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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

self-guided set of discussion topics and exercises for a writer or a small group.

I wanted my book to reflect the risks and chances of sailing the stormy waters of publishing—print and electronic—in this day and age, while never losing sight of the pole stars of the art of storytelling: how prose works and how a story moves.

Collaborative workshops and writers’ peer groups are good inventions.

The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.

To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.

What it has to do is move—end up in a different place from where it started. That’s what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.

One of the few things most writers agree on is that we can’t trust our judgment on our own freshly written work. To see its faults and virtues we need to look at it after a real interval: a day or two at least.

reread your piece with a friendly, hopeful, critical eye, with revision in mind.

speaking and hearing it will show up awkward bits and faults in the rhythm and can help you make dialogue natural and lively.

writing to a short, set length is an excellent discipline in itself. Of course your piece can grow longer later, if it leads you into something interesting.

lot of writers don’t know the difference between plagiarism, which is despicable, and imitation, which is useful. Intention matters.

A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff.

A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind’s ear.

The period means stop—for a moment. The semicolon means pause; and the comma means either pause very briefly or expect some change.

Fake Rule: Sentences beginning “There is . . .” are in the passive tense. Good writers never use the passive tense. Good writers use the “There is” construction all the time.

that’s the important thing for a writer: to know what you’re doing with your language and why.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.

Repetition of words, of phrases, of images; repetition of things said; near-repetition of events; echoes, reflections, variations: from the grandmother telling a folktale to the most sophisticated novelist, all narrators use these devices, and the skillful use of them is a great part of the power of prose.

When the quality that the adverb indicates can be put in the verb itself (they ran quickly = they raced) or the quality the adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself (a growling voice = a growl), the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.

Nothing in your story happens “somehow.” It happens because you wrote it. Take responsibility!

Being present in the present, really living in it, is one of the goals of awareness meditation, which people practice for years.

The brave writer says, “I think, therefore I am.”

POINT OF VIEW (POV FOR SHORT) IS THE technical term for who is telling the story and what their relation to the story is.

voice is a kind of shorthand for authenticity

Detached Author (“Fly on the Wall,” “Camera Eye,” “Objective Narrator”)

narrative technique that I hadn’t yet addressed. It has to do with what is included in a story and what is omitted. It has to do with details. It has to do with focus—the focus of the sentence, the paragraph, the piece as a whole. I call it Crowding and Leaping,

Climax is one kind of pleasure; plot is one kind of story. A strong, shapely plot is a pleasure in itself.

This doesn’t mean just cutting a bit here and there, snipping and pruning—though that’s part of it. It means counting the words and reducing them to half that many while keeping the narrative clear and the sensory impact vivid, not replacing specifics by generalities, and never using the word somehow. If there’s dialogue in your piece, cut any long speech or long conversation in half just as implacably.

This kind of cutting is something most professional writers have to do at one time or another. Just for that reason it’s good practice. But it’s also a real act of self-discipline. It’s enlightening. Forced to weigh your words, you find out which are the Styrofoam and which are the heavy gold. Severe cutting intensifies your style, forcing you both to crowd and to leap.

in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end; I am its means.