“Where do you get your ideas from?” is the question people in my line of work—fiction writers—get asked most often. We never know how to answer. In self-defense, most of us develop a sound-bite answer. Harlan Ellison’s is the best; he says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.This excerpt led to the discussion of distrust of imaginative fiction that Le Guin claims to find most obviously in American academics.
When people ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” what some of them really want to know is the address of that mail-order company.
That is, they want to write, or more likely what they want is to be a writer, because they know writers are rich and famous; and they know that there are secrets that writers know, like that address in Schenectady; and they know that if they can just learn those secrets, those mystical post-office box numbers, they will be Stephen King.
Alas. Writers don’t have secrets. Except maybe the well-kept secret that about 99 percent of writers are neither rich nor famous. Writers talk. Writers are wordy people. They talk, blab, whine all the time to each other about what they’re writing; they teach writing workshops and write writing books and yadder on talk shows. Writers tell all. If they could tell beginning writers where to get ideas, they would. In fact they do, all the time. Some of them actually get rich and famous by doing it.
What do the how-to-write writers say about getting ideas? They say stuff like: “Listen to conversations, note down interesting things you hear or read about, keep a journal, describe a character, imagine a dresser drawer and describe what’s in it”—yeah, yeah, but that’s all work. Anybody can do work. I wanna be a writer. What’s the PO box number?
Well, the secret to writing is writing. Writing is how you be a writer. It’s only a secret to people who really don’t want to hear it.
So why do I want to try to answer this foolish question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Because underneath the foolish aspect of it, the question is a real one that people really want to know the answer to, even though it is ultimately unanswerable; and unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.
It’s a big question—where do writers get their ideas, where do artists get their visions, where do musicians get their music? It’s bound to have a big answer. Or a whole lot of them.
One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought up his tunes, and he said, “The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.”
Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery.
And a true one. For a fiction writer—a storyteller—the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there; you just reach up and pick it.
Then you have to be able to let it tell itself.
First you have to be able to wait. To wait in silence. Wait in silence and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for it when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world. The artist says, “The world will give me what I need and I will be able to use it rightly.”
Readiness—not grabbiness, not greed—readiness: willingness to hear, to listen carefully, to see clearly and accurately—to let the words be right. Not almost right. Right. To know how to make something out of the vision; that’s what practice is for. Because being ready doesn’t mean just sitting around, even if it looks like that’s what writers mostly do; artists practice their art continually, and writing happens to involve a lot of sitting. Scales and finger exercises, pencil sketches, endless unfinished and rejected stories. The artist who practices knows the difference between practice and performance, and the essential connection between them. The gift of those seemingly wasted hours and years is patience and readiness; a good ear, a keen eye, and a skilled hand, a rich vocabulary and grammar. The gift of practice to the artist is mastery, or a word I like better, “craft.”
With those tools, those instruments, with that hard-earned mastery, that craftiness, you do your best to let the “idea”—the tune, the vision, the story—come through clear and undistorted. Clear of ineptitude, awkwardness, amateurishness; undistorted by convention, fashion, opinion.
This is a very radical job, dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and what I like to talk about when I talk about writing. I could happily go on and on about it. But I’m trying to talk about where the vision, the stuff you work on, the “idea,” comes from. So:
The air is full of tunes.
A piece of rock is full of statues.
The earth is full of visions.
The world is full of stories.
As an artist, you trust that. You trust that that is so. You know it is so. You know that whatever your experience, it will give you the material, the “ideas,” for your work. (From here on I’ll leave out music and fine arts and stick to storytelling, which is the only thing I truly know anything about, though I do think all the arts are one at the root.)
“Idea”—what does that word mean? “Idea” is shorthand for the material, the subject, subjects, the matter of a story. What the story is about. What the story is. “Idea” is a strange word for an imagined matter, not abstract but intensely concrete, not intellectual but embodied. However, “idea” is the word we’re stuck with. And it’s not wholly off center, because the imagination is a rational faculty.
“I got the idea for that story from a dream I had.”
“I haven’t had a good story idea all year.”
“Here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm.”
That last sentence was written in 1926 by Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a writer friend. I will come back to it in the end, because what she says about rhythm goes deeper than anything I have ever thought or read about where art comes from. But before I can talk about rhythm I have to talk about experience and imagination.
Where do writers get their ideas from? From experience. That’s obvious.
And from imagination. That’s less obvious.
Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent, to tell us a story.
Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story, go mad. Or, like infants or (perhaps) animals, they live in a world that has no history, no time but now.
Le Guin also talks about using other writers as inspiration and as a guide to writing material she was unfamiliar about. She illustrates this with her own work.
I want to use some of my own fiction as examples of Where Ideas Come From. I have written fantastic stories closely based on actual experience, and realistic stories totally made up out of whole cloth. Some of my science fiction is full of accurate and carefully researched fact, while my stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things on the Oregon coast in 1990 contain large wetlands and quicksands of pure invention. I hope to show you that fictional “ideas” arise from a combination of experience and imagination that is both indissoluble and utterly unpredictable.and
In my Earthsea books, particularly the first one, people sail around on the sea in small boats all the time. They do it quite convincingly, and many people understandably assume that I spent years sailing around on the sea in small boats.
