The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

A MATTER OF TRUST

In order to write a story, you have to trust yourself, you have to trust the story, and you have to trust the reader.

Before you start writing, neither the story nor the reader even exists, and the only thing you have to trust is yourself. And the only way you can come to trust in yourself as a writer is to write. To commit yourself to that craft. To be writing, to have written, to work on writing, to plan to write. To read, to write, to practice your trade, to learn your job, until you know something about it, and know you know something about it.

This can be tricky. I have an eleven-year-old pen pal who has written half a story and is now demanding that I put him in touch with my agent and a publisher. It is my very disagreeable duty to tell him that he hasn’t quite earned that much trust in himself as a writer, yet.

On the other hand I know some very good writers who never finish anything, or finish it and then destroy it with overrevising to meet real or imagined criticisms, because they don’t trust themselves as writers, which means they can’t trust their writing.

Confidence in yourself as a writer is pretty much the same as all other kinds of confidence, the confidence of a plumber or a school-teacher or a horseback rider: you earn it by doing, you build it up slowly, by working at it. And sometimes, particularly when you’re new at the game, you fake it—you act like you know what you’re doing, and maybe you can get away with it. Sometimes if you act as if you were blessed, you will be blessed. That too is part of trusting oneself. I think it works better for writers than it does for plumbers.

So much for trusting oneself. Now, to trust the story, what does that mean? To me, it means being willing not to have full control over the story as you write it.

Which would explain why it takes so long to learn to write. First you have to learn how to write English, and learn how to tell stories in general—techniques, practice, all that: so that you are in control. And then you have learn how to relinquish it.

Let me say here that many writers and teachers of writing would disagree strongly with what I’m saying. They’d say, you don’t learn how to ride a horse, control the horse, make it do what you want it to do, and then take off its bridle and ride it bareback without reins—that’s stupid. However, that is what I recommend. (Taoism is always stupid.) For me it’s not enough to be a good rider, I want to be a centaur. I don’t want to be the rider controlling the horse, I want to be both the rider and the horse.

How far to trust your story? It depends on the story, and your own judgment and experience are the only guide. The only generalisations I’m willing to make are these: Lack of control over a story, usually arising from ignorance of the craft or from self-indulgence, may lead to slackness of pace, incoherence, sloppy writing, spoiled work. Overcontrol, usually arising from self-consciousness or a competitive attitude, may lead to tightness, artificiality, self-conscious language, dead work.

Deliberate, conscious control, in the sense of knowing and keeping to the plan, the subject, the gait, and the direction of the work, is invaluable in the planning stage—before writing—and in the revision stage—after the first draft. During the actual composition it seems to be best if conscious intellectual control is relaxed. An insistent consciousness of the intention of the writing may interfere with the process of writing. The writer may get in the way of the story.

This is not as mystical as it sounds. All highly skilled work, all true craft and art, is done in a state where most aspects of it have become automatic through experience, through total familiarity with the medium, whether the medium is the sculptor’s stone, or the drummer’s drum, or the body of the dancer, or, for the writer, word sounds, word meanings, sentence rhythm, syntax, and so on. The dancer knows where her left foot goes, and the writer knows where the comma’s needed. The only decisions a skilled artisan or artist makes while working are aesthetic ones. Aesthetic decisions are not rational; they’re made on a level that doesn’t coincide with rational consciousness. Thus, in fact, many artists feel they’re in something like a trance state while working, and that in that state they don’t make the decisions. The work tells them what needs doing and they do it. Perhaps it is as mystical as it sounds.

To go back to my horse metaphor, a good cowboy on a good horse rides with a loose rein and doesn’t keep telling the horse what to do, because the horse knows. The cowboy knows where they’re going, but the horse knows how to get them there.

I hope I don’t sound like one of those bearers of glad tidings to writers who announce that there’s nothing to it, just shut down your intellect and free up your right brain and emit words. I have enormous respect for my art as an art and my craft as a craft, for skill, for experience, for hard thought, for painstaking work. I hold those things in reverence. I respect commas far more than I do congressmen. People who say that commas don’t matter may be talking about therapy or self-expression or other good things, but they’re not talking about writing. They may be talking about getting started, leaping over timidity, breaking through emotional logjams; but they’re still not talking about writing. If you want to be a dancer, find out how to use your feet. If you want to be a writer, find out where the comma goes. Then worry about all that other stuff.

Now, let’s say I want to write a story. (Speaking for myself personally, that can be taken for granted; I always want to write a story; there never is anything I’d rather do than write a story.) In order to write that story, first I have learned how to write English, and how to write stories, by doing it quite regularly.[1]

I have also learned that what I need, once the story gets going, is to relinquish conscious control, get my damned intentions and theories and opinions out of the way, and let the story carry me. I need to trust it.

But as a rule, I can trust the story only if there has been a previous stage of some kind, a period of approach. This may well involve conscious planning, sitting and thinking about the setting, the events, the characters, maybe making notes. Or it may involve a long semiconscious gestation, during which events and characters and moods and ideas drift around half formed, changing forms, in a kind of dreamy limbo of the mind. And I do mean long. Years, sometimes. But then at other times, with other stories, this approach stage is quite abrupt: a sudden vision or clear sense of the shape and direction of the story comes into the mind, and one is ready to write.

All these approach states or stages may occur at any time—at your desk, walking on the street, waking up in the morning, or when your mind ought to be on what Aunt Julia is saying, or the electricity bill, or the stew. You may have a whole grandiose James Joyce epiphany thing, or you may just think, oh, yes, I see how that’ll go.

The most important thing I have to say about this preliminary period is don’t rush it. Your mind is like a cat hunting; it’s not even sure yet what it’s hunting. It listens. Be patient like the cat. Very, very attentive, alert, but patient. Slow. Don’t push the story to take shape. Let it show itself. Let it gather impetus. Keep listening. Make notes or whatever if you’re afraid you’ll forget something, but don’t rush to the computer. Let the story drive you to it. When it’s ready to go, you’ll know it.

And if—like most of us—your life isn’t all your own, if you haven’t got time to write at that moment when you know the story’s ready to be written, don’t panic. It’s just as tough as you are. It’s yours. Make notes, think about your story, hang on to it and it will hang on to you. When you find or make the time to sit down to it, it will be there waiting for you.

Then comes the trancelike, selfless, rather terrifying, devouring work or play of composition, which is very difficult to talk about.

About planning and composition I want to make one observation: that it’s delightful for a writer to be sheltered and shielded while at this intense work, given solitude and freedom from human responsibilities, like Proust in his padded cell, or the people who keep going to writers colonies and having their lunch brought in a basket; delightful indeed, but dangerous, because it makes a luxury into a condition of work—a necessity. What you need as a writer is exactly what Virginia Woolf said: enough to live on and a room of your own. It’s not up to other people to provide either of those necessities. It’s up to you, and if you want to work, you figure how to get what you need to do it. What you live on probably has to come from daily work, not writing. How dirty your room gets is probably up to you. That the door of the room is shut, and when, and for how long, is also up to you. If you have work to do, you have to trust yourself to do it. A kind spouse is invaluable, a fat grant, an advance on spec, a session at a retreat may be a tremendous help: but it’s your work, not theirs, and it has to be done on your terms, not theirs.

All right, so you shut the door, and you write down a first draft, at white heat, because that energy has been growing in you all through the prewriting stage and when released at last, is incandescent. You trust yourself and the story and you write.

So now it’s written. You sit around and feel tired and good and look at the manuscript and savor all the marvelous, wonderful bits.

Then it cools down and you cool down, and arrive, probably somewhat chilled and rueful, at the next stage. Your story is full of ugly, stupid bits. You distrust it now, and that’s as it should be. But you still have to trust yourself. You have to know that you can make it better. Unless you’re a genius or have extremely low standards, composition is followed by critical, patient revision, with the thinking mind turned on.

I can trust myself to write my story at white heat without asking any questions of it—if I know my craft through practice—if I have a sense of where this story’s going—and if when it’s got there, I’m willing to turn right round and go over it and over it, word by word, idea by idea, testing and proving it till it goes right. Till all of it goes right.

Parenthetically: This is the period when it is most useful to have criticism from others—in a peer group or a class or from professional editors. Informed, supportive criticism is invaluable. I am a strong believer in the workshop as a way of gaining confidence and critical skills not only before you get published, but also for experienced professional writers. And a trustworthy editor is a pearl beyond price. To learn to trust your readers—and which readers to trust—is a very great step. Some writers never take it. I will return to that subject in a moment.

To sum up, I have to trust the story to know where it’s going, and after I’ve written it I have to trust myself to find out where it or I got off track and how to get it all going in one direction in one piece.

And only after all that—usually long after—will I fully know and be able to say what, in fact, the story was about and why it had to go the way it went. Any work of art has its reasons which reason does not wholly understand.

When a story’s finished, it’s always less than your vision of it was before it was written. But it may also do more than you knew you were doing, say more than you realised you were saying. That’s the best reason of all to trust it, to let it find itself.

