It’s been called “the hardest job a writer ever does.” Is it coming up with the initial idea? Developing characters? Or is it getting the first draft written? Revising and editing? What about simply overcoming writer’s block?
No, no, no, no, and no.
According to John Gardner, it’s none of those things. According to him—and he knows a thing or two about writing— Continue reading
“Do you take drugs to get your ideas?”
Did my ears deceive me? Had she really just asked that? What did she take me for?
No. Yes. And… I’m not quite sure.
It was a serious question, although one I can’t say I’ve ever had posed to me before. And so once again, living in a new country and meeting people from all over the world has meant having conversations I’ve never had before. (Another time, I met a Moroccan man with an Islamic background who asked me, “Is it easy for you to practice your religion?” But that’s a whole other story I’ll post about sometime.)
It was Saturday night and I was at Matilda’s, a party room/bar-kind-of-place inside the Australian Embassy just around the corner from the Eiffel Tower. It was their celebration for Australia Day and the cover band I’ve been playing with here—The Doodads—was providing the jams for the evening. In between sets I got to talking with one of the guests and we had the usual expat conversation: where are you from, what are you doing in Paris, how long are you here, etc., etc.
When I said I was writing a novel she asked what it was about. Even after all this time, I’m still working on my elevator speech of what the story is. It’s a little bit sci-fi, but without spaceships, time travel, aliens or ray-guns. It’s a little bit thriller and a little bit mystery; it’s character-driven and yet tightly plotted. (At least I hope it is—plot holes are the bane of a writer’s existence. Unless you’re working on a big-budget Hollywood action flick. Then you don’t care.) The most apt contemporary lingo for the genre would be “speculative fiction,” but I haven’t run into anyone outside of writerly circles who’s even heard that term.
So I described the initial set up of the plot, at which point most people say something like “that’s very interesting” and then we move on to other things. But not this time. She asked a few more questions, to the point that I’d have to get into more of the foundational premises of my invented world to even describe the basic workings of the plot. And so I paused and asked, “How deep do you want to get into this?” I didn’t want to start waxing long and boringly if she was only making polite conversation. But she said go deep. Ok. So I briefly sketched my novel-world where crimes and sins are dealt with by purging the memory of them from people’s minds, and where people can go to the black-market to purge their unwanted memories—or even those of other people.
We talked about the central conflict driving the plot and the interests of the main characters. And that was when she asked me the question about where the ideas come from—was it the drugs? Maybe it’s because I was playing in the band and everyone knows rock bands are full of drug heads who are always getting high before going on stage. (That’s a joke. Mostly.)
The idea factory
But the answer to where ideas come from, where the fount of creativity can be found is pretty mundane. Sure, there are those who have gotten inspiration from pills or powder or whatever other mind-altering thing they can find. But for the rest of us, it doesn’t require such extreme measures. It requires something much less exciting.
It’s called hard work.
Edison’s famous line is right on the money: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” I make no claims to genius-hood, but I do know that this is true for any serious creative endeavor.
It’s a curious thing, creativity. It has this air of magic, a kind of mystique that surrounds it. Where does it come from? Is it only for the chosen few? I’d wager that at least as often as people have wanted to talk about what I’m writing, they’ve wanted to talk about how creativity works. How do you get inspired, they ask? Do you have to wait for inspiration to come?
You want the truth? Can you handle the truth?
The key to creativity isn’t about living in Paris, as lovely as this city is. It’s not about waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s not about orchestrating the perfect circumstances—as much as I like to do my writing in a historic library or a comfortable café, listening to the perfect music (like Brahms or Palestrina or Sigur Rós), sipping a robust, not-too-bitter beverage. No, it’s about going to work. Opening the document. Picking up the pen. Putting in the time.
One time when someone asked me if I waited for inspiration to come, I asked in reply, “Do you wait to be inspired before you go to work?” Creative ideas don’t fall out of the sky fully-formed, to be found only by the lucky privileged elite. They’re fashioned and forged, tested and refined.
A practical example: J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” points out that it is one thing to imagine a world with a green sun—after all, anyone can write “the green sun”—but it is an entirely different matter to create a secondary world where such a green sun is “credible, commanding Secondary Belief.” And what, Mr. Tolkien, is the key to such an achievement? “Labour and thought.”
How true this is. My novel is set in a world in which the contemporary religious climate arose in a technologically advanced culture; and as well, their foundational “exodus” experience involves a catastrophic stellar event much nearer and more devastating than anything that’s ever happened to our planet. But just like it’s easy to say “the green sun” yet hard to make it fully believable, so it’s easy to dream up an exploding star and yet something else entirely to make it all actually work in the story. Making it work takes work. If you wait for inspiration, you may wait a long time.
So for me, this hard work has meant asking lots of “what if?” questions. What if a religion developed in an advanced culture? Right there, you’ve got a hundred implications, no shortage of possibilities. Asking the question is easy. Now comes the hard part—thinking it all through.
So much more could be said about creativity: how to be on the lookout for ideas, how to be attentive to the world around us for possibilities, how to test ideas to see if they’re worth exploring… for however long it’s going to take to flesh them out, whether it’s a novel, a painting, or a business proposal, or anything else. Yes, so much more could be said, but I’ve got work to do.
One last thing: I told the woman at the embassy, no, it wasn’t drugs. But I’m taking her question as a compliment. I’m going with the idea that the story I was telling her sounded compelling, like something hard to believe anyone could have come up with—in the amazing/wow/whowouldathunkit kind of way.
Yeah. I’m going with that.
Ursula K. Le Guin doesn’t want her books to be sold like deodorant. And neither do I (assuming I ever sell any).
Last night I finished polishing up the second draft of my opening set of scenes, about 7,500 words, or roughly 25 pages. (People always ask me how many pages I’ve written, but it’s much easier to think in terms of word count since words per page can vary so much. Some use 250 per page as their guide; I prefer 300. Not sure why–probably because I came across that number first.) It feels good, and it’s just in time for the girls’ Christmas break and a little sightseeing and a visit from family.
Of course, as soon as I move on to the next big chunk of the book, I come across a passage that might make more of a dramatic impact if it came earlier–back in the middle of those 25 pages I just finished revising. But I’m resisting the urge to fiddle with it. After all, second draft won’t be the final draft. Moving on!
Now, the real reason for this post is a chance to reprint this wonderful speech–with that line about deodorant–by Ursula K LeGuin, author of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and more (check out The Lathe of Heaven—it ain’t Katniss Everdeen’s dystopian fiction…).
Photo Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch
It’s one of those acceptance speeches that is actually worth reading. Not just “I want to thank the academy… my agent… my family…” She does that. And then she succinctly and persuasively defends the nature of her art, the art of writing, holding up its value in an age under the sway of profit and market forces.
There’s another fantasy author you may have heard of, who’s sold a few books in his time: J.R.R. Tolkien. He didn’t write the Lord of the Rings because he consulted the findings of a focus group. It was a sequel his publisher wasn’t expecting, probably didn’t want, but which so many are so grateful he wrote.
Isn’t that how the best art is? Not the result of the marketing machine, it’s something we didn’t even know we were looking for, but something that speaks to the depth of the soul.
Now, without further ado (you have to say that kind of thing when introducing someone about to give a speech), Ursula K. LeGuin:
To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
Thank you.
Ursula K. Le Guin
November 19, 2014
This text may be quoted without obtaining permission from the author, or copied in full so long as the copyright information is included:
Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin
a year with mona 