Because I Was Waiting

… I had a good idea, but I did not have a story. Critics talk as if stories were all idea, but intellect does not make story any more than ideology makes art. The story had to make itself, find its center, find its voice, Sutty’s voice. Then, because I was waiting for it, it could give itself to me.

Or put it this way: I had a lot of stuff in my head, good stuff, clear ideas — but I couldn’t pull it together, I couldn’t dance with it, because I hadn’t waited to catch the beat. I didn’t have the rhythm.

… What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn’t Woolf ”dislodge” them that morning?* It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs; she doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else, things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important ideas … but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.

That is from an essay The Questions I Get Asked Most Often by Ursula K. LeGuin.

[* Well-known quote from Virgina Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: " ... here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it...."]

-Julie

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