Fiction Loses a Legend

Last week, at age 88, beloved author Ursula K. Le Guin, died. It helps a little to know that she had as healthy a perspective on mortality as everything else:

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes, it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? — The Farthest Shore

That book is fantasy, so maybe you’d think, “I don’t like that wizard, fairy, dragon stuff.” But, take care, because here’s what she said about the realm of imagination: 

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

What did she mean?

Tip: Possibility is among our greatest creative gifts. Why reject it?

Her work gloriously intertwined myth, imagination, defiance, and poetry. You’d find a glimmer of revolution in everything she wrote or said. Here’s part of a speech at Bryn Mawr:

When women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want–-to hear you erupting. You young Mount St Helenses who don’t know the power in you – I want to hear you.

Quite timely in January, 2018. But gender issues have filled her books from the beginning, particularly the most famous one: The Left Hand of Darkness. It creates a fantastical world rich with suspense and some of the loveliest language ever put together. The novel raises questions about identity, society, and culture. How do we resist? What does it mean to love? How do we know who we are? 

She was a master of irony, as well. The Dispossessed is also more anthropological than supernatural. One of the worlds she creates prides itself on the wall that opens the book. What’s the big deal about a not particularly sturdy barrier? The people of Anarres don’t believe they’re hemmed in—they insist they’re protecting themselves from the outside. Voluntarily.

Le Guin’s talent combined keen understanding with enormous skill at expressing that understanding as no one else could. She was wonderfully modest and totally accessible to those who approached her at conferences. Not just a rare writer, but a rare human. 

And because of that, a great teacher.

Thanks to “show don’t tell,” I find writers in my workshops who think exposition is wicked. They’re afraid to describe the world they’ve invented.…This dread of writing a sentence that isn’t crammed with “gutwrenching action” leads fiction writers to rely far too much on dialogue, to restrict voice to limited third person and tense to the present.

She disliked misconceptions about writing as much as she disliked injustice or greed. This award-winning author devoted her life to nurturing the human capacity to create a reality more credible and moral than the actual one, saying, 

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

At least we’ll always have hers.

The Best Fantasy Describes Reality

Fiction itself is born in fantasy. The millennia-old quarrel between Plato and Aristotle questions the source of “truth.” Plato insisted it resides only in the realm of history and fact. But Aristotle praised a poetic version of reality, one more coherent, credible, and causal than the randomness of whatever really happened.

Fantasy has its roots deep in this dispute. Great fantasy builds a credible world, reveals truths about our own, and gives us a fun read. “Dwarf and Dragon,” the second book of D. L. Burnett’s trilogy “In the Kingdom of Dragons,” does all of this and more.  

At the Chicago Book Expo in 2004, beloved author Ursula K. Le Guin told her audience this: “Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil.”

Burnett’s novel accomplishes this by layering oaths, dilemmas, and inadvertent betrayal throughout. Is your loyalty to your people or to the mentor who helped you become a leader? Do you betray your husband or your moral code? Would you kill a friend who’s gone on a rampage that endangers lives? Can dragons, or dwarfs, or giantesses overcome their basic nature and achieve something gentler, more “human”?

Questions without easy answers generate terrific plotting and gorgeous writing. As the Dwarf army approached, “Their braided beards swung like pendulums across their chests.” They are defiant about reclaiming their homeland; they are unbeatable. Only a coerced marriage can save this people.

But this is a novel about loyalty—and love. The marriage begins with a Dwarf finding his spouse “a worthy diversion.” Sadly, he discovers that “’Human love is mist. What can I or any Dwarf know of it?...I am less welcome in your chamber than a winter wind….We cannot build a union upon a grave.’” But wait. Out of an ephemeral substance called Dripstone, he expresses his love through a sculpture he must carve and carve again. Will it move her? Read the book and find out.

LeGuin’s “Why are Americans afraid of dragons?”reminds us that “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. …For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true… it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.”

Author Maureen McHugh reminds all novelists to “Follow your weird.” Plato was wrong. Truth doesn’t “lie” in the fantastic. That’s where truth resides.

Tip: Regardless of genre, use your imagination to shape reality. That way you express the themes closest to your heart. 

Seeing the Magic, Making the Magic

Say it’s winter, and you’re lucky enough to be on a southern beach instead of imprisoned in a northern cold front. Say you like that beach enough to put it in your novel. The easy, obvious course is describing the easy and obvious. Here goes: hundreds of folks glistening with oil or tanning lotion splay out on beach chairs facing the sun. Behind them, the waves lap rhythmically, soothingly. It’s true. Absolutely.

But who cares?  No one, really. No magic here. Only the easy and obvious.

Tip: To convey something magical, first you must see—not just skim the surface, but really see.

It’s actually harder to see than to craft sentences about what you’ve uncovered. Seeing is far more than half the battle.  Happily, looking deeply and creatively is a skill. Like any skill, it’s something you can learn. All you need is patience, practice, and determination to keep seeking what’s initially invisible.

A writer I know remarked on wanting to find what’s beautiful and special about any location. Even though many admire mountains and ocean more than farmland, finding magic wherever you are makes you a better novelist.

That’s the whole trick: looking past pedestrian clichés and tired, superficial imagery to the mystery and magic. In that world—which is actually everywhere—magic surrounds you, encompasses you, infiltrates you. Replace sunbathers (yawn) and raucous gulls (yawn, yawn) and lapping waves (not yawn but ouch!). How about a sliver of moon accompanying a star or two when your protagonist’s the only one in the hotel pool at 5 a.m. Or a protagonist who, with only blessing for compensation, walks the beach, forking litter from seaweed and broken coral, stowing other people’s refuse in a giant garbage bag.

~ Find the magic of fantasy.

If you’re lucky enough to imagine what elves lovingly whisper during elf trysts, or the spell an elderly       wizard casts when he knows his long life is winding down, then you transcend the ordinary.

~ Find the magic of reality.

Every novelist needs magic, and not all of us can or want to conjure elves, wizards, or unicorns. But magic is everywhere. All you have to do is really look, and you’ll begin to really see. Abracadabra.

There it is. Yours for the taking—yours for the giving. A version of blessed.