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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

EXERCISE ONE: Being Gorgeous 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.*

Part Two: In a paragraph or so, describe an action, or a person feeling strong emotion—joy, fear, grief. Try to make the rhythm and movement of the sentences embody or represent the physical reality you’re writing about.

Emoticons are dreary little excuses for a failure to communicate feelings and intentions in words.

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.

EXERCISE TWO: Am I Saramago Write a paragraph to a page (150–350 words) of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices). Suggested subject: A group of people engaged in a hurried or hectic or confused activity, such as a revolution, or the scene of an accident, or the first few minutes of a one-day sale.

In a narrative, the chief duty of a sentence is to lead to the next sentence.

Good grammar is pretty much like good engineering: the machine works because the parts do. Careless grammar is bad design plus sand in the gears and the wrong size gaskets.

The marvelously supple connections of complex syntax are like the muscles and sinews of a long-distance runner’s body, ready to set up a good pace and keep going.

EXERCISE THREE: Short and Long Part One: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100–150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments!* Each must have a subject and a verb. Part Two: Write a half page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, that is all one sentence.

EXERCISE FOUR, PARTS 1 AND 2: Again and Again and Again I can’t suggest “plots” for these; the nature of the exercise doesn’t allow it. Part One: Verbal Repetition Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like was, said, did).

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.

I’m not sure how free the nonfiction writer is to use structural repetition. To force unlike events into a repetitive pattern certainly would be cheating. But to be aware of an existing pattern in the events of a life surely is one of the memoirist’s goals.

EXERCISE FIVE: Chastity Write a paragraph to a page (200–350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or an action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc.) may be necessary, but be sparing. Be chaste.

EXERCISE SIX: The Old Woman This should run to a page or so; keep it short and not too ambitious, because you’re going to write the same story twice. The subject is this: An old woman is busy doing something—washing the dishes, or gardening, or editing a PhD dissertation in mathematics, whatever you like—as she thinks about an event that happened in her youth. You’re going to intercut between the two times. “Now” is where she is and what she’s doing; “then” is her memory of something that happened when she was young. Your narration will move back and forth between “now” and “then.”

EXERCISE SEVEN: Points of View Think up a situation for a narrative sketch of 200–350 words. It can be anything you like but should involve several people doing something. (Several means more than two. More than three will be useful.) It doesn’t have to be a big, important event, though it can be; but something should happen, even if only a cart tangle at the supermarket, a wrangle around the table concerning the family division of labor, or a minor street accident. Please use little or no dialogue in these POV exercises. While the characters talk, their voices cover the POV, and so you’re not exploring that voice, which is the point of the exercise. Part One: Two Voices First: Tell your little story from a single POV, that of a participant in the event—an old man, a child, a cat, whatever you like. Use limited third person. Second: Retell the story from the POV of one of the other people involved in it. Again, use limited third person. ~~~~~~~

Part Two: Detached Narrator Tell the same story using the detached author or “fly on the wall” POV. Part Three: Observer-Narrator If there wasn’t a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character’s voice, in first or third person. Part Four: Involved Author Tell the same or a new story using the involved-author POV. Part Four may require you to expand the whole thing, up to two or three pages, 1000 words or so. You may find you need to give it a context, find out what led up to it, or follow it further. The detached author takes up as little room as possible, but the involved author needs a fair amount of time and space to move around in. If your original story simply doesn’t lend itself to this voice, find a story you want to tell that you can be emotionally and morally involved in. I don’t mean by that that it has to be factually true (if it is, you may have trouble getting out of the autobiographical mode into the involved author’s voice, which is a fictional mode). And I don’t mean that you should use your story to preach. I do mean that the story should be about something that concerns you.

EXERCISE EIGHT: Changing Voices Part One: Quick Shifts in Limited Third: A short narrative, 300–600 words. You can use one of the sketches from Exercise 7 or make up a new scene of the same kind: several people involved in the same activity or event. Tell the story using several different viewpoint characters (narrators) in limited third person, changing from one to another as the narrative proceeds. Mark the changes with line breaks, with the narrator’s name in parentheses at the head of that section, or with any device you like.

~~~~~~~ Part Two: Thin Ice In 300–1000 words, tell the same story or a new story of the same kind, deliberately shifting POV from character to character several times without any obvious signal to the reader that you’re doing so. You can of course do Part Two merely by removing the “signals” from Part One, but you won’t learn much by doing so. “Thin Ice” calls for a different narrative technique, and possibly a different narrative. I think it is likely to end up being written by the involved author, even though you are apparently using only limited third-person viewpoint. This ice really is thin, and the waters are deep.

A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. Plot is a marvelous device. But it’s not superior to story, and not even necessary to it. As for action, indeed a story must move, something must happen; but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day. Unceasing violent action is usually a sign that in fact no story is being told.

If the information is poured out as a lecture, barely concealed by some stupid device—“Oh, Captain, do tell me how the antimatter dissimulator works!” and then he does, endlessly—we have what science fiction writers call an Expository Lump. Crafty writers (in any genre) don’t allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.

~~~~~~~ EXERCISE NINE: Telling It Slant Part One: A & B The goal of this exercise is to tell a story and present two characters through dialogue alone. Write a page or two—word count would be misleading, as dialogue leaves a lot of unfilled lines—a page or two of pure dialogue. Write it like a play, with A and B as the characters’ names. No stage directions. No description of the characters. Nothing but what A says and what B says. Everything the reader knows about who they are, where they are, and what’s going on comes through what they say. If you want a suggestion for the topic, put two people into some kind of crisis situation: the car just ran out of gas; the spaceship is about to crash; the doctor has just realized that the old man she’s treating for a heart attack is her father

EXERCISE NINE, PART 2: Being the Stranger Write a narrative of 200–600 words, a scene involving at least two people and some kind of action or event. Use a single viewpoint character, in either first person or limited third person, who is involved in the event. Give us the character’s thoughts and feelings in their own words. The viewpoint character (real or invented) is to be somebody you dislike, or disapprove of, or hate, or feel to be extremely different from yourself. The situation might be a quarrel between neighbors, or a relative’s visit, or somebody acting weird at the checkout counter—whatever will show the viewpoint character doing what that person does, thinking what that person thinks.

EXERCISE NINE, PART 3: Implication Each part of this should involve 200–600 words of descriptive prose. In both, the voice is either involved author or detached author. No viewpoint character. Character by indirection: Describe a character by describing any place inhabited or frequented by that character—a room, house, garden, office, studio, bed, whatever. (The character isn’t present at the time.) The untold event: Give us a glimpse of the mood and nature of some event or deed by describing the place—room, rooftop, street, park, landscape, whatever—where it happened or is about to happen. (The event or deed doesn’t happen in your piece.)

EXERCISE TEN: A Terrible Thing to Do Take one of the longer narrative exercises you wrote—any one that went over 400 words—and cut it by half.