Thoughts on Writing from a Master

I haven’t much energy for the blog today.  I fear it all drained away during my massive writing session this morning and afternoon.  As such, I will simply leave you with this beautiful quote form Ursula K. Le Guin in 1977.

“As a child, I paid very little attention to authors’ names; they were irrelevant; I did not believe in authors.  To be perfectly candid, this is still true.  I do not believe in authors.  A book exists, it’s there.  The author isn’t there–some grown-up you never met–may even be dead.  The book is what is real.  You read it, you and it form a relationship, perhaps a trivial one, perhaps a deep and lasting one.  As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.  And, as you read and reread, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.  Where, in all this, does the author come in?  Like the God of the eighteenth-century deists, only at the beginning.  Long ago, before you and the book met each other.  The author’s work is done, complete; the ongoing work, the present act of creation, is a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them.”

Have a nice weekend, everyone!


-S.