On Getting and Giving Critiques

The blog Book View Café has a post about the role of criticism in the writing process by Mindy Klasky entitled C is for Critique. The focus is on criticism an author receives from a "critique partner" defined as:

trusted individuals who read and evaluate a book it’s in a final state. These people go by many other names—you might call them your beta readers, or your critique group, or your writers group. Most authors have more than one critique partner, and they learn different things from different critics. One partner might excel at catching plot mistakes, gaps in storytelling or oversights in timeline that destroy the credibility of a story. Another partner might be best at noting character inconsistencies, those times when an author makes a character do something completely unexpected, solely to advance a plot. Yet another partner might point out factual mistakes or grammar errors or any of a million other details that keep a book from being its best.

Ideally, an author assembles a team of critique partners who address all these areas, along with any other known weaknesses.

Much of the post is bout how an author can shape the critique process to be most beneficial:

There are multiple methods for receiving criticism (most of which are designed to minimize the sting.) Some authors conduct all critique work online—they submit their files electronically, and they receive comments electronically. That computerized distance translates to an emotional distance. The author can temporarily stop reading criticism if it becomes difficult to process. She can rant and rave in the privacy of her own home, without building permanent barriers to communication with her critique partners. This method, though, can lead to a lack of understanding; without direct time-synced communication, the critic and the author might inadvertently be at cross-purposes.

Other authors conduct critique work in person, at weekly or monthly meetings. Many of these sessions follow a workshop model, where each member of the critique group presents his comments within a limited time period (for example, three minutes.) During that presentation time, the author must remain silent (except, in some cases, to ask for a clarification of a specific point.) The author then has a limited time period to respond to all the issues raised. This method allows each critic and the author to present points in a planned, methodic fashion. It also reduces purely emotional responses. This method, though, requires real-time communication, either in person or through an electronic tool such as Skype. It also requires restraint on all parties, who must stick with time limitations and speaking restrictions.

Yet another model involves direct, ongoing exchanges between the author and his critics, without limitations on time or subject matter, either in person or by a Skype-like tool. Critics and the author make statements and ask questions without restraints on time or subject matter. This method allows everyone to flesh out ideas more completely—critics can state their problems with a work, and authors can delve more deeply, pinpointing specific issues. This method, though, has the potential to dissolve into debates. Aggressive critics and defensive authors can quickly derail the effectiveness of direct, unlimited communication.

There is also advice on how to give critiques:

• Begin with a general introduction. This is the place to state that you’ve never liked farmboy-saves-the-world epic fantasy novels so your comments should be taken with a grain of salt, or you had a bad experience at a high school pep rally so you have trouble finding a gym teacher a sympathetic heroine. Put your own biases on the table to allow the author to better understand your critique.
• Move on to positive statements. What works in this book? Why? Always find something positive about a work, even if it’s the formatting or enthusiasm of the author.
• Follow up with critical statements. What needs work in this book? Why? Start with larger topics (“this romance novel has no conflict between the hero and heroine”) and end with smaller topics (“the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not Connecticut Avenue.”) Consider grouping smaller topics into catch-all paragraphs (“Geography: review a map of Washington DC to double-check locations for the White House, the Capitol, and the Convention Center.”)
• Present potential fixes as suggestions, rather than as mandatory statements. (“Consider making the heroine a blind orphan to heighten the tension with her fellow boarding school students” instead of “Make Sally blind.”) If you don’t have a potential solution to a problem, admit as much.

Critique partners offer authors valuable insight into what works and what does not work in a book. Sometimes, that criticism is directly on point—the mere statement of the problem is enough to help an author see what needs to be fixed. Other times, an author concludes that a critic is mistaken—she doesn’t understand the book, or she isn’t familiar with a particular sub-genre, or she was having a bad day as she wrote her criticism. Even in those cases, the rational writer considers the criticism as a warning that the reader was pulled off track at that particular point. Often, a critic finds fault with a particular aspect of a book (e.g., “your heroine sounds whiny when she talks to her best friend”) but an author discovers a completely different fix (e.g., the heroine shouldn’t be talking to her best friend in that scene; instead, she should be taking steps to solve her problem more directly.) Critics aren’t omniscient, but they can be good barometers of when a story succeeds.

I thought this was pretty interesting, especially as it compares and contrasts with what I do editing and reviewing academic papers, as well as to preparing book reviews on this blog.

