May 30, 2015

Ursula K. Le Guin says: Most Novelists have “an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality” since that is how they experience their characters

“I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self…

“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…Deliberate, conscious control…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…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…

“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…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 writing, I may yield to my characters, trust them wholly to do and say what is right for the story…

“…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…for it’s an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me…

“When I am working on a story that isn’t going to work, I make up people. I could describe them the way how-to-write books say to do…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…These people come only when they’re ready, and they do not answer a call…I have called this waiting ‘listening for a voice’…and then the voice…would come and speak through me. But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston, Shambhala, 2004.