To conceive a story or manipulate it to make it serve a purpose outside itself, such as an ambition to be famous, or an agent’s opinion about what will sell, or a publisher’s wish for instant profit, or even a noble end such as teaching or healing, is a failure of trust, of respect for the work. Of course almost all writers compromise here, to some extent. Writers are professionals in an age when capitalism pretends to be the arbiter of good; they have to write for the market. Only poets totally and sublimely ignore the market and therefore live on air—air and fellowships. Writers want to right wrongs, or bear witness to outrages, or convince others of what they see as truth. But in so far as they let such conscious aims control their work, they narrow its potential scope and power. That sounds like the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. I don’t offer it as a doctrine, but as a practical observation.[2]

Somebody asked James Clerk Maxwell in 1820 or so, What is the use of electricity? and Maxwell asked right back, What is the use of a baby?

What’s the use of To the Lighthouse? What’s the use of War and Peace? How would I dare try to define it, to limit it?

The arts function powerfully in establishing and confirming human community. Story, told or written, certainly serves to enlarge understanding of other people and of our place in the world as a whole. Such uses are intrinsic to the work of art, integral with it. But any limited, conscious, objective purpose is likely to obscure or deform that integrity.

Even if I don’t feel my skill and experience are sufficient (and they are never sufficient), I must trust my gift, and therefore trust the story I write, know that its use, its meaning or beauty, may go far beyond anything I could have planned.

A story is a collaboration between teller and audience, writer and reader. Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion.

Without a reader there’s no story. No matter how well written, if it isn’t read it doesn’t exist as a story. The reader makes it happen just as much as the writer does. Writers are likely to ignore this fact, perhaps because they resent it.

The relationship of writer and reader is popularly seen as a matter of control and consent. The writer is The Master, who compels, controls, and manipulates the reader’s interest and emotion. A lot of writers love this idea.

And lazy readers want masterful writers. They want the writer to do all the work while they just watch it happen, like on TV.

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text—compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping—what is this, electroshock torture?

From commercial writing of this type, and from journalism, come the how-to-write clichés, “Grab your readers with the first paragraph,” “Hit them with shocker scenes,” “Never give them time to breathe,” and so on.

Now, a good many writers, particularly those entangled in academic programs in fiction, get their intellect and ego so involved in what they’re saying and how they’re saying it that they forget that they’re saying it to anyone. If there’s any use in the grab-’em-and-wrench-their-guts-out school of advice, it’s that it at least reminds the writer that there is a reader out there to be grabbed and gutted.

But just because you realise your work may be seen by somebody other than the professor of creative writing, you don’t have to go into attack mode and release the Rottweilers. There’s another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.

Writers who choose to try to establish mutual trust believe it is possible to attract readers’ attention without verbal assault and battery. Rather than grab, frighten, coerce, or manipulate a consumer, collaborative writers try to interest a reader. To induce or seduce people into moving with the story, participating in it, joining their imagination with it.

Not a rape: a dance.

Consider the story as a dance, the reader and writer as partners. The writer leads, yes; but leading isn’t pushing; it’s setting up a field of mutuality where two people can move in cooperation with grace. It takes two to tango.

Readers who have only been grabbed, bashed, gut-wrenched, and electroshocked may need a little practice in being interested. They may need to learn how to tango. Once they’ve tried it, they’ll never go back among the pit bulls.

Finally, there is the difficult question of “audience”: In the mind of the writer planning or composing or revising the work, what is the presence of the potential reader or readers? Should the audience for the work dominate the writer’s mind and guide the writing? Or should the writer while writing be utterly free of such considerations?

I wish there were a simple sound bite answer, but actually this is a terribly complicated question, particularly on the moral level.

Being a writer, conceiving a fiction, implies a reader. Writing is communication, though that’s not all it is. One communicates to somebody. And what people want to read influences what people want to write. Stories are drawn out of writers by the spiritual and intellectual and moral needs of the writer’s people. But all that operates on a quite unconscious level.

Once again it’s useful to see the writer’s work as being done in three stages. In the approach stage, it may be essential to think about your potential audience: who is this story for? For instance, is it for kids? Little kids? Young adults? Any special, limited audience calls for specific kinds of subject matter and vocabulary. All genre writing, from the average formula romance to the average New Yorker story, is written with an audience in mind—an audience so specific it can be called a market.

Only the very riskiest kind of fiction is entirely inconsiderate of the reader/market, saying, as it were, I will be told, and somebody, somewhere, will read me! Probably 99 percent of such stories end up, in fact, unread. And probably 98 percent of them are unreadable. The other 1 or 2 percent come to be known as masterpieces, usually very slowly, after the brave author has long been silent.

Consciousness of audience is limiting, both positively and negatively. Consciousness of audience offers choices, many of which have ethical implications—puritanism or porn? shock the readers or reassure them? do something I haven’t tried or do my last book over?—and so on.

The limitations imposed by aiming at a specific readership may lead to very high art; all craft is a matter of rules and limitations, after all. But if consciousness of audience as market is the primary factor controlling your writing, you are a hack. There are arty hacks and artless hacks. Personally I prefer the latter.

All this has been about the approach stage, the what-am-I-going-to-write stage. Now that I know, dimly or exactly, who I’m writing for—anything from my granddaughter to all posterity—I start writing. And now, at the writing stage, consciousness of audience can be absolutely fatal. It is what makes writers distrust their story, stick, block, start over and over, never finish. Writers need a room of their own, not a room full of imaginary critics all watching over their shoulders saying “Is ‘The’ a good way to start that sentence?” An overactive internal aesthetic censor, or the external equivalent—what my agent or my editor is going to say—is like an avalanche of boulders across the story’s way. During composition I have to concentrate entirely on the work itself, trusting and aiding it to find its way, with little or no thought of what or who it’s for.

But when I get to the third stage, revision and rewriting, it reverses again: awareness that somebody’s going to read this story, and of who might read this story, becomes essential.

What’s the goal of revision? Clarity—impact—pace—power—beauty… all things that imply a mind and heart receiving the story. Revision clears unnecessary obstacles away so the reader can receive the story. That is why the comma is important. And why the right word, not the approximately right word, is important. And why consistency is important. And why moral implications are important. And all the rest of the stuff that makes a story readable, makes it live. In revising, you must trust yourself, your judgment, to work with the receptive intelligence of your potential readers.

You also may have to trust specific actual readers—spouse, friends, workshop peers, teachers, editors, agents. You may be pulled between your judgment and theirs, and it can be tricky to arrive at the necessary arrogance, or the necessary humility, or the right compromise. I have writer friends who simply cannot hear any critical suggestions; they drown them out by going into defensive explanation mode: Oh, yes, but see, what I was doing—are they geniuses or just buttheaded? Time will tell. I have writer friends who accept every critical suggestion uncritically, and end up with as many different versions as they have critics. If they meet up with bullying, manipulative agents and editors, they’re helpless.

What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readers—but wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act—there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?

THE WRITER AND THE CHARACTER

Whether they invent the people they write about or borrow them from people they know, fiction writers generally agree that once these people become characters in a story they have a life of their own, sometimes to the extent of escaping from the writer’s control and doing and saying things quite unexpected to the author of their being.

My people, in the stories I write, are close to me and mysterious to me, like kinfolk or friends or enemies. They are in and on my mind. I made them up, I invented them, but I have to ponder their motives and try to understand their destinies. They take on their own reality, which is not my reality, and the more they do so, the less I can or wish to control what they do or say. While I’m composing, the characters are alive in my mind, and I owe them the respect due any living soul. They are not to be used, manipulated. They are not plastic toys, they are not megaphones.

But composition is a special condition. While writing, I may yield to my characters, trust them wholly to do and say what is right for the story. In planning the story and in revising it, I do better to keep some emotional distance from the characters, especially the ones I like best or loathe most. I need to look askance at them, inquire rather coldly into their motives, and take everything they say with a grain of salt—till I’m certain that they are really and genuinely speaking for themselves, and not for my damned ego.

If I’m using the people in my story principally to fulfill the needs of my self-image, my self-love or self-hate, my needs, my opinions, they can’t be themselves and they can’t tell the truth. The story, as a display of needs and opinions, may be effective as such, but the characters will not be characters; they will be puppets.

As a writer I must be conscious that I am my characters and that they are not me. I am them, and am responsible for them. But they’re themselves; they have no responsibility for me, or my politics, or my morals, or my editor, or my income. They’re embodiments of my experience and imagination, engaged in an imagined life that is not my life, though it may serve to illuminate it. I may feel passionately with a character who embodies my experience and emotions, but I must be wary of confusing myself with that character.

If I fuse or confuse a fictional person with myself, my judgment of the character becomes a self-judgment. Then justice is pretty near impossible, since I’ve made myself witness, defendant, prosecutor, judge, and jury, using the fiction to justify or condemn what that character does and says.

Self-knowledge takes a clear mind. Clarity can be earned by toughmindedness and it can be earned by tender-mindedness, but it has to be earned. A writer has to learn to be transparent to the story. The ego is opaque. It fills the space of the story, blocking honesty, obscuring understanding, falsifying the language.

Fiction, like all art, takes place in a space that is the maker’s loving difference from the thing made. Without that space there can be no consistent truthfulness and no true respect for the human beings the story is about.

