"Meditation With Ursula K. Le Guin" by Jackie Massaro

Image by Colton Sturgeon via Unsplash

I primarily write short speculative fiction and dabble in personal essays, but when I came across a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin's talk at Portland Arts & Lectures program of Literary Arts

on my Instagram feed, it made me pause:

"Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythm to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer's job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words."

Ursula K. Le Guin has a natural rhythm in her writing, and that is partly what stopped me from my continuous mindless scrolling. Le Guin was a prolific and versatile writer, stretching her talent across several genres throughout her life. Reading this sentence sounded and felt like a meditation. The pauses of each comma between words, the repetition. She is demonstrating here what she is encouraging writers to do; through her own rhythm and style, Le Guin goes down deep enough, even to deliver simple writing advice.

It made me wonder how far I reach when I write a horror story, a personal essay, a poem, a screenplay. What am I looking for? With horror, I am looking for fear and language that supports an unsettling experience for the reader. Sometimes this looks like revisiting childhood nightmares or performing sentence surgery to ensure the words that convey the right image or information stay — everything else goes. But every writer and editor does that, so why does Le Guin's advice seem to hold a different meaning?

"The writer's job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words."

Admittedly, I had to read over this quote a few times. At first glance, I assumed she was speaking to a specific type of writing. A certain genre or style. I immediately divided my writer-identity into two categories: someone who writes fiction, and someone who writes non-fiction. Now, I realize this isn't exactly the correct interpretation of this quote. Or maybe there aren't any wrong interpretations of this quote? I don't know, but I'll be sure to tell you if I ever figure it out.

What I realized, though, was the meaning of Le Guin's words hidden in plain sight. She is talking about digging deep beyond memory and experience, she is talking about finding and feeling, and allowing the discovery of what lies within us to lead forward. She is talking about intention. She is talking about aligning with the voice at the center of our writer-identity.

Oftentimes, it's challenging to tap into this with all of the noise in our internal and external worlds. Exploring the purpose and intention of a piece can be uncomfortable, but it might be the key to understanding what is at our center when we sit down to write.