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Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by [Ursula K. Le Guin]

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Ursula K. Le Guin

Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story Kindle Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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From the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, "a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller" (Boston Globe), the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft.

Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing.

Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guin’s own witty commentary and an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. She also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online.

Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer's shelf.

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September 1, 2015
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A must-read for intermediate and advanced writers of fiction and memoir." —Library Journal, STARRED "A succinct, clear, and encouraging companion for aspiring writers." —Kirkus Reviews "It would be churlish to deny the benefits of this thoughtful, concise volume...In essence, Le Guin reveals the art of craft and the craft of art...this book is a star by which to set one's course." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED “There is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.” — Slate “Le Guin is a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller with the humor and force of a Twain. She creates stories for everyone from New Yorker literati to the hardest audience, children. She remakes every genre she uses.” — Boston Globe --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

“There is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.” — Slate

“Le Guin is a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller with the humor and force of a Twain. She creates stories for everyone from New Yorker literati to the hardest audience, children. She remakes every genre she uses.” — Boston Globe

A modernized, new edition of an essential guide to the writing craft, presented by a brilliant practitioner of the art

Completely revised and rewritten to address the challenges and opportunities of the modern era, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing. The ten chapters shed light on the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Ursula Le Guin’s own witty commentary and an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. Le Guin also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online.

Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer’s shelf.

Over the course of her career, Ursula K. Le Guin has published more than sixty books of fiction, fantasy, children’s literature, poetry, drama, criticism, and translation. She is the winner of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929. Over the course of her career she has published more than sixty books of fiction, fantasy, science fiction, children’s literature, poetry, drama, criticism, and translation, and is the multiple winner of the highest awards in several fields. Among her honors are a National Book Award, a PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, twenty-one Locus Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Sound of Your Writing

The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of the writing depend on these sounds and rhythms. This is just as true of prose as it is of poetry, though the sound effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.

Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia; they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use them in all the wrong places. Some writers keep this primal interest in and love for the sounds of language. Others 'outgrow' their oral/aural sense of what they're reading or writing. That's a dead loss. An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer. Fortunately it's quite easy to cultivate, to learn or reawaken.

A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind's ear. We mostly read prose in silence, but many readers have a keen inner ear that hears it. Dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble: these common criticisms of narrative are all faults in the sound of it. Lively, well-paced, flowing, strong, beautiful: these are all qualities of the sound of prose, and we rejoice in them as we read. Narrative writers need to train their mind's ear to listen to their own prose, to hear as they write.

The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence'?''?to keep the story going. Forward movement, pace, and rhythm are words that are going to return often in this book. Pace and movement depend above all on rhythm, and the primary way you feel and control the rhythm of your prose is by hearing it'?''?by listening to it.

Getting an act or an idea across isn't all a story does. A story is made out of language, and language can and does express delight in itself just as music does. Poetry isn't the only kind of writing that can sound gorgeous. Consider what's going on in these four examples. (Read them aloud! Read them aloud loudly!)

Example 1
The Just So Stories are a masterpiece of exuberant vocabulary, musical rhythms, and dramatic phrasing. Rudyard Kipling has let generations of kids know how nonsensically beautiful a story can sound. And there's nothing in either nonsense or beauty that restricts it to children.

Rudyard Kipling: from 'How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin' in Just So Stories
Once upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind that you must particularly never touch. And one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick. It was indeed a Superior Comestible (that's magic), and he put it on the stove because he was allowed to cook on that stove, and he baked it and he baked it till it was all done brown and smelt most sentimental. But just as he was going to eat it there came down to the beach from the Altogether Uninhabited Interior one Rhinoceros with a horn on his nose, two piggy eyes, and few manners. [. . .] And the Rhinoceros upset the oil-stove with his nose, and the cake rolled on the sand, and he spiked that cake on the horn of his nose, and he ate it, and he went away, waving his tail, to the desolate and Exclusively Uninhabited Interior which abuts on the islands of Mazanderan, Socotra, and the Promontories of the Larger Equinox.

This passage from Mark Twain's early story 'the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' is totally aural/oral, its beauty lying in its irresistible dialectical cadences. There are lots of ways to be gorgeous.

Example 2

Mark Twain: from 'the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'
'Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom cats and all them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'lated to educate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut'?''?see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do 'most anything'?''?and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floor'?''?Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog'?''?and sing out, 'Flies, Dan'l, flies!' and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring straight up and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor ag'in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres all said he laid over any frog that ever they see."

