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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

It’s childish to assume people will understand unexpressed meanings. It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.

(She had had some trouble with the past-perfect tense in an earlier life. In her next life, she will not be going to have any trouble with the future-perfect tense. But she would have liked never to have had any trouble at all.)

YOU CAN CHANGE POINT OF VIEW, OF course; it is your God-given right as an American fiction writer. All I’m saying is, you need to know that you’re doing it; some American fiction writers don’t.

Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.