Another way to come at this matter: In so far as the author’s point of view exactly coincides with that of a character, the story isn’t fiction. It’s either a disguised memoir or a fiction-coated sermon.

I don’t like the word distancing. If I say there should be a distance between author and character it sounds as if I’m after the “objectivity” pretended to by naive scientists and sophisticated minimalists. I’m not. I’m all for subjectivity, the artist’s inalienable privilege. But there has to be a distance between the writer and the character.

The naive reader often does not take this distance into account. Inexperienced readers think writers write only from experience. They believe that the writer believes what the characters believe. The idea of the unreliable narrator takes some getting used to.

David Copperfield’s experiences and emotions are very close indeed to those of Charles Dickens, but David Copperfield isn’t Charles Dickens. However closely Dickens “identified with” his character, as we glibly and freudianly say, there was no confusion in Dickens’s mind as to who was who. The distance between them, the difference of point of view, is crucial.

David fictionally lives what Charles factually experienced, and suffers what Charles suffered; but David doesn’t know what Charles knows. He can’t see his life from a distance, from a vantage point of time, thought, and feeling, as Charles can. Charles learned a great deal about himself, and so let us learn a great deal about ourselves, through taking David’s point of view, but if he had confused his point of view with David’s, he and we would have learned nothing. We’d never have got out of the blacking factory.

Another interesting example: Huckleberry Finn. What Mark Twain achieves, with great skill and at tremendous risk, all the way through the book, is an invisible but immense ironic distance between his point of view and Huck’s. Huck tells the story. Every word of it is in his voice, from his point of view. Mark is silent. Mark’s point of view, particularly as regards slavery and the character Jim, is never stated. It is discernible only in the story itself and the characters—Jim’s character, above all. Jim is the only real adult in the book, a kind, warm, strong, patient man, with a delicate and powerful sense of morality. Huck might grow up into that kind of man, given a chance. But Huck at this point is an ignorant, prejudiced kid who doesn’t know right from wrong (though once, when it really matters, he guesses right). In the tension between that kid’s voice and Mark Twain’s silence lies much of the power of the book. We have to understand—as soon as we’re old enough to read this way—that what the book really says lies in that silence.

Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, is going to grow up to be at best a smart entrepreneur, at worst a shyster; his imagination has no ethical ballast at all. The last chapters of Huckleberry Finn are tedious and hateful whenever that manipulative, unfeeling imagination takes over, controlling Huck and Jim and the story.

Toni Morrison has shown that the jail Tom puts Jim into, the tortures he invents for him, and Huck’s uncomfortable but helpless collusion, represent the betrayal of Emancipation during Reconstruction. Freed slaves did find themselves with no freedom at all, and whites accustomed to consider blacks as inferior inevitably colluded in that perpetuation of evil. Seen thus, the long, painful ending makes sense, and the book makes a moral whole. But it was a risk to take, both morally and aesthetically, and it succeeds only partially, perhaps because Mark Twain overidentified with Tom. He loved writing about smart-alecky, go-for-broke manipulators (not only Tom but the King and Duke), and so Huck, and Jim, and we the readers, all have to sit and watch them strut their second-rate stuff. Mark Twain kept his loving distance from Huck perfectly, never breaking the tender irony. But wanting Tom for that final bitter plot twist, he brought him in, indulged him, lost his distance from him—and the book lost its balance.

Though the author may pretend otherwise, the author’s point of view is larger than the character’s and includes knowledge the character lacks. This means that the character, existing only in the author’s knowledge, may be known as we cannot ever know any actual person; and such insight may reveal insights and durable truths relevant to our own lives.

To fuse author and character—to limit the character’s behavior to what the author approves of doing, or the character’s opinions to the author’s opinions, and so forth—is to lose that chance of revelation.

The author’s tone may be cold or passionately concerned; it may be detached or judgmental; the difference of the author’s point of view from the character’s may be obvious or concealed; but the difference must exist. In the space provided by that difference, discovery, change, learning, action, tragedy, fulfillment take place—the story takes place.

UNQUESTIONED ASSUMPTIONS

This essay is the somewhat grouchy result of years of reading stories—workshop manuscripts and printed books—that include me, the reader, in a group I don’t belong to and don’t want to belong to.

You’re just like me, you’re one of us, the writer tells me. And I want to shout, I’m not! You don’t know who I am!

We writers of fiction don’t know who reads us. We can make some limited assumptions about our readers only if we write for a publication with a restricted readership such as a campus literary periodical or a magazine with a specific religious or commercial affiliation, or in a strictly coded genre such as the Regency romance. And even then it’s unwise to assume that your readers think the way you do about anything—race, sex, religion, politics, youth, age, oysters, dogs, dirt, Mozart—anything.

The unquestioned assumption, the mistake of thinking we all think alike, is less often made by writers who belong to a minority or oppressed social group. They know all too clearly the difference between “us” and “them.” The confusion of “us” with “everybody” is most tempting to people who are members of one or more of the privileged or dominant groups in their society or in an isolated or sheltered social environment such as a college, or a white American neighborhood, or a newspaper editorial staff.

The premise is: everybody’s like me and we all think alike.

Its corollary is: people who don’t think like me don’t matter.

The supposed phenomenon of “political correctness”—a conspiracy by bleeding-heart liberals to keep us ordinary folks from talking the normal ordinary just-folks down-home way and calling a spade a spade—exhibits the corollary as an article of belief, invoked to defend various bigotries.

Arrogance is usually ignorant. It can be innocent. Children’s ignorance of how others think and feel has to be forgiven, while it’s being corrected. Many adults in communities isolated by geography or poverty have known only people like themselves, of their own community, creed, values, assumptions, and so on.

But these days, no writer can legitimately claim either ignorance or innocence as a defense of prejudice or bigotry in their writing.

How does anybody know anything about other people’s minds and feelings? Through experience, yes, but fiction writers get and handle a great part of their experience through their imagination, and pass it on to their readers entirely through the same channel. Knowledge concerning the enormous differences among people is there for any reader, no matter how isolated and protected. And a writer who doesn’t read is inexcusable.

Even on television you can see that people are different. Sometimes.

I’ll talk about four common varieties of the Unquestioned Assumption and explore a fifth one in more detail.

1. WE’RE ALL MEN.

This assumption turns up in fiction in endless ways: in the belief, borne out by the entire substance of the book, that what men do is of universal interest, while women’s occupations are trivial, so that men are the proper focus of story, women peripheral to it; in women being observed only as they relate to men, and their conversation reported only as it relates to men; in vivid descriptions of the bodies and faces of sexually attractive young women, but not of men or older women; in presuming the reader will welcome misogynistic statements; in pretending the pronoun he includes both genders; and so on.

This assumption went almost unquestioned in literature until fairly recently. It’s still fiercely upheld as legitimate by reactionary and misogynist writers and critics, and is still defended by people who feel that to question it is to question the authority of great writers who accepted it in good faith. It should by now be unnecessary to say that such defensiveness is unnecessary. But alas, the New York Times and many academic bastions and bulwarks are still staunchly protecting us from the rabid hordes of man-eating bra-burners out to diminish Shakespeare and demonise Melville. How long will it be, I wonder, before these brave defenders notice that feminist criticism has vastly enriched our reading of such authors, by bringing to an area of darkness and denial the mild, honest illumination of cultural relativism and historical awareness?

2. WE’RE ALL WHITE.

This assumption is implied far, far too often in fiction by the author’s mentioning the skin color only of nonwhite characters. This is to imply unmistakably that white is normal, anything else is abnormal. Other. Not Us.

Like misogyny, actual racial contempt and hatred, often expressed with appalling brutality and self-righteousness, is so frequent in older fiction as to be inescapable. There the reader can only handle it with—again—historical awareness, which asks for tolerance, though it may or may not lead to forgiveness.

3. WE’RE ALL STRAIGHT.

—“of course.” All sexual attraction, any sexual activity in the story, is heterosexual—of course. This Unquestioned Assumption applies to most naive fiction, even now, whether the naivete is deliberate or not.

Straightness as dominant in-group may also be implied by the nudge-and-snigger. A negatively stereotyped fag or dyke is presented by the author with a verbal wink, an invitation to more or less hateful laughter from the reader.

4. WE’RE ALL CHRISTIAN.

Writers who have not noticed that Christianity is not the universal religion of humankind, or who believe that it is the only valid religion of humankind, are likely to take it for granted that the reader will automatically and appropriately respond to Christian imagery and vocabulary (the virgin mother, sin, salvation, and so on). Such writers take a free ride on the cross. In fifteenth-century Europe, this assumption was forgivable. In modern fiction it is, at best, unwise.

A particularly silly sub–in-group is made up of Catholic or ex-Catholic writers convinced that all readers went to parochial school and are obsessed, one way or another, with nuns.

Much more frightening than these are the writers whose description of non-Christian characters exhibits their conviction that outside Christianity there is no spirituality and no morality. Special grace extended to the occasional good Jew or honest unbeliever merely includes that individual in the Christian exclusivity. Monotheistic bigotry beats all.

