Here’s Le Guin, responding to criticism of The Dispossessed:

So The Dispossessed, a science-fiction novel not only concerned with politics, society, and ethics but approaching them via a definite political theory, has given me a lot of grief. It is generally, not always but often, been discussed as a treatise, not as a novel. This is its own damn fault, of course—what did it expect, announcing itself as a utopia, even if an ambiguous one? Everybody knows utopias are to be read not as novels but as blueprints for social theory or practice.

But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper. I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction. So when I came to write a utopia of course I wrote a novel.

I wasn’t surprised that it was treated as a treatise, but I wondered if the people who read it as a treatise ever wondered why I had written it as a novel. Were they as indifferent as they seemed to be to what made it a novel—the inherent self-contradictions of novelistic narrative that prevent simplistic, single-theme interpretation, the novelistic “thickness of description” (Geertz’s term) that resists reduction to abstracts and binaries, the embodiment of ethical dilemma in a drama of character that evades allegorical interpretation, the presence of symbolic elements that are not fully accessible to rational thought?

Le Guin, Words Are My Matter, page 22

It occurs to me that to read everything, including the news, like a novel—to be cognizant and accepting of discontinuities and conflicts, of multiple interpretations, of symbol that sits alongside more objective truths—is maybe the skill we most need to employ in navigating the world of news today, when there is so much news, and so few ways of making it all cohere.

In despair at a critical review, Virginia Woolf turned to her husband and asked,

Well, then, what should she do about such abuse? Pay no attention, get on with her work. And if she couldn’t work, what then? If such attacks upset her so that she couldn’t write—what then, Mongoose, what then? Then she should read until she could write again; that’s what books were for.

Nunez, Mitz, page 46

(“Mongoose” was the pet name Virginia used for Leonard; he called her “Mandrill.” Mitz is fiction, but it draws from the Woolf’s diaries and other contemporary sources and is, for my purposes, true enough. All prose is fiction, as Le Guin teaches us.)

Virginia, of course, knew well the ways that reading could summon us to our own wills. Here a similar note is echoed in a passage in A Room of One’s Own:

Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 94

This is one of the great joys of reading, and of reading novels in particular: that something in the novel resonates so deeply that you feel it vibrate down to your marrow, feel that spark of truth race across your veins. And that spark is, very often, a light by which we can write, the energy we need to put our own pen to paper, to evoke the fire that makes those premonitions visible, however darkly and briefly and tenuously.

And yet: sometimes the words do not come. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes:

As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, page 42

Which is another way of saying, when you can’t write, read. When you can’t read, sleep.