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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

But to make a rule never to use the same word twice in one paragraph, or to state flatly that repetition is to be avoided, is to go right against the nature of narrative prose.

The rhythms of prose—and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm—are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious. They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events in a novel: so large they’re hard to see, like the shape of the mountains when you’re driving on a mountain road. But the mountains are there.

(Things in Europe happen in threes, things in Native American folktales more often in fours.)

Structural repetition is the similarity of the events in a story: happenings that echo one another. It involves the whole of a story or novel. For a marvelous example of it, you might reread the first chapter of Jane Eyre and think about the rest of the book as you do. (If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, do; then you can think about it for the rest of your life.)

The similarity of this incremental repetition of word, phrase, image, and event in prose to recapitulation and development in musical structure is real and deep.

Part Two: Structural Repetition Write a short narrative (350–1000 words) in which something is said or done and then something is said or done that echoes or repeats it, perhaps in a different context, or by different people, or on a different scale. This can be a complete story, if you like, or a fragment of narrative.

Good story prompt

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.

You might just kind of take a little look at your own writing to see if you might have some very favorite qualifiers that you kind of, like, use just a little too often.

Haha

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.”

True

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.

Telling a story in the third person remains the commonest and least troublesome mode. The author uses it to move freely about, telling what he did and she did, and also what they thought.

Quotable

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.

I see the big difference between the past and present tenses not as immediacy but as complexity and size of field. A story told in the present tense is necessarily focused on action in a single time and therefore a single place. Use of the past tense(s) allows continual referring back and forth in time and space.

And so narration in the present tense sets up a kind of permanent artificial emergency, which can be exactly the right tone for fast-paced action.

The past tense can also focus tightly, but it always gives access to time before and after the moment of the narrative. The moment it describes is a moment continuous with its past and its future.

Too many people who yatter on about “you should never use the passive voice” don’t even know what it is. Many have confused it with the verb to be, which grammarians so sweetly call “the copulative” and which doesn’t even have a passive voice. And so they go around telling us not to use the verb to be! Most verbs are more exact and colorful than that one, but you tell me how else Hamlet should have started his soliloquy, or how Jehovah should have created light.

People often use the passive voice because it’s indirect, polite, unaggressive, and admirably suited to making thoughts seem as if nobody had personally thought them and deeds seem as if nobody had done them, so that nobody need take responsibility.

The world’s full of stories, you just reach out.

❤️