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

by Ursula K. Le Guin Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

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 the challenges and opportunities of the modern era, 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.
Masterful and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer's shelf.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/22/2015
This is not a book for beginners, warns Le Guin (Cheek by Jowl), but it would be churlish to deny the benefits of this thoughtful, concise volume to anyone serious about becoming a writer. Originally written in 1998 and based on Le Guin’s workshop of the same name, the book has been revised by her based on reader feedback and on the vast changes that have occurred in publishing over the years. But some issues remain constant, and Le Guin explores them in a familiar, breezy style that is admirably direct, and as entertaining as it is enlightening. The topics she examines include the sound and rhythm of language in writing; the need to understand the rules of grammar, if only to break them; point of view and narrative voice; and the judicious use of adjective, adverbs, and verbs. In essence, Le Guin reveals the art of craft and the craft of art. Each chapter ends with writing exercises that can be attempted in groups or alone. To borrow Le Guin’s nautical imagery, this book is a star by which to set one’s course. Agent: Ginger Clark, Curtis Brown. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

"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

Library Journal

★ 02/01/2016
Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea; The Left Hand of Darkness) explains points of craft in this must-read guide for intermediate to advanced writers. Her examples come from literature—writings by Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston—and occasionally from sf and fantasy, e.g., J.R.R. Tolkien's writings. (LJ 7/15)

Kirkus Reviews

2015-06-03
Practical writing advice from an acclaimed storyteller. Prolific writer Le Guin (The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth, 2012, etc.)—author of more than 60 books of fiction, poetry, drama, and translation and winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, among other awards—brings her experience as a writing workshop leader to this revision of her 1998 publication. In 10 chapters, the author considers basic writing topics, such as sound, rhythm, grammar, syntax, parts of speech (especially verbs, adverbs, and adjectives), and point of view. Each chapter contains examples from literature: an excerpt from Austen's Mansfield Park demonstrates the author's "vivid and versatile" syntax; a "glaringly bright scene" from Dickens' Little Dorrit shows the power of a "single word…repeated like a hammer blow." In addition, Le Guin has created short exercises "to clarify and intensify" awareness and hone technique. One exercise, "Am I Saramago," (alluding to the Portuguese novelist who uses no punctuation), asks readers to write a 150-350-word narrative with no commas, periods, or paragraph breaks. A four-part exercise on point of view calls for writing a 200-350-word narrative and retelling it from the point of view of participants, a detached narrator, an observer-narrator, and an involved author. Le Guin guides readers in evaluating their work by themselves and in giving and responding to peer critiques. "While being critiqued," she advises, "make notes of what people say about your story, even if the comments seem stupid. They may make sense later." The book's title emphasizes the author's belief that writing is essentially a craft that can be learned, practiced, and improved through attention and self-discipline. "Forced to weigh your words," she writes, "you find out which are the Styrofoam and which are the heavy gold." A succinct, clear, and encouraging companion for aspiring writers.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191941004
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	12/17/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.