Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite science fiction writers, so it's probably no surprise that I also really enjoy her non-fiction. I read No Time to Spare, her reflections on aging, apropos of her death in 2018. This collection of essays focuses mainly on the mystery and craft of writing. The title comes from a letter that Virginia Wolf wrote to a friend when she was suffering from "writer's block". She felt the characters and story were like an onrushing wave in her mind that was unable to break into words for lack of an appropriate rhythm. It's an appropriate title since quite a number of the essays are concerned with rhythm in both poetry and prose. From the perspective of someone who writes a lot, these are pretty fascinating. They're complemented by several related paeans to reading aloud that are enough to make one want to press a street urchin into service just to have an excuse to recite The Lord of The Rings. While there are plenty of opinions and ideas that would interest a general audience in this collection, I would say that it's squarely aimed at those of us who are both familiar with her work and writer's in our own right. Even within that Venn diagram, the real focus of the book is on the process of writing fiction, and even the particular story and character driven sort of fiction Le Guin usually writes. So while her descriptions of how to "pull a story from the air" are inspiring, I wonder whether they apply equally well to the type of more abstract short fiction, inspired by Chiang and Lem and Borges, that I'm most interested in writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment