STIT Week: A Letter To Ursula Le Guin

And finally for Smarter Than I Thought Week, one of the first ever posts I made when I started blogging about writing. This post is from over two years ago, and is older than this blog :)

Dear Ms Le Guin

You express in your introduction to the 1978 edition of Racona's World surprise at the proportion of vocal fans who are Christians when you yourself are so positively non Christian.

But I say that it is as you have said all along: truth is truth, no matter what background one approaches it from.

It is one thing for commercial writers like Holly Lisle to give us tools with which we might batter our dear Muses, teaching them willing submission and happy cooperation. It is another for writers of literary masterpieces, such as Le Guin, to remind us that one of the most inherent qualities of art is time.

Learn to batter your Muse, for sure.

But learn also, especially in the beginning, to recognise the difference between a stubborn Muses, and one that is percolating.

Mine is currently percolating.

I can feel it there, bubbling away in the back of my head, boiling and frothing with thoughts and characters and ideas that as yet my conscious mind knows nothing of.

I could choose to batter it for information, to force its half-formed ideas out into the daylight where they may burn and shrivel as likely as bloom and grow...

Or I can wait.

Robin Scott Wilson reminds us that there is nowhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. You can catch a bus, ride a taxi, take a flight to Success.

But to art, you must walk.

So here I am today, learning to walk.

Learning what it is to feel the road beneath my feet, to smell the freshness of the wind, unmarred by tyre or exhaust fume...

Learning patience, and trust.

The stories will come. They must.

And for today, that is enough.