My entire experience with sailboats was during my junior semester at Berkeley High School, when they let us take sailing for gym credit. On a windy day in the Berkeley Marina, my friend Jean and I managed to overturn and sink a nine-foot catboat in three feet of water. We sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as she went down, and then waded a half mile back to the boathouse. The boatman was incredulous. “You sank it?” he said. “How?”
That will remain one of the secrets of the writer.
All right, so practically all the sailing in Earthsea, certainly all the deep-sea sailing, does not reflect experience. Not my experience. Only my imagination, using that catboat, other people’s experience, novels I’d read, and some research (I do know why Lookfar is clinker-built), asking friends questions, and some trips on ocean liners. But basically, it’s a fake. So is all the snow and ice in The Left Hand of Darkness. I never even saw snow till I was seventeen, and I certainly never pulled a sledge across a glacier. Except with Captain Scott, and Shackleton, and those guys. In books. Where do you get your ideas? From books, of course, from other people’s books. If I didn’t read, how could I write?
We all stand on each other’s shoulders; we all use each other’s ideas and skills and plots and secrets. Literature is a communal enterprise. That “anxiety of influence” stuff is just testosterone talking. Understand me: I don’t mean plagiarism; I’m not talking about imitation, or copying, or theft. The stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, is composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, just as actual experiences are, and comes forth entirely changed. If that were not so, if I thought I had really stolen and used any other writer’s writing, I certainly wouldn’t stand here congratulating myself. I’d go hide my head in shame and wait for the lawsuit. But as it is, I acknowledge with delight my endless debt to every storyteller I have ever read, my colleagues, my collaborators—I praise them and honor them, the endless givers of gifts.
So, in a science fiction novel set on a planet populated by people whose gender arrangements are highly imaginative, the part about two people hauling a sledge across a glacier is as factually accurate as I could make it, down to the details of their gear and harness, how much weight they haul, how far they can get in a day, what different snow surfaces are like, and so on. None of this is from my direct experience; all of it is from the books I’ve read about the Antarctic, ever since I was in my twenties. It is factual material woven into a pure fantasy. As a matter of fact, so is all the stuff about their gender arrangements; but that’s a little too complicated to go into here.
My book The Telling started this way: I learned that Taoist religion, an ancient popular religion of vast complexity and a major element of Chinese culture, had been suppressed, wiped out, by Mao Tse-tung. Taoism as a practice now exists chiefly in Taiwan, possibly underground on the mainland, possibly not. In one generation, one psychopathic tyrant destroyed a tradition two thousand years old. In one lifetime. My lifetime. And I knew nothing about it. The enormity of the event, and the enormity of my ignorance, left me stunned. I had to think about it. Since the way I think is fiction, eventually I had to write a story about it. But how could I write a novel about China? My poverty of experience would be fatal. A novel set on an imagined world, then, about the extinction of a religion as a deliberate political act in counterpoint to the suppression of political freedom by a theocracy? All right, there’s my theme, my idea if you will.She also talks about the difficulty of translating ideas from brain to paper:
I’m impatient to get started, impassioned by the theme. So I look for the people who will tell me the story, the people who are going to live this story. And I find this uppity kid, this smart girl who goes from Earth to that world. I don’t remember what her original name was; she had five different names. I started the book five times, and it got nowhere. I had to stop.
I had to sit, patiently, and say nothing, at the same time every day, while the fox looked at me out of the corner of its eye and slowly let me get a little bit closer. And finally the woman whose story it was spoke to me. “I’m Sutty,” she said. “Follow me.” So I followed her; and she led me up into the high mountains; she gave me the book.
I had a good idea; but I did not have a story. The story had to make itself, find its center, find its voice—Sutty’s voice. Then, because I was waiting for it, it could give itself to me. Or put it this way: I had a lot of stuff in my head, but I couldn’t pull it together, I couldn’t dance that dance because I hadn’t waited to catch the beat. I didn’t have the rhythm.
Earlier, I used a sentence from a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West had been pontificating about finding the right word, Flaubert’s mot juste, and agonizing very Frenchly about style; and Woolf wrote back, very Englishly:Ursula Le Guin is one of my favorite writers. This is for many reasons. One of them is that, as this talk shows (and there is more at the link that I have not excerpted), she is an astute observer and a deep thinker about the process of writing.
As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year.
Woolf wrote that seventy-five years ago; if she did think differently next year, she didn’t tell anybody. She says it lightly, but she means it: this is very profound. I have not found anything more profound, or more useful, about the source of story—where the ideas come from.
Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention—beneath words, as she says—there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.
She’s full of ideas but she can’t dislodge them, she says, because she can’t find their rhythm—can’t find the beat that will unlock them, set them moving forward into a story, get them telling themselves. A “wave in the mind,” she calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it, like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words. But her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore and crashes, breaks, and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words and “has nothing to do with words.” So the writer’s job is to recognize the wave, the silent swell way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story.
What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn’t Woolf “dislodge” them that morning? It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else—things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things—but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. None of us is Virginia Woolf, but I hope every writer has had at least a moment when they rode the wave, and all the words were right.
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