Ursula Le Guin
"We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay." Lynda Barry
Le Guin frequently wrote about everything that matters - she was that kind of writer.
Her book Steering The Craft, about storytelling, is well worth reading - and maybe even doing the exercises too, if you are that way inclined.
There’s plenty to be found online, in the archive of her blog here.
This quotation made it into my writing journal.
"Making anything well involves a commitment to the work. And that requires courage: you have to trust yourself. It helps to remember that the goal is not to write a masterpiece or a best-seller. The goal is to be able to look at your story and say, Yes. That’s as good as I can make it."
Most of all, there’s her fiction.
It’s a long time since I read The Wizard of Earthsea, The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed - all of which had a huge impact on me.
If only there was the time and energy to re-read them all!
Her short fiction is also powerful.
Here’s one which I do revisit from time to time - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
Ann
More reading
A quotation from The Left Hand of Darkness
"“Do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?”
“No,” I said, shaken by the force of that intense personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. “I don’t think I do. If by patriotism you don’t mean the love of one’s homeland, for that I do know.”
“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear.”
From - The Fantastic Ursula Le Guin - The New Yorker
Jo Walton on Le Guin
You know how some people get cranky when they get old, and even though they used to be progressive they get left behind by changing times and become reactionary? You know how some older writers don’t like to read anything that isn’t exactly the same as people were writing when they were young? You know how some people slow down? Ursula Le Guin wasn’t like that, not at all. Right up to the moment of her death she was intensely alive, intensely involved, brave, and right up to the minute with politics. Not only that, she was still reading new things, reviewing for The Guardian, writing perceptive, deeply thought pieces about books by writers decades younger. She kept on going head to head with mainstream writers who said they weren’t writing genre when they were—Atwood, Ishiguro—and attacking Amazon, big business, climate change, and Trump. Most people’s National Book Award pieces are nice bits of pablum, hers was a polemic and an inspiration. I emailed to say it was an inspiration, and she told me to get on with my writing, then. I did.
Oh dear, I fear I’m an old writer or an old reader. A lot of recent books don’t seem to be what books used to be. I don’t enjoy the multiple POV style that’s grown so popular. George RR Martin managed it quite well but he’s a rare one.