I'm not a big fan of introductions or forwards in books.  I do love a good preface though.  Introductions seem so haughty and cryptic and like they're written to be critiqued thoroughly in paper after paper.

With that being said, there are several parts of the introduction in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin that I like so much I want to share here.

In reference to fiction writers:

"All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen.  That is what the novelists say.  But they don't tell you what you will see and hear.  All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

"The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!"

 Then later:

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.  Finally, when we're done with it, we may find --if it's a good novel--that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street that we never have crossed before.  But it's hard to say just what we learned, how we changed."

I don't agree with all her views on science fiction and I find her explanations on it quite bland, but I do love her view on fiction and fiction writers.

I tried to find a clever musical introduction to pair with this post, but I couldn't remember which artist I was originally thinking of so I went with the organ intro of The Ugly Organ by Cursive.

Labels: Cursive, fiction. novel, introductions, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, writers, writing, writing process