Tag: ursula-k-le-guin

I’m an Explorer, not an Engineer

“I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground… Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.” – Stephen King

I wish I could write an outline and stick to it. I wish writing one didn’t kill the story for me. My process would be much smoother.

Instead, I have to go digging, searching, exploring, and discover the story somewhere in the unknown parts of my subconscious. The beauty, though, the joy I get from writing, is in that exploration. When the right words, the right worlds, emerge through my fingertips, it feels like magic.

Gifts of the Muse

From the foreword to Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. I love the way she talks with such reverence about writing.

“The relation between short story and novel, inside the writer’s head, is interesting. ‘Semley’s Necklace,’ though a complete story in itself, was the germ of a novel. I had done with Semley when I finished it, but there was a minor character, a mere by-stander, who did not sink back obediently into obscurity when the story was done, but who kept nagging me. ‘Write my story,’ he said. ‘I’m Rocannon. I want to explore my world. . . .’ So I obeyed him. You really can’t argue with these people.

‘Winter’s King’ was another such germinal story, and so were ‘The Word of Unbinding’ and ‘The Rule of Names,’ though all of them gave me the place, rather than the person, for the novels to come. The last story in the book is not a germinal but an autumnal one. It came after the novel, a final gift, received with thanksgiving.”