What to Write This Week (21)...and Ursula K. Le Guin on Genre

Get out of your comfort zone and try a new genre.

This is part 21 of the What to Write This Week series, which includes suggested reading, a writing prompt, and sometimes commentary.

What to Read This Week

In the essay "Le Guin's Hypothesis," Ursula K. Le Guin—who brilliantly crossed genres, subverted genres, and threw genre to the wind—argues,

Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood; but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

If critics and teachers gave up insisting that one kind of literature is the only one worth reading, it would free up a lot of time for them to think about the different things novels do and how they do it, and above all, to consider why certain individual books in every genre are, have been for centuries, and will continue to be more worth reading than most of the others.

You will find this essay and other wonderful things to ponder on the late author’s blog, which she started writing at the age of 81. And you will find many of the pieces originally written for the blog in the collection No Time to Spare.