The fifth group that assumes itself to be universal deserves special examination because it’s not often talked about in the context of fiction. The assumption that we’re all young is a complex one. Our experience of age changes as our age changes—constantly. And age-prejudice runs both ways. Some people carry their in-group right through life: when they’re young they despise anybody over thirty, when they’re middleaged they dismiss the young and the old, when they’re old they hate kids. Eighty years of prejudice.

Men, whites, straights, and Christians are privileged groups in American society; they have power. Youth is not a power group. But it is a privileged or dominant one in college, in fashion, film, popular music, sports, and the advertising that sets so many norms for us. The tendency at present is to adulate youth without respecting it and sentimentalise old age while despising it.

And to segregate both. In most social situations and at work, including educational work, adults, except for a few designated as caretakers or teachers, are kept segregated from children. The interests of the young and the interests of adults are supposed to be entirely different. Nothing but “the family” is left as a meeting ground, and though politicians, preachers, and pundits prate about “the family,” few seem to want to look at what it consists of. Many contemporary families consist of one adult and one child, a subminimal social group, with a single-generation age spread. Divorce and remarriage can create large semidispersed families, but even children with a slew of parents, step-parents, and step-siblings often don’t know anybody over fifty. Many older people, by choice or perforce, have no contact with children at all.

I don’t know why this curious skewing and segregation of society by age should induce writers to use a youthful viewpoint as if it were the only one; but a great many of them do. The unquestioned assumption is that all readers are young, or identify with the young. The young are Us. Older people are Them, outsiders.

And to be sure, every adult was a child, was an adolescent. We’ve been there. We shared the experience.

But we aren’t there now. Most readers of adult fiction are adults.

A great many book readers are also parents or accept parental responsibility in one way or another. This means that though they may identify with the young, their identification isn’t simple. It’s extremely complex. It’s not a belonging. Nor is it mere recollection. Adults who accept their social or personal responsibility towards children and young people, and who don’t need to deny that they were themselves young, have a double or multiple point of view, not a single one.

To write from the child’s or adolescent’s point of view is of course natural in books written for children or young adults. In books written for adults it is a valid and often powerful literary device. It may simply fulfill nostalgic yearnings to be young again; but the innocent viewpoint is inherently ironic, and in a wise writer’s hands may imply the double vision of the adult with particular subtlety. In much recent fiction written for adults, however, the child’s vision is not used ironically or to increase complexity, but is, implicitly or openly, valued over the depth of vision of the adult. This is nostalgia with a vengeance.

In such books an absolute division between adult and child is made and a judgment is based on it. Adults are perceived as less fully human than children or young people, and the reader is expected to accept this perception. Parents and authority figures of any kind are presented without compassion or comprehension as automatic enemies, all-powerful wielders of arbitrary power. There may be a few saintly, all-comprehending exceptions proving the rule—powerless old folks, grandparent figures rich in the Primitive Wisdom of Another (note the word) Race. Sentimentality fawns on oversimplification.

As a dead white man of the ruling class remarked, power corrupts. To the extent that adults have more power than kids, adults are inarguably corrupt, while kids are at least relatively innocent. But innocence is not what defines people as human. It’s what we share with the animals.

An adult indeed may have absolute power over a child and may abuse it. But even truthful, valid descriptions of abuse are weakened when the writer’s point of view is childish or infantile. To accept the infantile view of adulthood as omnipotent, readers must abandon their hard-earned knowledge that most adults in fact have very little power of any kind.

I will use the same two books as examples as I did in the previous essay, on fictional characters: David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn.

We are caught in and share young David’s perception of his stepfather’s cruelty. But Dickens’s novel is not about a child abused by jealous and hateful adults: it is about a child growing up, becoming a man, a complete human being. All David’s mistakes, in fact, are the same mistake repeated—a childish misperception of false authority as real, which prevents him from valuing the real help that is always at hand for him. By the end of the book he has outgrown the infantile myths that held him helpless.

Dickens as a child was, in many respects, David, but Dickens the novelist does not confuse himself with that child. He keeps the complex, hard-earned vision. And so David Copperfield, fearfully acute in its understanding of how children suffer, is a book for adults.

Contrast J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds.

The childish point of view and the child’s point of view aren’t necessarily the same thing. A good deal of Tom Sawyer is a rather uneasy mixture of the two, but Huckleberry Finn, though narrated in a boy’s voice, has nothing childish in it. Behind Huck’s limited vocabulary, perceptions, and speculations, his ignorances, misconceptions, and prejudices, is the steadfast, lucid, ironic intelligence of the author, and it is through that intelligence that we understand and feel Huck’s moral dilemma, which he has such difficulty understanding himself.

When I read the book as a kid Huck’s age, I understood that, as well as anybody under eighteen understands irony. So I could read with understanding even when shocked by some of the language and events—until I came to the episode where the boys, at Tom’s insistence, imprison and torment Jim. There I saw the black man I had come to love powerless in the hands of the white children, his fear and grief and patience ignored and devalued, and I thought Twain himself had joined in the wicked game. I thought he approved of it. I didn’t understand that he was satirising the cruel mockeries of Reconstruction. I needed that historical knowledge to understand what Twain was doing: that he was honoring me by including me in the same humanity with Jim.

Throughout Huckleberry Finn, the boy’s unquestioned assumptions (which are those of his society) and the author’s convictions and perceptions (which are frequently counter to those of his society) contradict each other deliberately and shockingly. It is a profoundly complex, dangerous book. Those who want literature to be safe will never forgive it for being dangerous.

Each Unquestioned Assumption has a possible opposite, a reverse, which if written into fiction would give us stories in which men occur only as sexual objects for women, where homosexuality is the social norm, where white skin has to be mentioned whenever it appears, where only godless anarchists act morally, or where adults rebel vainly against the bullying authority of children. Such books are, in my experience, rare. One might meet them in science fiction.

Realistic fiction that merely questions or ignores the assumptions, however, is not unusual. We do have novels that assume that women represent humanity as well as men do; that gays, or people of color, or non-Christians, represent humanity as well as heterosexuals, whites, or Christians do; or that the adult or parental point of view is as valuable as the childish one.

The stigma of “political correctness,” invoked by those who see all refusal of bigotry as a liberal conspiracy, may be slapped on such books. They are often ghettoised by publishers and reviewers, segregated from fiction “of general interest.” If a novel is centered on the doings of men, or its major characters are male, white, straight, and/or young, nothing is said about them as members of a group, and the story is assumed to be “of general interest.” If the major characters are women, or black, or gay, or old, reviewers are likely to say that the book is “about” that group, and it is assumed, even by sympathetic reviewers, to be of interest chiefly or only to that group. Thus both the critical establishment and the publishers’ publicity and distribution tactics lend immense authority to prejudice.

A writer may not want to defy both the reactionary critical establishment and the pusillanimous marketplace. “I just want to write this novel about the kind of people I know!” “I just want to sell my book!” Fair enough. But how much collusion with prejudice, disguised as unquestioned assumptions about what is normal, does it take to buy safety?

The risk is real. Look again at Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is still getting bad-mouthed, banned, and censored, because its characters use the word nigger and for other reasons, all having to do with race. Those who allow it to be thus abused in the name of equality include people who think teenagers are incapable of understanding historical context, people who believe education for good involves suppressing knowledge of evil, people who refuse to understand a complex moral purpose, and people who distrust or fear secular literature as a tool of moral and social education. A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to—by gender, sex, race, religion, age—is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

PRIDES An Essay on Writing Workshops

Sometimes I worry about workshops. I’ve taught quite a few—Clarion West four times; in Australia; at Haystack on the Oregon coast and at the Malheur Field Station in the Oregon desert; at the Indiana and Bennington Writers Conferences, at the Writing Centers in D.C., and at Portland State University; and many times at the beloved and muchmissed Flight of the Mind. And I still teach workshops sometimes, though sometimes I think I should stop. Not only because I am getting old and lazy, but because I’m two-minded about workshops, not single-minded. I worry, are they a good thing—yes? no?

I always come down on the Yes side—lightly, but with both feet.

A workshop can certainly do harm as well as good.

The most harmless harm it can do is waste time. This happens when people come to it expecting to teach or be taught how to write. If you think you can teach people how to write you’re wasting their time and if they think you can teach them how to write they’re wasting yours, and vice (as it were) versa.

People attending workshops are not learning how to write.[1] What they are learning or doing (as I understand it) will come up later on.

A more harmful harm that can infect the workshop is the ego trip. Classes in literary writing and writers’ conferences, years ago, were mostly ego trips—the Great author and his disciples. A good deal of that still goes on at “prestigious” universities and creative writing programs featuring pickled big names. It was the system of mutual group criticism, the Clarion system, now used almost everywhere writing is taught, that freed the pedagogy of writing from hierarchical authority and authorial hierarchy.

But even in a mutual-criticism workshop the instructor can go on an ego trip. I have known an instructor who ran an amateur Esalen, playing mind games and deliberately disintegrating participants’ personalities without the faintest idea of how to put them back together. I have known an instructor who ran a little Devil’s Island, punishing the participants for writing by trashing their work, except for a favorite trusty or two who got smarmed over. I have known an instructor—oh, many, too many—who ran a little Paris Island, where a week of systematic misogyny was supposed to result in a “few good men.” I have known instructors who seemed to be running for a popularity prize, and instructors who just ran away, leaving their students to flounder, not showing up from Monday until Friday, when they came to collect their check.

