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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Since narrative is what this is all about, try to make each exercise not a static scene but the account of an act or action, something happening. It doesn’t have to be bang-pow “action”; it might be a journey down a supermarket aisle or some thoughts going on inside a head. 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.

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.

implacable

Good writers use the “There is” construction all the time. “There was a black widow spider on the back of his wrist.” “There is still hope.” It’s called an existential construction used to introduce a noun. It’s quite basic and very useful.

In a narrative, the chief duty of a sentence is to lead to the next sentence. Beyond this basic, invisible job, the narrative sentence can of course do an infinite number of audible, palpable, beautiful, surprising, powerful things. In order to do them, it needs one quality above all: coherence. A sentence has to hang together.

There is no optimum sentence length. The optimum is variety. The length of a sentence in good prose is established by contrast and interplay with the sentences around it—and by what it says and does.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

The rhythms of prose—and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm—are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious.

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.

Some adjectives and adverbs have become meaningless through literary overuse. Great seldom carries the weight it ought to carry. Suddenly seldom means anything at all; it’s a mere transition device, a noise—“He was walking down the street. Suddenly he saw her.” Somehow is a super-weasel, a word that betrays that the author didn’t want to bother thinking out the story—“Somehow she just knew . . .” “Somehow they made it to the asteroid.” Nothing in your story happens “somehow.” It happens because you wrote it. Take responsibility!

Almost all preliterate, sacred, and literary prose narrative before the sixteenth century is in the third person. First-person writing turns up first in Cicero’s letters, in medieval diaries and saints’ confessions, with Montaigne and Erasmus, and in early travel narratives.

First-person narrative is the ancestor of narrative in the “limited third person.” This is a technical literary term, meaning that the writer limits narration to the point of view of one character.

Abstract discourse is always in the present tense (I’m writing it right now). Generalities aren’t time-bound, and so philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and God all speak in the present tense.1