In the first example the more-than-oriental splendor of the language and in the second the irresistibly drawling aural cadences keep moving the story forward. In this one and the next, the vocabulary is simple and familiar; it's above all the rhythm that is powerful and effective. To read Hurston's sentences aloud is to be caught up in their music and beat, their hypnotic, fatal, forward drive.

Example 3

Zora Neale Hurston: from Their Eyes Were Watching God
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking together like harmony in a song.

In the next passage, Tom, a middle-aged rancher, is coping with the early onslaught of the cancer he knows will kill him. Molly Gloss's prose is quiet and subtle; its power and beauty come from the perfect placement and timing of the words, the music of their sound, and the way the changing sentence rhythms embody and express the emotions of the characters. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00T2414SC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (September 1, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4442 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 150 pages

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Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (US /ˈɜːrsələ ˈkroʊbər ləˈɡwɪn/; born October 21, 1929) is an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.

She influenced such Booker Prize winners and other writers as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell – and notable science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin has resided in Portland, Oregon since 1959.

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Sailing the Sea of Story with an Expert Navigator

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 23, 2016

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“Craft enables art” Ursula K. Le Guinn tells us in the introduction to her ‘Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story’. “There’s luck in art. And there’s the gift. You can’t earn that. But you can learn skill ... You can learn to deserve your gift.”

Overflowing with valuable insight and inspiration, 'Steering the Craft' is among the best single-volume works on writing I’ve ever read—and I’ve read a lot of them over the decades, positively devouring anything I can get my hands on. If Stephen King’s wonderful ‘On Writing’ is a helpful and encouraging introduction to the subject—call it Writing 101—Le Guinn offers a more advanced and rigorously focused 200-level course that will be most helpful to those already-experienced writers in search of self-improvement and a more acute understanding of how story works.

There is a difference, Le Guinn tells us, between the kind of straightforward expository prose we all learned to write in school, and the language of effective fiction—a distinction far too many aspiring storytellers have yet to grasp. The important thing for a writer, she says, “…is to know what you’re doing with your language and why.” She then proceeds to enlighten us in the most pleasing of ways, gently but firmly, never dogmatic, often with humor, stressing fundamentals without coming off as a snob or a “correctness bully”. “To break a rule you have to know the rule,” she says. “A blunder is not a revolution.”

Le Guinn challenges received and conventional wisdom at every turn. For instance, where Stephen King tells us that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” Le Guinn gently insists that adjectives and adverbs “add color, life, and immediacy … They cause obesity in prose only when used lazily or overused.” And again, she points out, “It’s a myth that short-sentence prose is ‘more like the way we speak’ … The marvelously supple connections of complex syntax are like the muscles and sinews of a long-distance runner’s body, ready to set up a good pace and keep going.” And there were so many more wonderful, refreshing observations throughout the book, I found myself obsessively marking and underlining to a point where my copy could never be resold—not that I would ever part with it!

I very much appreciate the way Le Guinn draws parallels between music and prose, stressing the essential importance of rhythm and the physical sound of language: “The similarity of … incremental repetition of word, phrase, image, and event in prose to recapitulation and development in musical structure is real and deep.” Elsewhere, punctuation is brilliantly demystified as it is likened to the use of rests in a musical score.

The volume is designed as a workbook, and includes a number of skill-enhancing exercises, with copious examples of the various concepts discussed, drawn from classic works from the Brontë sisters to Dickens, Hardy and Virginia Wolfe, always with fascinating, trenchant commentary from Le Guinn.

‘Steering the Craft’ is a treasure! Enthusiastically recommended.

66 people found this helpful

Helpful

Great for writers!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2018

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Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin is a fantastic book, but don't read it thinking it will teach you how to write a novel. Instead, read Write and Revise for Publication by Jack Smith to learn how to take an idea from an outline to a novel. Then, when you finish with that, buy this book, Steering the Craft.

In Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin talks about all the things that make good prose such as the sound of the language, rhythm, descriptions, story verse plot. She brings up all the rules we have heard over and over again such as: show don't tell; write in active voice, not the passive voice; don't use "be" verbs; and more -- and then tells you how to break them. She talks about grammar only to explain how not to be afraid of the semicolon or comas. She slices through so much of the bad advice I see over and over again online with an effortless logic that had me laughing at the truth of her statements. This is not a humorous book, but I tend to laugh at things gives me relief. Writing as contortionist around such arbitrary rules is tough! This book gives you the license and freedom to use all the tools the English language provides without fear or guilt.