When reviewing an academic paper, it is typical to prepare a letter to the editor (not seen by the author) that discusses in a frank (and occasionally brutal) way the strengths and weaknesses of the article, as well as a report to both the editor and author. I typically write my reports along the lines advocated above. I start by briefly summarizing the work and placing it into context (for the benefit of the editor, who is usually not a specialist in the precise subfield). I follow it up with some comments about what the paper did well, and then describe any problems I found on a macro level. I then delve deeper into any of those problems, suggesting remedies when I know them, and then follow that up with some miscellaneous smaller criticisms.

Just like with any other form of writing, it is important to know your audience. As an editor, I want a no-nonsense and frank evaluation of a paper's strengths and weaknesses. If the recommendation is to publish the paper after revisions, then I want to report to be constructive and as specific as possible as to what type of revision is required. As an author, I want criticism to be constructive.

When reviewing fiction for this blog, my audience is other readers and fans of SFF. I would not mind if an author read something I wrote and it influenced them, but that is not why I write (I don't even write reviews in the expectation that they will be read). And so I do not write my reviews in the same way that I would offer a critique to an author desiring feedback. Rather, I write them more along the lines of an editors letter.

Mike Carey on Genre vs Literary Fiction

Continuing with the recent theme of authors defending genre fiction from literary snobs (see my posts on ), a couple of weeks ago I noticed a post by Mike Carey, author of the Felix Castor novels, works for comics publishers Marvel and DC, as well as the “literary zombie” novel The Girl With All the Gifts. The article posted at The Norwich Radical was entitled Literature vs Genre---Seconds Out (Part 1).

Recently, Part 2 of this article was published and so I thought it opportune to review the arguments raised.

Carey starts by noticing that this ongoing debate is pretty one-sided:

One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not “literary” writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.

He then goes on to illustrate this with the example of Jonathan Jones attach on Terry Pratchett in The Guardian, which we have talked about recently. He then talks about an example from last year:

Last year it was Oliver Burkeman’s turn to tell us – I’m assuming with a straight face – that one way to “be a smarter reader” and “get more from what you read” is to stick to literary fictions. Why? Because a “well-designed study” at a US social research think tank (it’s Kidd & Castano if you want to look it up) found that literary fiction produces more powerful emotional identification with its more fully rounded characters and has a lasting effect on your ability to empathise with others.

The relevant section of Burkeman’s little how-to guide is called “Keep it Literary” – building on the most tendentious of Kidd & Castano’s five linked experiments, in which subjects read selected passages from either literary or genre fictions and then performed a range of tests designed to measure their empathy. The smoking gun here is “selected passages”. The experimenters hand-picked texts which they felt exemplified the differences between the two kinds of text, which is a little like marking the deck before you do a random shuffle. Six passages in all, by the way – three from genre fictions and three from the world’s canonically great literature – so this generalisation about all literary fiction and all genre fiction is based on about a millionth of a per cent of each. And despite being able to skew their sample in this bespoke way, Kidd & Castano reported differences between test and control groups that were barely larger than the margin of error. Mark Liberman dissected these procedural inadequacies very thoroughly in the Annals of Overgeneralisation on Language Log, and he was far from the only one.

So a spurious claim is being worked up out of a flawed study that seriously over-sold the significance of its findings. You can’t help but feel that there’s an agenda here, or at least a presumption – that literature has merit and that what has merit is by that same circular definition literature.

He has some other examples:

Other writers have been less coy about saying exactly this. Here’s Arthur Krystal, writing in the New Yorker in 2012:

“Genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it.

and

I hate to rake up ancient history, but here’s another example from a little further back – dredged up because in this case it is a writer of literary novels (Edward Docx, in the Observer in 2010) who’s saying this, so the agenda is maybe a little more naked.

Even good genre… is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Carey begins his rebuttal with the last of these:

Yes, of course there are constraints when you write genre fiction. There are also constraints when you write literary fiction. Totally unconstrained writing would be (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) gibberish interspersed with exclamation marks. When you write – when you write anything at all – you write on the end of a tether. But it’s a flexible tether, and it’s all about the dance you perform on the end of that thing and how you work with it or strain against it or in some cases tie it into knots that were never seen before.

And then, referring to his own novel, The Girl With All the Gifts

If Docx’s thesis is right, the fact that I was working in a space that had been partially defined for me should have robbed whatever I produced of all or most of its potential value. I think the opposite was the case: being coaxed out of my comfort zone made me take creative pathways I’d never noticed or thought about before, and the results were unexpected and exciting. I realised almost as soon as I’d sent the story in that I couldn’t part company with Melanie so soon. I’d inadvertently written the first few scenes of a much larger narrative. There were events that hadn’t eventuated, other characters waiting in the wings, and a box (Pandora’s) that had finally to be opened.

