Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
—Ursula K. LeGuin, Steering the Craft
2005-06-22
Grandmother Little Bear Woman on conflict
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3 comments:
Of course, Ms. le Guin - a fantastic author, to be sure - writes of very realistic conflicts in her books.
Although I own almost all of her books, I often find that the long list of nouns rattled off leads to her narratives wandering into polemics, politics, and private passions. Many books are built this way, but the truly influential ones are subversive rather than confrontational.
Or books can be so far out of bounds that nobody knows what to make of them. Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand mocks the cultural conservative readers out of the book in part 1, mocks the liberals out in part 2, and then is left with the unaffiliated trying to figure out how many levels of irony and deconstruction should be applied to something that nailed the Web ten years before we got here. Ah, heterotopia.
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I'm...speechless.
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