Such self-indulgence can do real and permanent damage, particularly when the instructor is famous and respected, and the participant is—and they all are more or less—insecure and vulnerable. To offer one’s work for criticism is an act of trust requiring real courage. It must be respected as such. I know several people who after a brutal dismissal by a writer they admired stopped writing for years, one of them forever. Certainly a writing instructor has a responsibility to defend the art, and the right to set very high standards, but nobody has the right to stop a person from trying to learn. The defense of excellence has nothing whatever to do with bullying.

Ego-tripping by participants can also be destructive to the work of other individuals or of the whole group, unless the instructor is savvy enough to refuse to play games with the troublemaker, who is usually either a manipulative bully or a passive bully, a psychopathically demanding person. I was slow to learn that as the instructor I must refuse to collude with these people. I am still not good at handling them, but have found that if I ask other participants to help me they do so, often with a skill, kindness, and psychological sensitivity that never cease to amaze me.

Perhaps all workshops should have a sign on the door: Do Not Feed the Ego! But then on the other side of the door should be a sign: Do Not Feed the Altruist! Because the practice of any art is impeded by both egoism and altruism. What’s needed is concentration on the work.

I shall now go out on a limb, hunch my shoulders, clack my beak, stare fiercely, and announce that I think there are two types of workshop that are to some extent intrinsically harmful. Both types tend to corrupt the work. They do it differently, but are alike in using writing not as an end but as a means. I will call them commercial and establishmentarian.

Commercially oriented workshops and conferences range from the modest kind where everybody is dying to meet the New York editor and the agent who sells in six figures and nothing is talked about but “markets,” “good markets for paragraphs,” “good markets for religious and uplift,” and so on—to the fancy kind where everybody sneers at little old ladies who write paragraphs, but would kill to meet the same editor and the same agent, and where nothing is talked about but “markets,” “meeting contacts,” “finding an agent with some smarts,” “series sales,” and so on. All these matters of business are of legitimate, immediate, and necessary interest to a writer. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer’s primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I’m teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

Establishmentarian workshops and programs, on the other hand, eschew low talk of marketing. Sell is a four-letter word at such places. You go to them to be in the right place, where you will meet the right people. The purpose of such programs, most of which are in the eastern half of the United States, is to feed an in-group or elite, the innermost members of which go to the innermost writers colonies and get the uppermost grants by recommending one another.

If being perceived as a successful writer is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a social climber: a person using certain paraliterary ploys to attain a certain kind of prestige. If I teach these techniques in a workshop, I am not teaching writing, but methods of joining an elite.

It is to be noticed that membership in the elite may, not incidentally, improve one’s chances to sell work in the marketplace. There’s always a well-kept road between the marketplace and the really nice part of town.

Papa Hemingway said that writers write for money and Papa Freud said that artists work for fame, money, and the love of women. I’ll leave out the love of women, though it would be much more fun to talk about. Fame and money—success and power. If you agree with the Papas, there are workshops for you, but this is not the essay for you. I think both Papas were talking through their hats. I don’t think writers write for either fame or money, though they love them when they can get them. Writers don’t write “for” anything, not even for art’s sake. They write. Singers sing, dancers dance, writers write. The whole question of what a thing is “for” has no more to do with art than it has to do with babies, or forests, or galaxies.

In a money economy, artists must sell their work or be supported by gifts while doing it. Since our national government is hysterically suspicious of all artists, and most arts foundations are particularly stingy to writers, North American writers must be directly concerned with the skills of marketing and grant-getting. They need to learn their trade. There are many guidebooks and organisations to help them learn it. But the trade is not the art. Writers and teachers of writing who put salability before quality degrade the writer and the work. Writing workshops that put marketing and contact-making before quality degrade the art.

If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine. Just keep out of my workshop.

Finally, one more cause of time-wasting: workshop codependency, the policy of encouraging eternal returners, workshop junkies, people who go to retreats and groups year after year but don’t write anything the rest of the year… and the policy of giving a grant simply because the applicant has received other grants to attend other workshops and writers colonies.

A friend who was at one of the very elite New England artist colonies told me about a woman there who had no address. She lived at colonies and conferences. She had published two short stories in the last ten years. She was a professional, all right, but her profession was not writing.

Junkies always bring an old manuscript to the workshop, and when it gets criticised, they tell us about the great writers at greater workshops who said how great it was. If the instructor demands new work from junkies, they are outraged—“But I’ve been working on this since 1950!” Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, they will be hauling out that same damned unfinished manuscript twenty years from now and whining, “But Longfellow said it was tremendously sensitive!”

But then, I am a workshop junky too: I keep doing them. Why?

So, to the positive side. Maybe nobody can teach anybody how to write, but, just as techniques for attaining profit and prestige can be taught in the commercial and establishmentarian programs, so realistic expectations, useful habits, respect for the art, and respect for oneself as a writer can be acquired in work-centered workshops.

What the instructor has to give is, I think, above all, experience—whether rationalised and verbalised or just shared by being there, being a writer, reading the work, talking about the work.

What most participants need most is to learn to think of themselves as writers.

For the young, this is all too often no problem at all. Many teenagers, college-agers, having no idea what being a fiction writer entails, assume they can write novels and screenplays and play drums in a band and pass their GREs and fifteen other things at the same time, no sweat. This blithe attitude is healthy, it is endearing, and it means they do not belong in a serious workshop (or, in my opinion, in a writing program ending in a degree of any kind). The very young cannot, except in rare cases, make the commitment that is required.

With many adults the problem is the opposite—lack of confidence. Women, particularly women with children, or in middle age and older, may find it enormously difficult to take seriously anything they do that isn’t done “for other people”—the altruism trap. Men brought up to consider themselves as wage earners and ordinary joes may in the same way find it hard to take the leap to considering themselves seriously as writers. And this is why, though peer groups of amateur and semiamateur writers are a wonderful development of the last decades, and though the functioning of the workshop is strictly egalitarian, the workshop has an instructor: a central figure who is a professional, a real, indubitable, published writer, able to share professionalism and lend reality-as-a-writer to everyone in the circle.

And thus it is important that instructors should not be writing teachers but writers teaching: people who have published professionally and actively in the field of the workshop.

And it is important that they should be women as often as they are men. (If they are Gethenians, this latter requirement is no problem; otherwise it should be a central concern of the workshop managers.)

Instructors are not only symbols and gurus. They are directly useful. Their assignments, directions, discussions, exercises, criticisms, responses, and fits of temperament allow the participants to discover that they can meet a deadline, write a short story overnight, try a new form, take a risk, discover gifts they didn’t know they had. The instructor directs their practice.

Practice is an interesting word. We think of practicing as beginner’s stuff, playing scales, basic exercises. But the practice of an art is the doing of that art—it is the art. When the participants have been practicing writing with a bunch of other practicing writers for a week, they can feel with some justification that they are, in fact, writers.

So perhaps the essence of a workshop that works is the group itself. The instructor facilitates the formation of the group, but the circle of people is the source of energy. It is, by the way, important that it be literally, in so far as possible, a circle. This is the Teepee Theory of Workshopping. A circle of units is not a hierarchy. It is one shape made of many, one whole, one thing.

Participants who participate, who write, read, criticise, and discuss, are learning a great deal. First of all, they’re learning to take criticism, learning that they can take criticism. Negative, positive, aggressive, constructive, valuable, stupid, they can take it. Most of us can, but we don’t think we can till we do; and the fear of it can be crippling. To find that you have been roundly criticised and yet have gone on writing—that frees up a lot of energy.

Participants are also learning to read other people’s writing and criticise it responsibly. For a good many, this is the first real reading they’ve ever done: reading not as passive absorption, as in reading junk for relaxation and escape; reading not as detached intellectual analysis, as in English 102; but reading as the intensely active and only partially intellectual process of collaboration with a text. A workshop in which one person learned to read that way would have justified itself. But if the group forms, everybody begins reading each other’s work that way; and often real reading is so exciting to those new to it that it leads to the overvaluation of texts that is one of the minor hazards of a lively workshop.

Learning to read gives people a whole new approach to writing. They have learned to read what they write. They can turn their criticocollaborative skills onto their own work and so be enabled to revise, to revise constructively, without dreading revision as a destructive process, or a never-ending one, as many inexperienced writers do.

I spoke of the psychological acuteness and sensitivity I have learned to count on and call on in workshop groups. I think it rises from the fact that the people feel that they are working hard together at hard work, and that they have experienced honesty and trust as absolutely essential to getting the work done. So they will use all their skills to achieve that honesty and trust. If the group works as a group, everyone in it, including the instructor, is strengthened by its community and exhilarated by its energy.

This is such a rare and valuable experience that it’s no wonder good workshops almost always spin off into small peer groups that may go on working together for months or years.

And it’s one reason why I go on teaching. I come home from a workshop and I write.