The constraints were liberating, and believe me when I say that I speak as someone who has no interest in bondage.

Carey then revisits the debate on why some classic works are not considered "genre" pieces despite having all their trappings, as with Hamlet and Macbeth, despite having ghosts and witches in them. aren’t genre fictions, and both were unapologetically designed to get the crowds into the theater.

Lastly, he ends up quoting on of my favorite writers:

If I’m honest, I tend to see the entire “literature versus genre” debate as a dead horse so cruelly and relentlessly flogged that it isn’t even vaguely horse-shaped any more. It lies in a neglected corner of the academic meadow close to the intentional fallacy and the vast midden of post-modernism. But since Mr Burkeman has tried to put a saddle on it, I felt it was probably worth offering an opinion (“It is an ex-horse. It has ceased to be…”). And on top of that, to slip in a reference to one of my favourite writers and her eloquent rebuttal of this whole daft non-argument. I’m referring to Ursula LeGuin, who in the introduction to The Left Hand Of Darkness laments the tendency of people who don’t like or get science fiction to pronounce (ham-fistedly) on what science fiction is and does. Along the way, she has this to say about the relevance and importance of her chosen genre:

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words.

I like this formulation very much. I seldom write pure sci-fi, but LeGuin’s words apply just as well to horror and dark fantasy and probably to serious-minded works in any genre. I also like T.S.Eliot’s famous dictum about everything you write being “a raid on the inarticulate”. A genre is a tool you pack and carry along when you go on one of these raids. It takes it place – its honourable, earned place – among the other tools of the writer’s trade.

All-in-all, another well argued response to the dismissal of genre fiction. But also a reminder that many writers working in SFF have a (well deserved) chip on their shoulder.

Tolkien Scholarship

Following on from Ursula Le Guin's discussion of academic treatments (and the scorning) of Tolkien, Norbert Schürer has published an article in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books titled Tolkien Criticism Today.

As Schürer sees it, scholarship on Tolkien has struggled to find a path between recognizing the difficulty of the literature:

ON THE FACE OF IT, J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are not exactly easy reading. The Hobbit veers between childish asides and grandiose battles; The Lord of the Rings trilogy presents 1,000 pages of unrelenting heroism; The Silmarillion makes the Bible look like easy reading — and this doesn’t even begin to consider The History of Middle-Earth, the 12 volumes of manuscript variants compiled posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Furthermore, much of Tolkien’s work is written in an indigestible faux-medieval style; there are long descriptions of imagined countrysides, and he sprinkles in countless obscure references to invented fantastic histories.

and the popularity of the works:

Tolkien is nonetheless one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. In poll after poll, readers declare him their favorite writer; his main books remain bestsellers 60 years after their publication, and the recent movies based on his works are box office hits. On a superficial level, Tolkien’s success is easy to explain: He offers timeless stories about hard moral choices, and he creates a marvelous world of magic, including talking eagles, walking trees, and hobbits — invented figures with whom many contemporary readers can easily identify.

As he says it, scholars face a difficult trade-off:

On one hand, critics do not want to be seen as fawning fans, so their writing adopts a scholarly tone. On the other hand, they want to appeal to fans, so they have to cater to popular sentiment. They need to address controversial topics, but they cannot attack the author if they want to find readers among fans, and while they often try to address the entirety of Tolkien’s published imaginary writings (known as the legendarium) they can only rely on readers being familiar with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and often only in cinematic form.

As a result, he concludes that Tolkien scholarship is in a sad state. He then goes on to review seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, and comes away unimpressed for the most part.

The best of the seven, he argues, is A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Stuart Lee, and published by Wiley Blackwell. The next best, the essay collection Tolkien: The Forest and the City:

these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.

Recommended Reading: Barnes and Noble's Best SFF of 2015

Barnes and Noble have come out with their list of the best SFF of 2015:

1. Radiance, by Catherynne M. Valente
2. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson
3. Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
4. Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
5. A Darker Shade of Magic, by V.E. Schwab
6. Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho
7. The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu
8. Ink and Bone: The Great Library, by Rachel Caine
9. The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
10. Flex/The Flux, by Ferrett Steinmetz
11. Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
12. The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins
13. Half-Resurrection Blues, by Daniel José Older
14. Planetfall, by Emma Newman
15. Signal to Noise, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
16. Dark Orbit, by Carolyn Ives Gilman
17. The Drafter, by Kim Harrison
18. Wake of Vultures, by Lila Bowen
19. Vision in Silver, by Anne Bishop
20. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers
21. Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
22. Revision, by Andrea Phillips
23. Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear
24. Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, by Bradley P. Beaulieu
25. The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, by Jim Butcher

I have read only three of these so far, although I have plans to read another four. Lots more recommendations to think about.

