Eli5— the carrier bag theory
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Ursula le Guin has written about how an awful lot of our books and novels are conflict-based, and if you try to write something else you’re at risk of editors and readers saying “where’s the conflict, fix your book”.
There are classic examples like “the king died, then the queen died of grief” that might be interesting to read or think about, but it’s hard to identify any conflict in them. She says we should be more open to writing like that. Another discussion was about the Shackleton expedition, which is presented as “man fights nature”, and le Guin said that was just silly. You can’t attack nature, nature doesn’t attack you, it’s just a weird and maybe egotistical perspective to try and fit the story into.
There are two origins for the “carrier bag” name and I’m afraid I’m not sure which is right. One is that a novel can be like a bag, that collects a bunch of related ideas without necessarily requiring any conflict between them; the other one was a more symbolic thing where someone suggested humanity’s first tool might have been a spear, and the reply was that more likely it was some kind of pouch. (Kind of a metaphor for conflict-and-hunting, manly shit, contrasted with gathering, a more traditionally feminine job.)
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