The Writer, that noble heroic figure gazing at a blank page who is such an awful bore in books and movies because he doesn’t get to bash holes in marble or slash brushes over canvas or conduct gigantic orchestras or die playing Hamlet—he only gets to gaze, and drink, and mope, and crumple up sheets of paper and throw them at a wastebasket, which is just as boring as what he does in real life, which is he sits there, and he sits there, and he sits there, and if you say anything he jumps and shouts WHAT?—the Writer, I say, is not only boring, but lonely, even when, perhaps especially when her family (she has changed sex, like Orlando) is with her, asking where is my blue shirt? when is dinner? The Writer is liable to feel like a little, tiny person all alone in a desert where the sand is words. Giant figures of Best-Sellers and Great Authors loom over her like statues—Look on my works, ye puny, and despair!—This lonely, sitting-there person may find that in a work-centered workshop she can draw on the kind of group support and collaborative rivalry, the pooled energy, that actors, dancers, and musicians, all performing artists, draw on all the time.

And so long as ego-tripping is discouraged, the process of the workshop, depending on mutual aid, stimulation, emulation, honesty, and trust, can produce an unusually pure and clear form of that energy.

The participant may be able to carry some of that energy home, not having learned “how to write,” but having learned what it is to write.

I think of a good workshop as a pride of lions at a waterhole. They all hunt zebras all night and then they all eat the zebra, growling a good deal, and then they all come to the waterhole to drink together. Then in the heat of the day they lie around rumbling and swatting flies and looking benevolent. It is something to have belonged, even for a week, to a pride of lions.

THE QUESTION I GET ASKED MOST OFTEN

The question fiction writers get asked most often is: Where do you get your ideas from? Harlan Ellison has been saying for years that he gets ideas for his stories 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 e-mail address of that company in Schenectady.

That is: they want to be writers, because they know writers are rich and famous; and they know that there are secrets that writers know; and they know if they can just learn those secrets, that mystical address in Schenectady, they will be Stephen King.

Writers, as I know them, are poor, they are infamous, and they couldn’t keep a secret if they had one. Writers are wordy people. They talk, they blab, they yadder. They whine all the time to each other about what they’re writing and how hard it is, they teach writing workshops and write writing books and give talks about writing, like this. Writers tell all. If they could tell beginners where to get ideas from, they would. In fact they do, all the time. Some of them actually get somewhat 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 address in Schenectady?

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

So why did I want to try to answer this foolish question, Where do you get your ideas from? Because underneath the foolishness is a real question, which people really yearn to have answered—a big question.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential, durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it’s visible? That is a real question.

One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought of 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. A true mystery. That’s what it is. For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there, and 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, listen carefully, to see clearly, see accurately—to let the words be right. Not almost right. Right. To know how to make something out of the vision, that’s the craft: 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 is an art that involves 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 Lord knows where talent comes from, but craft comes from practice.

With those tools, those instruments, with that hard-earned mastery, that craftiness, artists do their 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, this 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 craft is what I like to talk about when I talk about writing, and 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.)

All right, these “ideas”—what does that word mean? “Idea” is a shorthand way of saying: 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; and I will come back in the end to it, 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, continually, 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.

The minds of animals are a great, sacred, present mystery. I do think animals have languages, but they are entirely truthful languages. It seems that we are the only animals who can lie. We can think and say what is not so and never was so, or what has never been, yet might be. We can invent; we can suppose; we can imagine. All that gets mixed in with memory. And so we’re the only animals who tell stories.

An ape can remember and extrapolate from her experience: once I stuck a stick in that ant hill and the ants crawled on it, so if I put this stick in that ant hill again, maybe the ants will crawl on it again, and I can lick them off again, yum. But only we human beings can imagine—can tell the story about the ape who stuck a stick in an anthill and it came out covered with gold dust and a prospector saw it and that was the beginning of the great gold rush of 1877 in Rhodesia.

That story is not true. It is fiction. Its only relation to reality is the fact that some apes do stick sticks in anthills and there was a place once called Rhodesia. But there was no gold rush in 1877 in Rhodesia. I made it up. I am human, therefore I lie. All human beings are liars; that is true; you must believe me.

Fiction: imagination working on experience. A great deal of what we consider our experience, our memory, our hard-earned knowledge, our history, is in fact fiction. But never mind that. I’m talking about real fiction—stories, novels. They all come from the writer’s experience of reality worked upon, changed, filtered, distorted, clarified, transfigured, by imagination.

“Ideas” come from the world through the head.

The interesting part of this process to me is the passage through the head, the action of the imagination on the raw material. But that’s the part of the process that a great many people disapprove of.

I wrote a piece years ago called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In it I talked about how so many Americans distrust and despise not only the obviously imaginative kind of fiction we call fantasy, but all fiction, often rationalising their fear and contempt with financial or religious arguments: reading novels is a waste of valuable time, the only true book is the Bible, and so on. I said that many Americans have been taught “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. They have learned to fear [the imagination]. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

I wrote that in 1974. The millennium has come and gone and we still fear dragons.

If you fear something you may try to diminish it. You infantilise it. Fantasy is for children—kiddylit—can’t take it seriously. But fantasy also has shown that it can make money. Gotta take that seriously. So when the first Harry Potter book, which combined two very familiar conventions, the British school story and the orphan-child-of-great-gifts, hit the big time, many reviewers praised it lavishly for its originality. By which they showed their absolute ignorance of both traditions the book follows—the small one of the school story, and the great one, a tradition that descends from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Thousand and One Nights and Beowulf and the Tale of Monkey and medieval romance and Renaissance epic, through Lewis Carroll and Kipling to Tolkien, to Borges and Calvino and Rushdie and the rest of us: a tradition, a form of literature which really cannot be dismissed as “entertainment,” “great fun for the kiddies,” or “well at least they’re reading something.”

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it—because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. “Oh those awful Orcs,” they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is. And they’re too damned lazy to do it.

What the majority of our critics and teachers call “literature” is still modernist realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns mysteries science fiction fantasy romance historical regional you name it—is dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, so what? Magic realism, though—that bothers them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians (American ones and Indian ones) dancing up in the attic of the New York Times Book Review. They think maybe if they just call it all postmodernism it will go away.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. In mean moments I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted, highly puritanical proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay.

But that has been a genuine popularity, a real preference, not a matter of academic canonizing: people really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography, sure, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice, and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

Our high valuation of story drawn directly from personal experience may be a logical extension of our high value for realism in fiction. If faithful imitation of actual experience is fiction’s greatest virtue, then memoir is more virtuous than fiction can ever be. The memoir writer’s imagination, subordinated to the hard facts, serves to connect the facts aesthetically and to draw from them a moral or intellectual lesson, but is understood to be forbidden to invent. Emotion will certainly be roused, but imagination may scarcely be called upon. Recognition, rather than discovery, is the reward.

True recognition is a true reward. The personal essay is a noble and difficult discipline. I’m not knocking it. I admire it with considerable awe. But I’m not at home in it.

I keep looking for dragons in this country, and not finding any. Or only finding them in disguise.

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in poverty. Hopeless poverty, cruel fathers, incompetent mothers, abused children, misery, fear, loneliness…. But is this the property of nonfiction? Poverty, cruelty, incompetence, dysfunctional families, injustice, degradation—that is the very stuff of the fireside tale, the folktale, stories of ghosts and vengeance beyond the grave—and of Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, and Huckleberry Finn, and Cien Años de Soledad…. The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in many personal essays and autobiographies, that’s what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognise our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognise something I never saw before. I want the vision to leap out at me, terrible and blazing—the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.

Experience is where the ideas come from. But a story isn’t a mirror of what happened. Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, transfigured by the imagination. Truth includes but is not coextensive with fact. Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation.

In a factual history or memoir, the raw material of experience, to be valuable, has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes, which may be only indirectly related to rational thinking. The whole thing may end up looking like pure invention. A girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a monster. A mad captain and a white whale. A ring that confers absolute power. A dragon.

But there’s no such thing as pure invention. It all starts with experience. Invention is recombination. We can work only with what we have. There are monsters and leviathans and chimeras in the human mind; they are psychic facts. Dragons are one of the truths about us. We have no other way of expressing that particular truth about us. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

Another way we have recently taken of showing our deep distrust of the imagination, our puritanical lust to control it and limit it, is in the way we tell stories electronically, on TV and in media such as electronic games and CD-ROMs.

Reading is active. To read a story is to participate actively in the story. To read is to tell the story, tell it to yourself, reliving it, 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. She is a tiger eating.

Reading is a most mysterious act. It absolutely has not been replaced and will not be replaced by any kind of viewing. Viewing is an entirely different undertaking, with different rewards.

A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. Reading is an act, a creative one. Viewing is relatively passive. 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. Film eats viewers.

This can be wonderful. 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. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Viewing is a different transaction. It isn’t collaborative. The viewer consents to participate and 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 screen or monitor 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, 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, the 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 in games, 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 collaborated with the whale to kill himself. Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it. Viewers are either controlled by the program or try to control it. Different ball games. Different universes.

When I was working on this talk, a 3-D animated version of The Little Prince came out on CD-ROM. The blurb said it “offers 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.”

In the book the prince visits several planets, with extremely interesting inhabitants, and his own tiny planet has an immense secret—a rose—the rose he loves. Do these CD guys think Saint-Exupéry was stingy with his planets? Or are they convinced that stuffing irrelevant information into a work of art enriches it?

