Writing Rituals of Ursula K Le Guin
A series on the What, Where and Why of Literary Women
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This essay forms part of a series around the writing rituals of inspirational literary women. At the end of this essay, I will give three key takeaways we might all bring into our own creative lives.
I have spoken before about my lack of knowledge when it comes to the genre of science fiction. But there is one woman who I have read in this genre, mostly because one of her short stories came up on a course I was taking several years ago, and also because she wrote essays on writing and women’s lives, and that is Ursula K Le Guin. I have to say, this essay was a joy to write, as I found Le Guin’s modest ideas around her writing life so resonant with living a simple life.
I hope you enjoy them too 🙂
Writing Rituals of…Ursula K Le Guin
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
What?
Over a sixty year career, Ursula K Le Guin became one of the most successful, prolific and influential science fiction writers in history. She produced a huge body of literary work, including The Left Hand of Darkness series, The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven.
Her first publishing success came in 1966 with Rocannon’s World, the novel which would become the first of the Hainish Cycle, with later titles in the series being compared to James Cameron’s Avatar. The fourth book in the series launched her as a trailblazing example of the genre with the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness, probably the book for which she is most well known.
Requested by her publisher to write a book for younger readers, she created A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968. This became a huge success, with five more novels following on to create a series, and credited as a proto Harry Potter.
She also published several substantial essay collections including a nonfiction guide for writers, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, and in later years, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, a collection of essays on the themes of motherhood, abortion and the menopause. She had initially been reluctant to write about herself in any form of autobiography, despite requests from her publishers. Instead, she wrote a nonfiction book entitled Dreams Must Explain Themselves, which she declared to be: “a carrier bag full of ideas and responses, thoughts and rethinking.”
In total, Le Guin went on to write twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections and four works of translation. She also won various awards, including a total of six Nebula Awards and seven Hugo Awards.
When?
Much has been made of Le Guin’s writing schedule, of which she appears to have been fastidious.
Le Guin claimed in a 1988 interview, re-published more recently in Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, to write every day between the hours of 7:15am and 1:00pm. Her specific schedule ran as follows:
5:30 am - Wake up and lie there and think.
6:15 am - Get up and eat breakfast (lots).
7:15 am - Get to work writing, writing, writing.
Noon - Lunch.
1:00-3:00 pm - Reading, Music.
3:00-5:00 pm - Correspondence, maybe house cleaning.
5:00-8:00 pm - Make dinner and eat it.
After 8:00 pm - I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.
She went to bed at 10:00pm, as well as adding in long walks on the beach when she was spending time there. This, she said, was the perfect day for her.
What stands out about Le Guin’s writing ritual here is both its simplicity and its specificity: not just get up and eat breakfast, but eat ‘lots,’ clearly needing this to give her the stamina to work solidly from 7:15am to noon.
I also like the casual ‘maybe house cleaning,’ indicating that although she referenced herself as “a Portland housewife,” she nonetheless alludes to housework as an aside she may or may not fit in late in the afternoon, after the far more urgent work of writing has been accomplished.
“My life is very ordinary, commonplace, middle class, quiet and hard-working. I enjoy it immensely. I do not find it appropriate to talk about it very much.”
But importantly, her routine does not entirely dismiss the need for the mundane areas of life, such as housework, cooking, eating and resting, saying in one interview that:
“An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again. This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework, and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”
Noticeably, she didn’t appear to set a daily word count for herself, merely demanding that she write between the hours of 7:15 am and noon. Her commitment to reading and music in the afternoons is also refreshing.
Like many writers, she professes to needing an early night to enable her to wake and repeat her schedule each day.
“Some of us are Norman Mailer, but others of us are middle-aged Portland housewives.”
Le Guin was also supportive of other writers, offering advice that for some, no set routine was necessarily required, but that a dedication to the craft of storytelling was essential.
“The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time…Making anything well involves a commitment to the work. And that requires courage: you have to trust yourself. It helps to remember that the goal is not to write a masterpiece or a best-seller. The goal is to be able to look at your story and say, Yes. That’s as good as I can make it.”
Where?
Le Guin wrote in a dedicated writing studio at her home in Portland, Oregon. The studio had formerly been the nursery used by her three young children.
