It’s Work

This from The Writer’s Almanac this morning. Sometimes it is just work to do this, not an excuse to indulge one’s self, or play at being a writer. And, happy birthday Ursula!

It’s the birthday of science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin(books by this author), born in Berkeley, California (1929). She grew up in a family of academics. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, was a psychologist and writer. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, was the first person to receive a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University-he’s been called the “Dean of American anthropologists.” He specialized in researching Native American cultures, and so Ursula grew up with Native American myths.

When she was young, over the course of 10 years, she wrote five novels, none of which were published. Publishers in the 1950s thought her writing was too “remote.” So she began to write science fiction and fantasy, and she has been incredibly prolific for the last four decades. She has published more than 100 short stories, 20 novels, 11 children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four volumes of translation. She’s best known for her Earthseabooks, a fantasy series that takes place in a world populated by wizards and dragons. She also wrote the Hainish Cycle – science fiction novels set in an imaginary universe where the residents are genderless.

An interviewer once asked her advice for writers, and she replied: “I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.”