And it takes physical stamina to write a novel. If you look, it’s up there going round and round. Or you’re thinking about it all the time… all the time, subliminally. Pretty much go up every morning and write some. UG: It’s a huge expenditure of energy, and it has to be more or less regular. I wish I did, but I don’t.ĮM: Does there have to be a routine when it’s a novel? An expenditure of energy over a given time?

And since Lavinia I do not feel like there is another novel pending, and I know that I don’t have the energy, the stamina, to write a novel now. I feel that one either accepts a gift like this or not, and I accepted it, and I was very grateful for it, because I really didn’t–it was the first time in my life that I felt that there wasn’t another novel pending. I do exert some control, and there’s re-writing and so on, but still. I don’t want to seem totally irresponsible. And again, I found out what was going on in that book as it went on. It’s a voice narrating to me in a speaking tone. UG: The first book I felt had been dictated was Very Far Away from Anywhere Else. I just couldn’t see a southern Italian girl being a blue eyed blonde. Except that, of course, I tried not to deny anything that Virgil says-except the color of her hair. I’m not following a mapped road I’m following a road but I don’t always know where it goes. More and more I realize that in my writing I just find out what happens next. I wasn’t choosing the way as an author, I was taking dictation, as it were-finding the story as it happened. I was deeply engaged with Virgil, and, of course, Virgil himself is a character in the book.

It has happened before, but not quite in this way. Like Joan of Arc, I’m hearing voices! I knew who it was, but not quite what was going on-she just went on telling me things, so, okay, I know I’m getting one of these dictated books.

I know who I was,” you know? That paragraph just came and I wrote it down. On about the third page of, Lavinia begins talking-“I don’t know who I am. Okay: I’m reading the Aeneid in Latin very, very, very slowly, with my high school Latin revived as best as I could sort of chewing my way through. Ursula Le Guin: I’m not sure how it came about.

Voices ursula le guin