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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer.

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

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

Part One: Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that’s meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration,* repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect—any kind of sound effect you like—but NOT rhyme or meter.*

If you read music, you know that rests are signs for silence. Punctuation marks serve very much the same purpose.

The period means stop—for a moment. The semicolon means pause; and the comma means either pause very briefly or expect some change. The dash is a pause that sets a phrase apart.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.

Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.”

There’s no such thing as “the passive tense.” Passive and active aren’t tenses, they’re modes of the verb. Each mode is useful and correct where appropriate. Good writers use both.

Rhythm is what keeps the song going, the horse galloping, the story moving. And the rhythm of prose depends very much—very prosaically—on the length of the sentences.