Flavorwire Excerpt: Ursula K. Le Guin on How Writers Get Inspired
The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write (Tin House) is an essential anthology of speeches made by leading writers at Oregon’s Literary Arts Foundation, which is celebrating thirty years strong in 2014. It’s a pleasure to read writers like Chimamanda Adiche, Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, and Jeanette Winsterson on how and why we write and the mystery of the muse and inspiration.
It’s full of quotes that you’ll just want to put over your desk, like this quip from Ursula K. Le Guin: “That “anxiety of influence” stuff is just testosterone talking.” Le Guin’s full piece, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” is a marvelous meditation on inspiration and how to write and how current ideas and problems get mediated through techniques used in fantasy and genre. Read an excerpt from Le Guin’s piece below; The World Split Open is now available in stores and online. … Read More
It’s full of quotes that you’ll just want to put over your desk, like this quip from Ursula K. Le Guin: “That “anxiety of influence” stuff is just testosterone talking.” Le Guin’s full piece, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” is a marvelous meditation on inspiration and how to write and how current ideas and problems get mediated through techniques used in fantasy and genre. Read an excerpt from Le Guin’s piece below; The World Split Open is now available in stores and online. … Read More
In the Heart of the Heart of Fiction: A Masterpiece Resurfaces
I was a solitary child, a reader. I spent my childhood in Kentucky and Indiana, two places that, in the minds of others, may not sound distinct. In my memory, though, the states are irreconcilable. In Kentucky, I roamed the streets and rested on the grass that strikes the eye as blue in images. In Indiana, I sat in rooms, an array of identical rooms, reading books. Later in my life, during college, in a small gray town fastened to a cornfield, still in Indiana, I took my reading life and shoved it gracelessly into writing.
I started to believe that a reader, somewhere, might like what I had written. Then I found a story set near my school — William Gass’ “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” — and I abandoned this belief wholeheartedly. I no longer wrote fiction to please. Like Gass, I began to write purely to balance the scales in a misaligned world. … Read More
I started to believe that a reader, somewhere, might like what I had written. Then I found a story set near my school — William Gass’ “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” — and I abandoned this belief wholeheartedly. I no longer wrote fiction to please. Like Gass, I began to write purely to balance the scales in a misaligned world. … Read More
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