Thoughts on Writing...before bed

Found this essay via shipperx who appears to be attempting to teach me the value of twitter via her lj posts regarding tweets. (okay not me personally, obviously.)

From Ursula Le Guinn's essay on "Where Writer's Ideas Come From" (something I was asked recently and flailed about trying to answer. She does it far more eloquently.) found in the altogether fantastic 1989 collection of her speeches, essays, and reviews, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (public library).

The blogger, that I've linked to above reproduces some of the following quotes from the essay:

The reason why it is unanswerable is, I think, that it involves at least two false notions, myths, about how fiction is written.

First myth: There is a secret to being a writer. If you can just learn the secret, you will instantly be a writer; and the secret might be where the ideas come from.

Second myth: Stories start from ideas; the origin of a story is an idea.


I will dispose of the first myth as quickly as possible. The “secret” is skill. If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In a fairly simple art, such as making pie crust, there are certain teachable “secrets” of method that lead almost infallibly to good results; but in any complex art, such as housekeeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, so many “secrets,” some teachable and some not, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice — in other words, by work.

[…]

Some of the secretiveness of many artists about their techniques, recipes, etc., may be taken as a warning to the unskilled: What works for me isn’t going to work for you unless you’ve worked for it.

People kept telling me that I had a god-given gift for writing. Uh...no. What I had was a drive, be it genetic, or mystical, (most likely genetic considering my family is filled with writers), to write and tell stories no matter what. But that's not enough on its own. I had to work at it. HARD. It didn't come easily. I have been writing stories since I was ten, first on three ring notebooks and then on a type-writer. I was telling them aloud since I was 6. I've been doing it non-stop for 44 years. I'd written the equivalent of six books prior to self-publishing one. I'd taken numerous creative writing courses, and been in various writers groups. I've had my writing torn apart by experts. And paid line editors to work with me. It's not been easy, and it didn't come to me magically. I worked at it. Constantly. I've also read voraciously since I was 9, and my parents read to me constantly prior to that. I have read over a billion books. I'd rather write and/or read than go out drinking with friends, see a movie, or party. If you can't say the same? Don't bother trying to be a writer. You won't become one. Writers don't take vacations from writing. We write constantly.
It's a drive. That's the secret. You feel driven to write. I write during my lunch hour. I write during any down time at work - while co-workers are chatting about tv shows they saw or their kids.
I write each night when I get home from work. I write on weekends. I write on holidays. I write when I'm sick and burning up with a fever. (The story that I got an award for, I wrote with a 104 degree fever, in a computer lab at the basement of a library until midnight. This was in the 1980s. We had crappy computers back then.)

My talent and inclination for writing stories and keeping house were strong from the start, and my gift for and interest in music and sewing were weak; so that I doubt that I would ever have been a good seamstress or pianist, no matter how hard I worked. But nothing I know about how I learned to do the things I am good at doing leads me to believe that there are “secrets” to the piano or the sewing machine or any art I’m no good at. There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.

[Fits me perfectly. I was never inclined towards music or sewing. But stories, telling them, writing them, I was driven towards, although not so much keeping house. Organizational matters - definitely.]

The more I think about the word “idea,” the less idea I have what it means. … 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've told people that I've no idea where it comes from. It just comes. The story I'm writing now is a hodgepodge of various things. Characters jump out at me. Ideas float into my brain. I write the stories I can't find on the shelves or on the net or on the screen, yet crave to read. I write the story that bubbles up inside my brain aching to be free...

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.

Exactly.

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.

Too often the audience or reader gets in the way of the story being told. I've noticed this with online fandoms who attempt in various and sundry ways to interfere with the story-teller. I keep wanting to smack these fans. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Let the writer work. Let their story breath.
If you don't like it - write your own story. But don't interfere with their work, until at least it is finished. It is out there. Complete. Then you may whinge and pick and criticize in all your fannish glory. But not until then. How dare you think for one moment that you know the story better than the teller...

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 alive: a live thing, a story.

[…]

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.

But timing I think is key here. Wait. Wait. Wait until it is out there. The serial writer needs space.
Sure you can offer suggestions. But don't cripple their process. Don't shut them down. Go over there.
Sit in that corner. Wait until they are done. Now, you can watch, now you can read, now you can ponder what worked and what didn't. Now is the time to interact -- once they deem it fitting to share it with you.

By the same token, she is right. Le Guinn. You have to get used to the criticism. To realize you have no control over the reception of your work. All artists get ripped. It's inevitable. All misunderstood.

Our work once it hits our audience, once it is out there, takes on a life of its own, and is often interpreted and reinterpreted in ways we'd never imagine. All artists hope to be loved. All to be understood. The tragedy of James Joyce's life is the love of his life, Nora, never understood or liked anything he wrote - which ironically was all he ever wanted. It's all so subjective.

Writing is painful. Because you are at the mercy of the reader.

I've been reading about a daytime soap opera head-writer who has been ripped to smithereens by fans and various actors performing his work. He was fired for poor ratings. One moment on top of the world, getting nominations, told he was amazing, the next told he sucked, was horrible and destroyed the show. Same is true of novelists.

And I wonder sometimes why I bother with it. But as my father stated tonight over dinner, there's something marvelous about seeing a book - the final published product of something you sweated years over, poured your love into and all your dreams and thoughts and imagination. It's a beautiful thing.