Navigating the 'Inner Lands'

Ursula Le Guin and Pathfinding in the Creative Writing Process

Writing can be terrifying, for many reasons. 

For a long time, the scariness of writing for me was confronting the sheer amount of possibilities in fiction writing.

It reminds me of the angst of 20th century existentialism. To philosophers like Sartre and Camus, exisential dizziness ensued when you discovered that there was no God to define your essence for you. Instead of simply enacting our fate as predetermined beings, humans were thrust into this world without an essence and had to carve one out for ourselves. It was a lot to adapt to coming from a God-saturated world.

Similarly, you can feel creative angst when you are faced with vast possibilities as a writer. If you’re writing fantasy, you can dream up literally ANYTHING. How do you hold yourself to some kind of system or reality or truth? Which creative thread do you follow among millions that might speak to you?

During a nature retreat in August, my mind had a lot of time to wander, and a question came up as I reflected on creative process. I wrote in my journal:

“What does an artist listen to when they don’t find inspiration in their immediate surroundings? What motivates/drives/guides them? Intuition?”

I’m not sure I phrased the question perfectly, but I knew there was an important idea behind it. I was wondering about the origins of creativity.

I mean seriously. How does creativity EVER arise? One answer is that it is a synthesis of an artist’s experiences and influences. Still, how do those experiences and influences get transmuted into a concrete intuition that speaks to the artist? How does that artist arrive at that intuition? Is it an inner voice? If it is, how would they develop an ear for it?

When you think of the prototypical creative geniuses in history like Homer or Shakespeare or Tolkien, it’s kind of amazing to reflect on their body of work. How do they hold so many elements together? How did Shakespeare understand so deeply the clownish antics of tricksters, the dignity and pathology of kings, the poetic strivings of poor men and countless lovers? He must have lived voraciously.

It’s no wonder theories were floated that Shakespeare or Homer were in fact a collection of creative minds. It’s hard to imagine that one human could be so prolific, so deep, so fluent in universal human experiences. But maybe it’s possible.

A recent favorite book I’ve picked up is Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a collection of essays and reflections about writing fantasy and sci-fiction. The book has been very insightful as I am in the thick of my own writing process for a sci-fi project.

In the introduction to the book, Susan Wood characterizes Le Guin’s work as “translations” of the author’s intuition. She writes:

Fantasy and [science fiction are] the “translations” of an intuitive process, of an interior journey, into words; the writer finds within herself patterns and archetypes meaningful to humanity as a whole.

There’s a tiny paradox there. How do you dive into yourself, into your own unique experiences, in order to find human universals?

Wood writes of an inner voice that writers listen to, and it speaks in the language of “patterns… meaningful to humanity as a whole.”

You can’t get far into this conversation without bringing in Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud’s disciple and colleague. Jung was famous for studying myths and positing theories around universal character types called “archetypes” that lived in the “collective unconscious.”

To Jung, all human minds operated subconsciously in a world of common myths, and all time-tested stories pulled from this deep well. I used to be REALLY skeptical of Jung. I thought it was like astrology: fun to believe, but ultimately untestable, so I sort of wrote it off, especially because Jung was connected to Freud who had all sorts of bizarre theories.

But Jung feels much more scientific to me today, especially as Le Guin corroborates his philosophy.

Reflecting on her process for writing her famous book The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin wrote in 1975:

To me myth is a living element, a symbolic constellation, in Jung’s terms, within my own psyche; and my job as an artist is to create a way, a thoroughfare, to and from it, by means of my art, so that both the image and some sense of its meaning can come up into consciousness and be communicated to other consciousnesses. I fully accept Jung’s definition: ‘The symbol differs essentially from sign or symptom, and should be understood as the expression of an intuitive perception which can as yet neither be apprehended better, nor expressed differently.’

I really love this metaphor. Le Guin sees the artist as creating a “thoroughfare” or path to and from her own psyche.

It’s actually kind of nice to imagine the artist as a builder or laborer, and not as some mystic visionary. Road-building is methodical, disciplined work. It’s not fueled by chance lightning strikes of inspiration, at least not entirely.

And the rich haul, the golden ore that gets transported back to audiences is the artist’s rendered image, that symbol that represents an intuitive perception “which can as yet neither be apprehended better nor expressed differently.”

That last piece feels critical. It makes total sense that the image that the artist brings back derives its power from the fact that it can’t be expressed better or any differently. It’s the purest possible distillation. If you altered its form, you would alter its message. And so sublime art can’t be summarized or paraphrased or condensed or repackaged. The artist has already done that work for us.

Le Guin writes elsewhere that, “there is always this circularity in fantasy. The snake devours its tail. Dreams must explain themselves.”

Dreams must explain themselves. No footnotes. Art works through a dream logic, something like the logic in a good joke, and so explaining it gives diminishing returns. It either hits or it doesn’t.

So how does this all inform my writer’s angst? How do these lofty theories help me meet my word count goal for the day?

Le Guin’s creative framework actually helps put my mind at ease. If I’m doing my job as a road-builder, I should arrive, eventually, at human universals.

Of Jung’s collective unconscious, Le Guin writes:

[Jung] reminds us that region of the mind/body that lies beyond the narrow, brightly lit domain of consciousness is very much the same in all of us… the achievement of individual consciousness… is to [Jung] a great achievement… but the tree grows only from deep roots.

This image also hits. Yes, our conscious minds are towering trees pushing up against the sky, but they only grow so tall because they draw their nourishment from deep roots: our collective human psyche.

Le Guin continues, “Writers who draw upon… their own deep being will inevitably hit upon common material. The more original the work, the more imperiously recognizable it will be. ‘Yes, of course! say I, the reader recognizing myself, my dreams, my nightmares.’”

Le Guin is reassuring all the creative writers coming after her. While there is technically an infinite realm of possibilities in creative writing, the writer’s job is to dig deep within themselves to narrow them down. But not through random artifice, but through painstaking and deliberate work. Through deep listening.

So as I work on what’s surely my most ambitious project, it’s helpful to have Le Guin at my side.

And I’ve found through the course of my writing that certain archetypes have actually emerged, organically and almost miraculously. My own journey into what Le Guin calls “the inner lands” is not the treacherous walk in a pitch-black forest that I imagined it would be. The way is lit, dimly maybe, but just enough to light a path.

“We all have the same kinds of dragons in our psyche.” Le Guin writes. And I think I’ve found mine.