This book is orchestrated in such a way that it could be used in a writing group. Every chapter has exercises at the end to help you explore and learn the concepts by doing them. I am not a great team player, but I can see these activities would be beneficial for me to do on my own. I intend to go back and do them.

This book makes a lot of sense once you are already writing and discover that something just doesn't sparkle. It is specifically for fiction writers and covers a lot of the vague frustrations of crafting elegant sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. I honestly would understand how vital her advice in this book was before I started writing. It is like learning to paint or play an instrument; certain lessons on make sense after you have been doing it some. So if you are a writer, I highly recommend this book!

23 people found this helpful

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Andrew P Cox

Excellent book for writers

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 21, 2021

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When my writing group selected this one, I breezed they the table of contents and first few chapters to get a feel for it. I was initially a little disappointed, because the focus of the first few chapters was on grammar, syntax, etc. “What? I thought we were going to learn about STORY from one of the greatest fiction authors of our time!!”

My first impression was mistaken, and we really did learn a lot together. Insightful, expertly written, and ful of great examples and exercises for single writers or critique groups, this book was a joy to read and work through. Highly recommended, you will learn (or discover upon re-learning) from both her take on the basics and her take on the more esoteric parts of writing.

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A. J. Farrel

A good guide for groups or individuals who seriously want to work at improvring their writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 27, 2018

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I try to make a habit these days of writing a review of every book I read as soon as I can after I complete it, but reviewing "Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story" by Ursula K Le Guin was always going to be a hard job. It's a book about how to write by one of the best authors of our time, and I only play at being a writer in my spare time.

This week's sad news of the death of its author makes my review of this little book even more daunting. Where even to start?

Ursula K Le Guin wrote so many excellent books that have entertained and informed me. They taught me about story, they influenced my writing style, and they showed me aspects of thought and politics in that ever-so-subtle way of dropping details into plots that was one her trademarks.

So, with this background I started to read "Steering the Craft". And I did not like it! Here was a successful and respected author telling me with the lightest of touches that I should practice my writing, hone my skills, and pay more attention to what I do. And she put exercises at the end of each chapter. And she illustrated her points with extracts from famous (although typically long-dead) authors. It was really too much!

Surely you don't teach advanced aeronautics to a hawk. You don't explain gliding, swooping, and hovering to a magnificent bird of prey. But I am not a hawk; I am not even a pigeon; to be quite honest with you, I can't actually fly. That I spend some time in the air is probably only thanks to having climbed a particularly tall tree with a fine view, or perhaps I am like Amélie Nothomb in "Fear and Trembling" looking out from the window high above Tokyo and imagining myself flying.

And it took a while for me to come round to Le Guin's tutelage. But, at the end of the second chapter she said: "Writing a sentence that expresses what you want to say isn't any easier than plumbing or fiddling. It takes craft." And I started to get the point.

But I am a slow learner. Those things that I flatter myself I already do passably well seemed like needless inclusions, while those things that are beyond me appeared to be irrelevant and frustrating.

The single thing that resonated most was the metaphor of the story as a magic craft. You don't have to lean into the tiller and plot a detailed course; you can simply step aboard and lightly help the boat follow the path along which it already wants to sail. This is both a comfort and a challenge! It is nice to know that as writers we can relax a little and let the story take charge, but it is also disconcerting to be told that we still need to learn the skills of seamanship.

But anyway, the image of the magic boat adrift in the sea of story so resonated with my image of Ged aboard Lookfar sailing the West Reach in Earthsea that I was quite won over and started to pay attention.

Maybe I would have liked to see more encouragement to read. Of course, Le Guin does provide examples and suggestions, and of course this book is about writing, but it is surprising (to me) how little and how narrowly many would-be authors read. Osmosis is a fine principal, and authors may subconsciously develop their style and their repertoire simply by watching and learning. On the whole I found the examples to be heavy and rather American in style (even when they are from British authors), but perhaps that is just personal taste.

At the end of the day, however, I suspect this book is rather good at being what it sets out to be: a guide for groups or individuals who seriously want to work at understanding and improving their writing skills. I think it would work better as a workbook for a group of committed collaborators (what Le Guin calls "The Mutinous Crew") where there is a support organisation and peer pressure to do the exercises and provide critiquing feedback, than it does for an under-motivated individual ("The Lone Mariner"). Although I believe I have learned a lot from the book, I must confess that I have not attempted any of the exercises.