But overall, a pretty strange list. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves did not make the cut? Terry Pratchett's The Shephered's Crown? Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife? I thought Seveneves was one of the better novels I read this year, and so far (I am not finished yet) The Water Knife is excellent. Should I infer from this that the other books on the list are better than these? If so, I have some great reading ahead. Or should I infer that the list-maker's tastes are very different from mine?

The list also features a large selection of books by women writers, and by writers of color. Given that we continually hear about how the profession is dominated by white males, we might infer that this is a disproportionately large representation of women and people of color. That is a good thing; I think it is important to draw attention to new and different voices.

David Mitchell on Literary vs Genre Fiction

David Mitchell is an unusual author. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 3 times, shortlisted twice, and was also the author of Bone Clocks, which recently won the World Fantasy Award. His recent novel, The Slade House, is a haunted house story. As such, he is uniquely qualified to speak on the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, a topic that has been of substantial interest to me on this blog (see my posts on the views of  C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Ursula Le Guin).

In a recent article in The Guardian, based on a Wired podcast and entitled David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation', he spoke at some length on this topic. The title pretty much sums up his views, but I think the arguments are worth repeating.

He starts by listing some of his childhood influences, listing Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (I recently reported on David Mitchell's stirring tribute to Ursual Le Guin's Earthsea books), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, British SF comic 2000AD and EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. These were all books I read as a child, too.

He then goes on to talk about the “ghettoisation” in bookshops:

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

He also pointed out that many books accepted as literature, such as Dickens, are “shot through with fantasy” and argued that works that “become sanctified in the canon of English literature, people then forget – conveniently – are what we now called genre”. He listed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the works of HG Wells and Margaret Atwood. I would add Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, much of magical realism, and many, many others.

He also had a lot to say about Kazuo Ishiguro’s distancing of his novel The Buried Giant from the fantasy label (for which he was criticized by Ursula Le Guin):

Mitchell said he admired both writers. On Ishiguro – and those readers and critics who also sought to downplay the fantasy elements in his novel – Mitchell said: “There was just this big, big, big brouhaha in the press. In the admittedly tiny corner of the press that the book world occupies, there was this, ‘How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?’ A lot of people just didn’t get it. But this is what the book wants to be. You’re personally entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works, you’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing, you don’t like the book because of its absurdity or strangeness – but don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it!”

Le Guin remains a personal favourite: “I visit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there – my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, as a teenager of 15, as a young man of 26 or so, as a writer of 35, and as a person who re-read them to write an introduction to the Folio Society’s recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea. So it’s kind of come full circle.”

 I've not read any of Mitchell's works, but will seek some out in the near future.

Le Guin on Where Ideas Come From

In my last post on transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin from 2000 that was published recently online (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here and here), I review what Le Guin has a lot to say directly about the topic of the title of the talk.

“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.

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.

This excerpt led to the discussion of distrust of imaginative fiction that Le Guin claims to find most obviously in American academics.

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.

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.

and

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.

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.

She also talks about the difficulty of translating ideas from brain to paper:

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:

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.

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.

Le Guin on Reading vs Viewing Stories

In the same transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin that I talked about yesterday (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here), Le Guin also has a lot to say about the differences between reading fiction, and the experience of watching TV or movie adaptations of that same material.

In it, she says, following on from her discussion of fantasy existing in a literary ghetto:

Another way we show our distrust of the imagination, our puritanical lust to control it, is in the way we tell stories on TV and in video or online games.

Reading is active. To read a story is to participate actively in the story; to read is to tell the story to yourself by reliving it and rewriting it with the author, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. If you want proof, just watch an eight-year-old reading a story she likes. She is concentratedly, tensely, fiercely alive. She is as intense as a hunting cat.

Reading is a mysterious act. It absolutely has not and cannot be replaced by any kind of viewing, because viewing is an entirely different undertaking, with different stakes and rewards. Viewing is passive. A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating the arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it—to participate in it—be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books, but film eats viewers. This is fine. It’s wonderful to be eaten by a good movie, to let your eyes and ears take your mind into a reality you could never otherwise know. However, passivity means vulnerability, and that’s what a great deal of media storytelling exploits.

Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader. The text is under the control of the reader—she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story or refuse to go along with it, make judgments, revise her judgments— she has time and room to genuinely interact with it. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Viewing is not a transaction. It isn’t collaborative. The viewer, consenting to participate, hands over control to the filmmaker or programmer. Psychically there is no time or room outside an audiovisual narrative for anything but the program. For the viewer, the monitor screen temporarily becomes the universe. There’s very little leeway, and no way to control the constant stream of information and imagery unless one refuses to accept it and detaches oneself emotionally and intellectually, in which case it appears essentially meaningless. Or one can turn the program off.