Ah, but there is more: 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 he has to do it 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 misunderstanding. 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, “Being tamed didn’t do you any good,” 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 CD-ROM tames the fox, that is, presses buttons until the food pellet drops into the food dish—no, sorry, that’s rats—the child selects the “right” choices from the program till informed that the fox is tamed. Somehow this seems different from imagining doing what the book says: coming back every day at the same time and sitting silently while a fox looks at you from the corner of its eye. Something essential has been short-circuited. Has been falsified. What do you think the fox’s “gift” is, in the CD-ROM? I don’t know, but if it was a twenty-four-carat gold ring with an emerald, it wouldn’t top the fox’s gift in the book, which is nine 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 CD-ROM 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 1930s, 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 fantastic story of a little prince. Imagination working on experience. Invention springing, like a flower, a rose, out of the desert sands of reality.

Thinking about the sources of art, about where ideas come from, we often give experience too much credit. Earnest biographers often fail to realise that novelists make things up. They seek a direct source for everything in a writer’s work, as if every character in a novel were based on a person the writer knew, every plot gambit had to mirror a specific actual event. Ignoring the incredible recombinatory faculty of the imagination, this fundamentalist attitude short-circuits the long, obscure process by which experience becomes story.

Aspiring writers keep telling me they’ll start writing when they’ve gathered experience. Usually I keep my mouth shut, but sometimes I can’t control myself and ask them, ah, like Jane Austen? Like the Brontë sisters? Those women with their wild, mad lives cram full of gut-wrenching adventure working as stevedores in the Congo and shooting up drugs in Rio and hunting lions on Kilimanjaro and having sex in SoHo and all that stuff that writers have to do—well, that some writers have to do?

Very young writers usually are handicapped by their relative poverty of experience. Even if their experiences are the stuff of which fiction can be made—and very often it’s exactly the experiences of childhood and adolescence that feed the imagination all the rest of a writer’s life—they don’t have context, they don’t yet have enough to compare it with. They haven’t had time to learn that other people exist, people who have had similar experiences, and different experiences, and that they themselves will have different experiences… a breadth of comparison, a fund of empathic knowledge, crucial to the novelist, who after all is making up a whole world.

So fiction writers are slow beginners. Few are worth much till they’re thirty or so. Not because they lack life experience, but because their imagination hasn’t had time to context it and compost it, to work on what they’ve done and felt, and realise its value is where it’s common to the human condition. Autobiographical first novels, self-centered and self-pitying, often suffer from poverty of imagination.

But many fantasies, works of so-called imaginative fiction, suffer from the same thing: imaginative poverty. The writers haven’t actually used their imagination, haven’t made up anything—they’ve just moved archetypes around in a game of wish fulfillment. A salable game.

In fantasy, since the fictionality of the fiction, the inventions, the dragons, are all right out in front, it’s easy to assume that the story has no relation at all to experience, that everything in a fantasy can be just the way the writer wants it. No rules, all cards wild. All the ideas in fantasy are just wishful thinking—right? Well, no. Wrong.

It may be that the further a story gets away from common experience and accepted reality, the less wishful thinking it can do, the more firmly its essential ideas must be grounded in common experience and accepted reality.

Serious fantasy goes into regions of the psyche that may be very strange territory, dangerous ground, places where wise psychologists tread cautiously: and for that reason, serious fantasy is usually both conservative and realistic about human nature. Its mode is usually comic not tragic—that is, it has a more or less happy ending—but, just as the tragic hero brings his tragedy on himself, the happy outcome in fantasy is earned by the behavior of the protagonist. Serious fantasy invites the reader on a wild journey of invention, through wonders and marvels, through mortal risks and dangers—all the time hanging on to a common, everyday, realistic morality. Generosity, reliability, compassion, courage: in fantasy these moral qualities are seldom questioned. They are accepted, and they are tested—often to the limit, and beyond.

The people who write the stuff on the book covers obsessively describe fantasy as “a battle between good and evil.” That phrase describes serious fantasy only in the sense of Solzhenitsyn’s saying: “The line between good and evil runs straight through every human heart.” In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral and internal. We have met the enemy, as Pogo said, and he is us. To do good, heroes must know or learn that the “axis of evil” is within them.

In commercial fantasy the so-called battle of good and evil is a mere power struggle. Look at how they act: the so-called good wizards and the so-called bad ones are equally violent and irresponsible. This is about as far from Tolkien as you can get.

But why should moral seriousness matter, why do probability and consistency matter, when it’s “all just made up”?

Well, moral seriousness is what makes a fantasy matter, because it’s what’s real in the story. A made-up story is inevitably trivial if nothing real is at stake, if mere winning, coming out on top, replaces moral choice. Easy wish fulfillment has a great appeal to children, who are genuinely powerless; but if it’s all a story has to offer, in the end it’s not enough.

In the same way, the purer the invention, the more important is its credibility, consistency, coherence. The rules of the invented realm must be followed to the letter. All magicians, including writers, are extremely careful about their spells. Every word must be the right word. A sloppy wizard is a dead wizard. Serious fantasists delight in invention, in the freedom to invent, but they know that careless invention kills the magic. Fantasy shamelessly flouts fact, but it is as deeply concerned with truth as the grimmest, greyest realism.

A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy it up, but to tone it down. The world is unbelievably strange, and human behavior is frequently so weird that no kind of narrative except farce or satire can handle it. I am thinking of a true story I heard about a man who rationed his daughters’ toilet paper. He had three daughters and it infuriated him that they used so much toilet paper, so he tore all the toilet paper rolls into the little component squares, and made three piles of six squares on the bathroom counter, and each daughter was to use one pile each day. You see what I mean? In a case like this, the function of the imagination is to judge whether anything so bizarre belongs in the story without turning it into farce or mere gross-out.

The whole matter of “leaving it to the imagination”—that is, including elements of the story only by allusion and implication—is enormously important. Even journalists can’t report the full event, but can only tell bits of it; both the realist and the fantasist leave out a tremendous amount, suggesting through imagery or metaphors just enough that the reader can imagine the event.

And the reader does just that. Story is a collaborative art. The writer’s imagination works in league with the reader’s imagination, calls on the reader to collaborate, to fill in, to flesh out, to bring their own experience to the work. Fiction is not a camera, and not a mirror. It’s much more like a Chinese painting—a few lines, a few blobs, a whole lot of blank space. From which we make the travellers, in the mist, climbing the mountain towards the inn under the pines.

I have written fantastic stories closely based on actual experience, and realistic stories totally made up out of moonshine; 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 will refer to some of my own works in hopes of showing how fictional “ideas” arise from a combination of experience and imagination that is indissoluble and unpredictable and doesn’t follow orders.

In my Earthsea books, particularly the first one, people sail around all the time on the sea in small boats. 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 in my junior semester in 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 all that sailing around that Ged does in Earthsea does not reflect experience—not my experience. Only my imagination, using that catboat, and other people’s experience—novels I’d read—and some research (I do know why Lookfar is clinkerbuilt), and 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 Scott, and Shackleton, and those guys. In books. Where do you get your ideas from? From books, of course, from other people’s books, what are books for? If I didn’t read how could I write?

We writers 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. If I thought I had really deliberately used any other writer’s writing, I certainly wouldn’t stand here congratulating myself, I’d go hide my head in a paper bag (along with several eminent historians). What I mean is that stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, and like actual experience gets composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, and comes forth entirely changed, our own, growing out of our own mind’s earth.

So, I acknowledge with delight my endless debt to every storyteller I have ever read, factual or fictional, my colleagues, my collaborators—I praise them and honor them, the endless givers of gifts.

In my 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.

Once I wanted to write a story from the point of view of a tree. The “idea” of the story came with the sight of an oak alongside the road to McMinnville. I was thinking as we drove by that when that oak was young, Highway 18 was a quiet country road. I wondered what the oak thought about the highway, the cars. Well, so, where do I get the experience of being a tree, on which my imagination is to work? Books don’t help much here. Unlike Shackleton and Scott, oaks don’t keep diaries. Personal observation is my only experiential material. I have seen a lot of oaks, been around oaks, been in some oaks, externally, climbing around; now I want to be in one internally, inside. What does it feel like to be an oak? Large, for one thing; lively, but quiet, and not very flexible, except at the tips, out there in the sunlight. And deep—very deep—roots going down in the dark…. To live rooted, to be two hundred years in one place, unmoving, yet traveling immensely through the seasons, the years, through time… Well, you know how it’s done. You did it as a kid, you still do it. If you don’t do it, your dreams do it for you.

In dreams begins responsibility, said a poet. In dreams, in imagination, we begin to be one another. I am thou. The barriers go down.

Big stories, novels, don’t come from just one stimulus but a whole clumping and concatenation of ideas and images, visions and mental perceptions, all slowly drawing in around some center which is usually obscure to me until long after the book’s done and I finally say Oh, that’s what that book’s about. To me, two things are essential during the drawing-together, the clumping process, before I know much of anything about the story: I have to see the place, the landscape; and I have to know the principal people. By name. And it has to be the right name. If it’s the wrong name, the character won’t come to me. I won’t know who they are. I won’t be able to be them. They won’t talk. They won’t do anything. Please don’t ask me how I arrive at the name and how I know when it’s the right name; I have no idea. When I hear it, I know it. And I know where the person is. And then the story can begin.