The family generously donated the author’s former Portland home and studio to Literary Arts, a non-profit organisation, to be used as a writer’s residency for other writers. This followed discussions before Le Guin’s death in 2018, where she stated her vision for the studio to become a creative space for a future generation of writers.
What inspiration?
Le Guin had quite an inspirational start. Her mother Theodora was a writer herself, chronicling the life of Ishi, the last Yahi tribe member, whilst her father Alfred was an anthropologist. It isn’t difficult to see how both of her parents’ went on to influence her creation of other worlds. Much of her father’s anthropological influence in particular has been noted within the fantasy worlds she created.
Importantly, her family also encouraged art, ideas, and culture within their home, with members of the Native-American community becoming well-known to the family.
Later, Le Guin became interested in mythology, attending Radcliffe College and then Columbia University, where she met her future husband, Charles Le Guin.
Like most new writers, Le Guin faced many rejections before reaching publication success. She doggedly continued writing, eventually trying her hand at science fiction writing when her attempts to find a market for her mainstream fiction failed. She had realised the benefit of the “pivot”, and it was for her sci-fi that she finally found writing success.
Le Guin also credited Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as an important text to her as a young writer. Written the same year as Le Guin was born, she acknowledged the debt of gratitude she felt towards Woolf’s essay, saying that she felt that a ‘room of one’s own’ was not absolutely necessary for a female writer, though it could be a good help.
Which Tools?
Similar to her simple writing schedule, Le Guin felt that the writing implements required were basic enough. A pencil and some paper, she said, were enough to write, adding: “So long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on the paper.”
Le Guin went on to say that she sometimes varied writing with a pen and notebook to a computer, but that it made no difference which tools were available to her, stating: “If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock.” Clearly, for Le Guin, the act of writing was the essential ingredient to her daily life.
What Else?
In a 2018 interview for Psychologies magazine, Le Guin spoke about the importance of ‘Flow’ for a writer. Referencing the “flow state,” she said this was what she saw as the state in which all skilled work was done. She believed in a regular commitment to writing, ensuring that the ritual of writing became automatic. This included things like muscular coordination and familiarity with whatever medium the writer is working in. This should then allow for the only decisions to be made during a work day to be the aesthetic ones required for the genre of writing undertaken, and that this would then allow for that ideal state of flow to occur.
Three key takeaways from the writing rituals of Ursula K Le Guin
Create a schedule that includes not just writing
Le Guin was keen to schedule in time for other activities outside of writing. Two hours in the afternoon were allocated to ‘music and reading,’ clearly something she felt important enough to put into her daily schedule, and which were no doubt essential to her writing output. She also felt the need to put down ‘Wake up and lie there and think’ for the first forty-five minutes of her day. As anyone who writes or creates anything knows, daydreaming is an essential ingredient to the creative process.
Schedule in the mundane
Le Guin’s schedule appears unusual in her inclusion of the mundane tasks such as eating lots of breakfast, making and eating dinner, and ‘maybe’ house cleaning. But the fact that she throws these into the list shows someone who values the ordinariness of life and is happiest when these essential tasks are included. It can be helpful to schedule even the seemingly insignificant tasks in order to make writing life run smoothly.
Consider making a pivot
Although Le Guin would have been the first person to tell you that it was the commitment to writing and the sharing of stories that really mattered over any sort of commercial gain, she nevertheless stands as a great example of the need to sometimes pivot in our writing careers. Having struggled to write general fiction for a while, but determined to make it as a writer, she experimented with a different genre, finding her niche in the sci-fi field. This might be worth trying as a refreshing alternative when becoming frustrated or stuck in our own writing lives.
“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.”
Although I am not a science fiction fan, I surprisingly found Ursula K Le Guin’s Writing Rituals one of the most endearing to research. Primarily, because we often talk about the ‘The Pram in the Hall,’ and the difficulties for mothers in particular in finding the space and the time to write around their families. Although this is certainly a real factor for many women, I think Le Guin showed us that these can actually be the very things that ground us closer to our practice.
I like her emphasis on satisfying meals. In addition to 45 minutes for a good brekfast, she allowed three hours to cook and enjoy dinner. She didn’t just throw it together but took time for care and a sense of ceremony.
This was a delight to read. And her emphasis on substantial meals is so refreshing, and sensible! I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life as I was when I was in the final months of writing my novel/PhD thesis, working 14 hours a day. I ate like a horse! Brain work is hungry work, I discovered! 😆