I’ve recently finished reading (and regrettably had to rely on THAT shop beginning with A to get a copy shipped over from America) the new Scribner reprint of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Language Of The Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.
I shan’t pretend to have understood every bit of it, but when it did speak to me, it really spoke.
There’s a cracking bit early on (Page 8) in the essay A Citizen of Mondath which makes sense even if you’ve never read much Tolkien (holds hand up) or even knew who Dunsany was (holds hand up again):
“I wonder what would have happened if I had been born in 1939 instead of 1929, and had first read Tolkien in my teens, instead of in my twenties. That achievement might have overwhelmed me. I am glad that I had some sense of my own direction before I read Tolkien. Dunsany’s influence was wholly benign, and I never tried much to imitate him in my prolific and derivative adolescent scribblings. I must have known already that this sort of thing is inimitable. He was not a model to me, but a liberator, a guide.”
The last line is in bold because I put it in bold. That’s the bit that really spoke to me.
It parallels the entire first chapter of the first book I read by Austin Kleon — both the chapter and the book have the same title, and they wear their heart on their sleeve: Steal Like An Artist. Kleon is a lavish and generous quoter of other people’s great sayings, but in amongst all of those, he is himself eminently quotable. Here are a few pearls plucked from that chapter of that book:
“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”
and…
“If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”
and one more…
“You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.”
I could go on. He’s that quotable. But I won’t. Read Austin Kleon and enjoy him for yourself.
Le Guin’s distinction between models, liberators and guides has stuck with me these last few weeks, and I say that not least because I’m gearing up to write a 90,000-word novel in 31 days this autumn which is intensely influenced by Le Guin. Is she my model, my liberator or my guide? I think she’s all three.
Model, because she’s moved me to realise that science fiction is a perfect, natural, unique format for exploring relationships and ideas and themes that are nothing at all to do with science, and yet which are only enabled to come into full blossom precisely because of the scientific context. All I have to do is pin down my relationships, ideas and themes, and find the suitable science to be their enabler and their backdrop and their metaphor. (I think, for this new book, I now have.)
Liberator, because she’s freed me from the “I’ve written one novel, but do I have another one in me?” quandary, and persuaded me that I do. Freed me from thinking that sci-fi has to be hard, when it can in fact be beautifully soft — and that you need to know all the ins and outs of science fact in order to be able to write great science fiction. (You don’t). Freed me to write what I want to write, accepting its faults and revelling in the process of getting somewhere, getting better, writing better. “I learn,” she says in her 1978 introduction to her 1966 novel Planet Of Exile, “by going where I have to go.”
And where is it that I have to go, precisely? This is where Le Guin as guide comes in, because… well, even though she thought it best that she hadn’t first read Tolkien in her teens, rather than her twenties, I do wish I’d first read Le Guin in my teens or my twenties, rather than my forties. My journey could have been a very different one if I had, and I’m not just talking about the literary one.
So — guide — because even though she doesn’t go as deep or as far with it as I’d have liked, even though much is missed out or overlooked, Le Guin has shown me that what passes for normal on my world doesn’t have to be what’s normal on any other world. On those other worlds, the worlds you make up but which are always, in fact, versions of or responses to your own world, you can establish new normals, take a deep dive into the uncharted waters of your thought experiment and find new ways to redefine reality, the present world. “Science fiction is not prescriptive,” she says in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness — “it’s descriptive.”
On the basis that you’re supposed to write the books you want to read, that’s precisely what I’m setting about doing; I have a sense of my own direction now, and just like Le Guin, I’m glad.
POSTSCRIPT: This very week, I’ve come across this quote from Hilary Mantel, in The Paris Review #212 (Spring, 2015):
The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage.