Here is an example: my recent book The Telling. Unlike most of my stories, it started with something you really could call an idea—a fact I had learned. I have been interested most of my life in the Chinese philosophy called Taoism. At the same time that I finally also learned a little about the religion called Taoism, an ancient popular religion of vast complexity, a major element of Chinese culture for two millennia, I learned that it had been suppressed, almost entirely wiped out, by Mao Tse-tung. In one generation, one psychopathic tyrant destroyed a tradition two thousand years old. In 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… counterpointed by 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 name was, she had five different names and none of them was the true name. I started the book five times, 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 from 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; and she gave me the book.

I had a good idea, but I did not have a story. Critics talk as if stories were all idea, but intellect does not make story any more than ideology makes art. 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, good stuff, clear ideas—but I couldn’t pull it together, I couldn’t dance with it, because I hadn’t waited to catch the beat. I didn’t have the rhythm.

This book takes its title from a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Vita Sackville-West. Vita had been pontificating about finding the right word, Flaubert’s mot juste, and agonising very Frenchly about style; and Virginia wrote back, very Englishly:

Woolf wrote that eighty years ago, and 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; and the writer’s job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, to 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, “has nothing to do with words.” So the writer’s job is to recognise 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 ideas… 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.

As readers, we have all ridden that wave, and known that joy.

Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it, the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a little while.

OLD BODY NOT WRITING

Just now I’m not writing. That is, I’m writing here and now that I’m not writing, because I am unhappy about not writing. But if I have nothing to write I have nothing to write. Why can’t I wait in patience till I do? Why is the waiting hard?

Because I am not as good at anything else and nothing else is as good. I would rather be writing than anything else.

Not because it is a direct pleasure in the physical sense, like a good dinner or sex or sunlight. Composition is hard work, involving the body not in satisfying activity and release but only in stillness and tension. It is usually accompanied by uncertainty as to the means and the outcome, and often surrounded by a kind of driving anxiety (“I have to finish this before I die and finishing it is going to kill me”). In any case, while actually composing, I’m in a kind of trance state that isn’t pleasant or anything else. It has no qualities. It is unconsciousness of self. While writing I am unconscious of my existence or any existence except in the words as they sound and make rhythms and connect and make syntax and in the story as it happens.

Aha, then writing is an escape? (Oh the Puritan overtones in that word!) An escape from dissatisfactions, incompetences, woes? Yes, no doubt. And also a compensation for lack of control over life, for powerlessness. Writing, I’m in power, I control, I choose the words and shape the story. Don’t I?

Do I? Who’s I? Where’s I while I write? Following the beat. The words. They’re in control. It’s the story that has the power. I’m what follows it, records it. That’s my job, and the work is in doing my job right.

We use escape and compensation negatively, and so we can’t used them to define the act of making, which is positive and irreducible to anything but itself. True making is truly satisfying. It is more truly satisfying than anything I know.

So when I have nothing to write I have nothing to escape to, nothing to compensate with, nothing to give control to, no power to share in, and no satisfaction. I have to just be here being old and worried and muddling and afraid that nothing makes sense. I miss and want that thread of words that runs through day and night leading me through the labyrinth of the years. I want a story to tell. What will give me one?

Having a clear time to write, often I sit and think hard, forcefully, powerfully, and make up interesting people and interesting situations from which a story could grow. I write them down, I work at them. But nothing grows. I am trying to make something happen, not waiting till it happens. I don’t have a story. I don’t have the person whose story it is.

When I was young, I used to know that I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that’s what it was.

That’s the physical side of storytelling, and it’s still mysterious to me. Since I was in my sixties it has happened again (with Teyeo and Havzhiva in Four Ways to Forgiveness, for example) to my great delight, for it’s an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me, and their world overlapping and interplaying with my world. But I didn’t embody so deeply with anybody in Searoad, nor with most of my characters in the last ten or fifteen years. Yet writing Tehanu or “Sur” or “Hernes” was as exciting as anything I ever did, and the satisfaction was solid.

I still find embodying or identifying most intense when the character is a man—when the body is absolutely not my own. That reach or leap across gender has an inherent excitement in it (which is probably why it is like falling in love). My identification with women characters such as Tenar or Virginia or Dragonfly is different. There is an even more sexual aspect to it, but not genital sexuality. Deeper. In the middle of my body, where you center from in t’ai chi, where the chi is. That is where my women live in me.

This embodying business may be different for men and women (if other writers do it at all—how do I know?). But I incline to believe Virginia Woolf was right in thinking that the real thing goes on way past gender. Norman Mailer may seriously believe that you have to have balls to be a writer. If you want to write the way he writes I suppose you do. To me a writer’s balls are irrelevant if not annoying. Balls aren’t where the action is. When I say the middle of the body I don’t mean balls, prick, cunt, or womb. Sexualist reductionism is as bad as any other kind. If not worse.

When I had a hysterectomy, I worried about my writing, because sexualist reductionism had scared me. But I’m sure it wasn’t as bad for me as losing his balls would be for a man like Norman Mailer. Never having identified my sex, my sexuality, or my writing with my fertility, I didn’t have to trash myself. I was able, with some pain and fear but not dreadful pain and fear, to think about what the loss meant to me as a writer, a person in a body who writes.

What it felt like to me was that in losing my womb I had indeed lost some connection, a kind of easy, bodily imagination, that had to be replaced, if it could be replaced, by the mental imagination alone. For a while I thought that I could not embody myself in an imagined person as I used to. I thought I couldn’t “be” anyone but me.

I don’t mean that when I had a womb I believed that I carried characters around in it like fetuses. I mean that when I was young I had a complete, unthinking, bodily connection and emotional apprehension of my imagined people.

Now (perhaps because of the operation, perhaps through mere aging) I was obliged to make the connection deliberately in the mind. I had to reach out with a passion that was not simply physical. I had to “be” other people in a more radical, complete way.

This wasn’t necessarily a loss. I began to see it might be a gain, forcing me to take the more risky way. The more intelligence the better, so long as the passion, the bodily emotional connection is made, is there.

Essays are in the head, they don’t have bodies the way stories do: that’s why essays can’t satisfy me in the long run. But headwork is better than nothing, as witness me right now, making strings of words to follow through the maze of the day (a very simple maze: one or two choices, a food pellet for a reward). Any string of meaningfully connected words is better than none.

If I can find intensely felt meaning in the words or invest them with it, better yet—whether the meaning be intellectual, as now, or consist in their music, in which case I would, ¡ojalá! be writing poetry.

Best of all is if they find bodies and begin to tell a story.

Up there I said “be” somebody, “have the person,” “find the person.” This is the mystery.

I use the word have not in the sense of “having” a baby, but in the sense of “having” a body. To have a body is to be embodied. Embodiment is the key.

My plans for stories that don’t become stories all lack that key, the person or people whose story it is, the heart, the soul, the embodied inwardness of a person or several people. When I am working on a story that isn’t going to work, I make people up. I could describe them the way the how-to-write books say to do. I know their function in the story. I write about them—but I haven’t found them, or they haven’t found me. They don’t inhabit me, I don’t inhabit them. I don’t have them. They are bodiless. So I don’t have a story.

But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I have that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story. Then I can begin writing directly, trusting the person knows where she or he is going, what will happen, what it’s all about.

This is extremely risky, but it works for me, these days, more often than it used to. And it makes for a story that is without forced or extraneous elements, all of a piece, uncontrolled by intrusions of opinion, willpower, fear (of unpopularity, censorship, the editor, the market, whatever), or other irrelevancies.

So my search for a story, when I get impatient, is not so much looking for a topic or subject or nexus or resonance or place-time (though all that is or will be involved) as casting about in my head for a stranger. I wander about the mental landscape looking for somebody, an Ancient Mariner or a Miss Bates, who will (almost certainly not when I want them, not when I invite them, not when I long for them, but at the most inconvenient and impossible time) begin telling me their story and not let me go until it’s told.

The times when nobody is in the landscape are silent and lonely. They can go on and on until I think nobody will ever be there again but one stupid old woman who used to write books. But it’s no use trying to populate it by willpower. These people come only when they’re ready, and they do not answer to a call. They answer silence.

Many writers now call any period of silence a “block.”

Would it not be better to look on it as a clearing? A way to go till you get where you need to be?

If I want to write and have nothing to write I do indeed feel blocked, or rather chocked—full of energy but nothing to spend it on, knowing my craft but nothing to use it on. It is frustrating, wearing, infuriating. But if I fill the silence with constant noise, writing anything in order to be writing something, forcing my willpower to invent situations for stories, I may be blocking myself. It’s better to hold still and wait and listen to the silence. It’s better to do some kind of work that keeps the body following a rhythm but doesn’t fill up the mind with words.

I have called this waiting “listening for a voice.” It has been that, a voice. It was that in “Hernes,” all through, when I’d wait and wait, and then the voice of one of the women would come and speak through me.

But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.

THE WRITER ON, AND AT, HER WORK