22 people found this helpful

Alan D

A masterclass in the art of writing, with useful short exercises and examples

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 3, 2023

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Steering the Craft is a fantastic short guide packed with lots of great insights and writing exercises across a range of different aspects of the craft. Mainly aimed at the kind of writer who’s been doing this thing a little while and wants to hone their craft, it’s an excellent resource for both lone and group work. As such, it doesn’t go over the basics like how to create characters, build fictional worlds etc… But focuses more on style.

I have to admit, I haven’t tried the exercises myself at the time of writing this review - I wanted to read through and see what they were first - but I’ll absolutely be going back to do them, because they seem very useful indeed. The examples in the book are plentiful, and they’re all excerpts from classic literature (Twain, Austen, Woolf, Dickens etc…) which precisely illustrate the aspects of writing the section highlights, from how to use repetition to the different types of POV (and switching between them), and much more besides. There’s nothing specific about writing science fiction in here, apart from a passing mention about worldbuilding in the context of avoiding info-dumps, but I didn’t expect there to be. All the lessons within are applicable to writing as a whole, regardless of genre.

One of the things that particularly spoke to me was the section about writing from a perspective that is not your own. I don’t struggle to empathise usually, but writing from a perspective I personally disagree with can be tricky to get right; to go deep and nuanced so as to not create a cartoon. And it’s a necessary part of writing complex characters, rather than simple authorial mouthpieces. The exercises in this section force you into writing from those kinds of perspectives a few times over with variations, which seems a good way to drive the point home. It’s especially good for those who learn by doing. Never fear, though, Le Guin doesn’t force us to do all the work. Thankfully, she provides a wealth of suitable prompts and ideas as jumping off points, as well as word count limits and detailed instructions. There’s even an exercise on writing a page worth of narrative with no adjectives or adverbs! It sounds like a marvellous challenge. Speaking of adverbs, as expected Le Guin takes a far more balanced stance on their use than a lot of writing advice you might find on the internet, which oftentimes tells budding authors to never use them. In fact, Le Guin deliberately avoids hard and fast “Rules of Good Writing”, and the book holds a good few opinion pieces in which she expresses her general disdain for them, as they often strip out all nuance.

As with all of Le Guin’s books, her style of prose even in non-fiction flows so smoothly that it makes the whole thing remarkably easy-reading. And she even includes a glossary of grammatical terms at the back just in case we get stuck (I didn’t think I’d need it at all, but towards the end I certainly did, and I was grateful it was there). Best of all, I think, is that Steering the Craft is absolutely designed as a longer term study book, rather than a reference to dip in and out of. Another thing is that by no means is this a “how to write like Ursula K. Le Guin” book. Everything is carefully chosen to challenge a writer’s own creativity, rather than imposing a certain style. I’m looking forward to going back through it and trying out some of the exercises. Hopefully it’ll improve my writing and understanding of the craft a great deal.

If you’re looking to go deeper with your own writing, I would absolutely recommend Steering the Craft. I’ve seen some people criticising the book for being a study guide, which I find a bit strange, because it’s very clearly marketed as such. It requires interactivity from the reader in order to be most useful as a resource. Although, there are plenty of passages of explanation and advice from Le Guin around the exercises and examples, such that you can indeed read it passively and still learn something.

One person found this helpful

Bobbie

useful exercises and advice on work-shopping in a group

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 14, 2020

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Subtitled: “A 21st-century guide to sailing the sea of story”, this is a distillation of advice and exercises from the author’s own writing workshops, focusing on craft and technique. Sound and rhythm. The value of (i.e. not the detailed rules about) punctuation and grammar. Sentence length. Repetition. Adjectives and adverbs. Person, tense, point of view, voice. Exposition. What to include and to exclude. Plus examples from classic texts, and advice on how to critique in a group, face to face or online. The book’s strength is in Le Guin’s engaging advice and suggested exercises. Though I’m too lazy to do them, they made me think.

One person found this helpful

Angie Athanassiades

A wonderful book. It's probably not the best choice for ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 13, 2017

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A wonderful book. It's probably not the best choice for someone starting out, but, as the author says herself in the introduction, if you already have some good writing experience, it's wonderful to help you improve your skills, get out of writer's block, or fix a problem in one of your texts by doing the various exercises. Great fun and really useful.

10 people found this helpful

coquadrille

Excellent guide to storytelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 12, 2021

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This is a highly entertaining and practical book on writing.
Many of the ideas and exercises would be of value to writers of all genres, even to writers of non-fiction.
Written with salty and vigorous sense of humour.
Excellent!

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