotizing them? Am I giving to them, tempting them, inviting them, drawing them into the work to work with me—to be the one, the Reader, who completes my vision?

  Because the writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

  A special note to the above: If the writer is a socially privileged person—particularly a White or a male or both—his imagination may have to make an intense and conscious effort to realize that people who don’t share his privileged status may read his work and will not share with him many attitudes and opinions that he has been allowed to believe or to pretend are shared by “everybody.” Since the belief in a privileged view of reality is no longer tenable outside privileged circles, and often not even within them, fiction written from such an assumption will make sense only to a decreasing, and increasingly reactionary, audience. Many women writing today, however, still choose the male viewpoint, finding it easier to do so than to write from the knowledge that feminine experience of reality is flatly denied by many potential readers, including the majority of critics and professors of literature, and may rouse defensive hostility and contempt. The choice, then, would seem to be between collusion and subversion; but there’s no use pretending that you can get away without making the choice. Not to choose, these days, is a choice made. All fiction has ethical, political, and social weight, and sometimes the works that weigh the heaviest are those apparently fluffy or escapist fictions whose authors declare themselves “above politics,” “just entertainers,” and so on.

  The writer writing, then, is trying to get all the patterns of sounds, syntax, imagery, ideas, emotions, working together in one process, in which the reader will be drawn to participate. This implies that writers do one hell of a lot of controlling. They control all their material as closely as they can, and in doing so they are trying to control the reader, too. They are trying to get the reader to go along helplessly, putty in their hands, seeing, hearing, feeling, believing the story, laughing at it, crying at it. They are trying to make innocent little children cry.

  But though control is a risky business, it need not be conceived in confrontational terms as a battle with and a victory over the material or the reader. Again, I think it comes down to collaboration, or sharing the gift: the writer tries to get the reader working with the text in the effort to keep the whole story all going along in one piece in the right direction (which is my general notion of a good piece of fiction).

  In this effort, writers need all the help they can get. Even under the most skilled control, the words will never fully embody the vision. Even with the most sympathetic reader, the truth will falter and grow partial. Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew. All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

  OVER THE HILLS AND A GREAT WAY OFF

  (1988)

  My husband and I have known Barbara since 1968, when we and our children spent a sabbatical year in her son’s house in Islington. At that time she also lived in London; after her husband’s death, she moved to the Berkshire village of Inkpen, where, on our next sabbatical, we often stayed with her and went with her on long walks on the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs, to Stonehenge, to the other great henge, Avebury, and to the Vale of the White Horse. Life in the lovely, lonely Inkpen house began to be difficult for a woman in her seventies, and so she moved recently to a sunny little house in Oxford. She is “English Granny” to our three grown children, who have all been to stay with her. It was our turn: we went to England in September to see Barbara. England, too; London, of course—a land and a city we love to return to; but at the heart of it is the person, the dear friend, the wellspring. And we’d been promising for years to “do” Dorset and Somerset with her.

  What we didn’t know was that much
of that journey, all new country to us, would be for her a returning to the source. Chideock was where her family went, summers, for their seacoast holiday, when she was a little child. She had climbed Golden Cap, the highest headland of England’s south coast, exactly fifty years before, in 1937, with her young husband and her baby son. She had tramped the long dike paths of Dorchester’s great Iron Age fort, Maiden Castle, with a granddaughter. She knew the roads and the byroads, and how to find hidden Toller Fratrum and its tiny, ancient barnyard church. For her, the journey was return; and therefore for us, all its intensity of unknownness was doubled with a shared nostalgia, a familiar tenderness, which was again redoubled by the soft, rainy, breezy, gleaming weathers of autumn in the west of England, so like the autumn of our Oregon so much farther west.

  I kept this journal while we drove, or before sleep, so that we might return again to these places, with Barbara, in words and memory—just as I took photographs along the way. Like photographs, a diary doesn’t explain, it just reacts; but I don’t think much needs explaining to those unfamiliar with the countryside, except perhaps the Cerne Giant, in whose village we stayed three nights. He is a huge figure cut into the side of a steep hill; the hill is chalk covered with grass, so he is outlined white on green, and has been since the Dark Ages. He is, unmistakably and tremendously, a fertility symbol. And perhaps I should assure you that though I am a fiction writer, I didn’t make up a single one of the names of villages. You can find them all on a map, as I do sometimes, to remind myself that they are there, and that we were there, and might go back—with Barbara.

  Friday, September 4. In the car. Barbara drives; Charles navigates; I stare and scribble.

  We left Oxford about noon and are now on the A34 south, coming into rolling uplands dotted with trees in their varying distances. Fields grey-green or stubble-ocher. Sunlight and big sea clouds.