Le Guin's method was short on ritual and long on discipline. She wrote in the morning, in a study that looked out into trees, and she counted a good day in hours at the desk rather than words on the page. Then she revised, and kept revising, often in pencil.

The Direct Answer
She wrote in the morning, by ear, then revised the draft heavily.
She worked at home in Portland, Oregon, and stayed in the early hours because that is when she felt closest to her unconscious, the source she trusted to do the real writing.

Morning, When the Mind Was Loosest

The engine of Le Guin's method was timing. She reached for the morning because the unconscious was still close, still loose from sleep, and she was certain that is where stories actually come from. The slow start, waking at 5:30 and lying there to think, was already part of the writing. She let the mind wander on purpose so that whatever had been assembling itself overnight could float up while she was still too drowsy to argue with it.

5:30 a.m.: wake up and lie there and think.

Ursula K. Le Guin, on how her writing day began

When she did sit down, she wrote by ear, listening to every sentence as it landed. Her early drafts came in longhand and on a typewriter, and she moved to a computer only later in life, yet the habit underneath never shifted. Sound told her whether a line was alive. If a sentence went flat, she heard the flatness before she could explain it, and she stayed with the line until it moved the way she wanted.

The place mattered too, though less than the timing. She worked at home in Portland, Oregon, in a study with a window that looked into trees, at a desk she used for decades. She kept no elaborate ritual around the work. The room was quiet, the hour was early, and that suited her.

Draft Slow, Revise Hard

A first draft was only the raw material. Le Guin drafted slowly and then revised without mercy, going back over a story again and again until it did exactly what it needed to do. She kept marking changes in pencil late into her life, working line by line the way she always had, trusting the same ear that guided the first draft. Revision was where she found out what a story was really about, and she treated it as the serious half of the work.

She also refused to measure a day in word count. The unit that mattered was time given to the work, so a strong morning might produce a single page she was willing to keep. That freed her from the anxious arithmetic that traps so many writers, the daily tally that turns writing into a race. She could spend three hours coaxing one paragraph into the right rhythm and count it as a full day's work, because for her it honestly was.

It helped that she was not sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. Le Guin showed up at the same hour whether or not she felt ready, and she let the act of writing summon whatever the day had in it. Discipline did the heavy lifting, and the mood tended to follow the work rather than lead it. That is the least glamorous part of her method, and probably the most useful.

This patience is the thread through everything she made, from the Earthsea books to The Left Hand of Darkness. The method was plain enough to describe in a sentence and hard enough to sustain for sixty years. To see the study with its window into the trees and the full shape of her day, read the full Ursula K. Le Guin writing routine.

What You Can Steal