When successful writers write books on how to write, the books tend to be one of two kinds: actual how-to books or how-I-did-it books. I find the former highly useful, and many of them have sat on the bookcase in my office for years, frequently revisited for use in my classes. But the latter tend to be much more interesting. Students and clients alike often cite Stephen King’s On Writing as their favorite book about writing, more than twenty years after it was first published.

In that vein, a few years ago I purchased a book that someone recommended to me: The Wave in the Mind. A collection of talks and essays by the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy stands out as some of the finest science fiction/fantasy I’ve ever read, and her book on writing, Steering the Craft, is one of those perennial how-to books on my shelf. I never got the chance to dive into the essay collection, though, until I was beginning my preparation for this year’s fall classes. I needed new material to use as “teaching moments,” and finally pulled this (rather lengthy) book out. I started reading, and kept reading, and kept reading, and bookmarking pages, and making discreet pencil marks of truly important passages (I am loath to write in books). And the book did provide plenty of material for my fall classes, and I expect to use it for my winter classes. I will also reference it in blog posts, starting with this one.

Le Guin had some favorite authors, namely Mark Twain, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Virginia Woolf. A phrase from a memorable musing on writing that Woolf wrote to her friend Vita Sackville-West, in fact, is the title of this collection. To quote some of what Woolf wrote:

“Style is a very simple matter: it is all about rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. … 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…” 

Le Guin does a great job in an essay titled “The Question I Get Asked Most Often” teasing meaning from Woolf’s “simple matter.” In part, she writes:

“Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention—beneath words, as [Woolf] says—there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. … I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries; she doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break.”

You are a writer, you have things to say, ideas and stories to share, but sometimes you have to be patient and wait for the wave to come crashing over you, to “carry [you] beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.”