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Ursula K. Le Guin — A Message about Messages

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I made a note to myself a while ago: “Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don’t know they want and don’t think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.” My fiction, especially for kids and young adults, is often reviewed as if it existed in order to deliver a useful little sermon (“Growing up is tough but you can make it,” that sort of thing). Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice? Readers — kids and adults — ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, “Your question isn’t in the right language.” As a fiction writer, I don’t speak message. I speak story. Su

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