Although there’s a lot of talk about transactional viewing and “interactive” is a favorite word of programmers, electronic media are a paradise of control for programmers and a paradise of passivity for viewers. There is nothing in so-called interactive programs except what the programmer put in them; the so-called choices lead only to subprograms chosen by the programmer, no more a choice than a footnote is—do you read it or don’t you. The roles in role-playing games are fixed and conventional; there are no characters, only personae. (That’s why teenagers love them; teenagers need personae. But they have to shed those personae eventually, if they’re going to become persons.) Hypertext offers the storyteller a wonderful complexity, but so far hypertext fiction seems to be like Borges’s garden of forking paths that lead only to other forking paths—fascinating, like fractals, and ultimately nightmarish. Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel. If you don’t like the end of Moby-Dick you can change it. You can make it happy. Ahab kills the whale. Ooowee.

Readers can’t kill the whale. They can only reread until they understand why Ahab made it kill him. Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it. Viewers are either controlled by the program or try to control it. Different ballgames. Different universes.

A 3-D animated version of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, appeared this year and was presented as offering “more than just the story of the Little Prince. You can, for example, catch an orbiting planet in the Little Prince’s universe and learn all about the planet’s secrets and its inhabitants.” But in the book, doesn’t the prince visit several planets, with extremely interesting inhabitants, and doesn’t his own tiny planet have an immense secret—a rose—the rose he loves? Do the makers of this version feel that Saint-Exupéry was stingy with his planets? Or are they convinced that stuffing irrelevant information into a work of art enriches it? Maybe they’ll give us a version of The Tempest, and when Miranda says, “O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!” the viewer can press a button and on the screen there will be information about a genuine virtual new world with all kinds of weird creatures in it.

We are told that the viewer can interact with the animated version of The Little Prince. You can “enter the Fox Training Game and after you’ve ‘tamed’ the fox that the Little Prince meets, he will give you a gift.”

Do you remember the fox in The Little Prince? He insists that the little prince tame him. Why? the prince asks, and the fox says that if he is tamed he will always love the wheat fields, because they’re the color of the little prince’s hair. The little prince asks how to tame him, and the fox says by being very patient, sitting down “at a little distance from me . . . in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .” And it should be at the same time every day, so that the fox will “know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites.” And so the fox is tamed, and when the little prince is about to leave, “‘Ah,’ said the fox, ‘I shall cry.’” So the little prince laments that being tamed “has done you no good at all!” but the fox says, “It has done me good . . . because of the color of the wheat fields.” And when they part, the fox says, “I will make you a present of a secret . . . It is the time you wasted for your rose that makes your rose important. . . . You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

So, then, the child viewing the program “tames” the fox by pressing buttons until the food pellet drops into the food dish—no, no, sorry, that’s how we train rats. We train children by teaching them to select the “right” choice from the choices offered until the program tells them that the fox is “tamed.” Somehow this doesn’t seem the same as imagining doing what the book describes: coming back every day at the same time and sitting silently while a fox looks at you out of the corner of its eye. Something essential has been short-circuited, falsified. What do you think the fox’s “gift” to the child viewer will be? I don’t know, but I don’t really see how it can top the fox’s gift in the book: just the words “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

The “gift” The Little Prince gives its readers is itself. It offers them absolutely nothing but a charming story with a few charming pictures, and the chance to face fear, grief, tenderness, and loss.

Which is why that story, written in the middle of a war by a man about to die in that war, is honored by children, adults, and even literary critics. Maybe the animated version isn’t as ghastly as it sounds; but it’s hard not to see it as an effort to exploit, to tame something that, like a real fox, must be left wild: the imagination of an artist.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did crash-land in the desert once, in the thirties, and nearly died; that is a fact. He did not meet a little prince from another planet there. He met terror, thirst, despair, and salvation. He wrote a splendid factual account of that experience in Wind, Sand and Stars. But later it got composted, transmuted, transfigured into a story of a little prince. Imagination working on experience. Invention springing like a flower, a rose, out of the desert sands of fact.

I thought these were interesting views, and her references to The Little Prince were spot on. However, it is interesting to note that some of the more popular video games available today (like Minecraft) are popular because they allow for the player to express their individuality. Even those games based on movies tend to allow the player to depart from the script of the movie, and so express their own imagination (albeit within the limits of the game).