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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. 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. Group criticism is great training for self-criticism. But until quite recently no writer had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned it by doing it.

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.

There’s luck in art. And there’s the gift. You can’t earn that. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift. I’m not going to discuss writing as self-expression, as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things, but first of all—and in the end, too—it is an art, a craft, a making. And that is the joy of it. 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.

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.

If you and this book are alone together, I suggest that you work through it methodically, doing the exercises in order. When you’ve worked on an exercise till you’re more or less satisfied with it, put it away and forbid yourself to look at it again for a while. 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. Then reread your piece with a friendly, hopeful, critical eye, with revision in mind. If I offer specific suggestions for criticism regarding the exercise, use them now. Read the piece aloud to yourself, since speaking and hearing it will show up awkward bits and faults in the rhythm and can help you make dialogue natural and lively. In general, look for what’s wordy, ugly, unclear, unnecessary, preachy, careless—what breaks the pace, what doesn’t work. Look for what does work, and admire it, and see if you can bring it out even better.

If you’re part of a Mutinous Crew, I recommend that you follow the procedure outlined in the appendix, The Peer Group Workshop. All my suggestions for group work are based on this procedure. I’ve used it in all the workshops I’ve led and all the peer groups I’ve belonged to. It works.

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.

punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing. That’s what it’s for. Commas and periods bring out the grammatical structure of a sentence; they make it clear to the understanding, and the emotions, by showing what it sounds like—where the breaks come, where to pause.

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. Incoherent, straggling, patched-together sentences can’t lead seamlessly to the next sentence, because they can’t even hold themselves together. 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.

Think of it like this: there’s one best way for the parts of a sentence to fit together, and your job as a writer is to find it. You may not notice anything’s out of place till you’re rereading to revise. All that’s needed may be a slight rearrangement of order, or you may have to rethink and rewrite the sentence entirely.

I think it’s fair to say that though every sentence should move with grace, the proper beauty and power of prose is in the work as a whole.

The first exercise was Being Gorgeous, because I wanted to start with the neglected fact that good writing always gives pleasure to the ear. But in most good narrative, especially long narrative, it’s less the immediate dazzle of the words than the sounds, rhythms, setting, characters, action, interactions, dialogue, and feelings all working together that make us hold our breath, and cry . . . and turn the page to find out what happens next. And so, until the scene ends, each sentence should lead to the next sentence.

Every sentence has a rhythm of its own, which is also part of the rhythm of the whole piece. Rhythm is what keeps the song going, the horse galloping, the story moving. And the rhythm of prose depends ver...

Virginia Woolf’s thought and work is wonderful in itself and useful to anyone thinking about how to write. The rhythm of Woolf’s prose is to my ear the subtlest and strongest in English fiction. She said this about it, in a letter to a writer friend: 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. I’ve never read anything that says more about the mystery at the very center of what a writer does.

The Dictionary Word, the word that really isn’t your word, may stick out of your prose like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons, and it will change the tone. “She’d had enough cream, enough sugar, enough tea” isn’t the same as “She’d had enough cream, an ample sufficiency of sugar, and a plenitude of tea.”

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!

Ornate, fancy adjectives are out of fashion and tempt few writers now, but some conscious prose stylists use adjectives as poets do: the adjective’s relation to the noun is unexpected, far-fetched, forcing the reader to stop to see the connection. This mannerism can be effective, but in narration it’s risky. Do you want to stop the flow? Is it worth it?

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. That’s how our minds normally work, moving around easily. Only in emergency situations do they focus very tightly on what’s going on. 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.

The novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz argued that present-tense narration, avoiding temporal context and historical trajectory, oversimplifies, suggesting that nothing “is terribly complex and that understanding, such as it is, can be achieved by naming objects or accumulating data,” and that “all we can ever understand is what can be understood from a glimpse.” This externality and narrowness of its field of vision may be why so much present-tense narrative sounds cool—flat, unemotional, uninvolved. And therefore all rather alike.

Involved author is the most openly, obviously manipulative of the points of view. But the voice of the narrator who knows the whole story, tells it because it is important, and is profoundly involved with all the characters cannot be dismissed as old-fashioned or uncool. It’s not only the oldest and the most widely used storytelling voice, it’s also the most versatile, flexible, and complex of the points of view—and probably, at this point, the most difficult for the writer.

Detached Author (“Fly on the Wall,” “Camera Eye,” “Objective Narrator”) There is no viewpoint character. The narrator is not one of the characters and can say of the characters only what a totally neutral observer (an intelligent fly on the wall) might infer of them from behavior and speech. The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described, but values and judgments can only be implied indirectly. A popular voice around 1900 and in “minimalist” and “brand-name” fiction, it is the least overtly, most covertly manipulative of the points of view. It’s excellent practice for writers who expect codependent readers. When we’re new at writing, we may expect our readers to respond just as we respond to what we’re writing about—to cry because we’re crying. But this is a childish, not a writerly, relation to the reader. If you can move a reader while using this cool voice, you’ve got something really moving going on.

Observer-Narrator, Using the Third Person This point of view is limited to fiction. The tactic is much the same as the last one. The viewpoint character is a limited third-person narrator who witnesses the events. As unreliability is a complex and subtle way of showing the narrator’s character and the observer-narrator isn’t the protagonist, the reader is usually safe in assuming that this viewpoint character is fairly reliable, or at least transparent, both in first and third person.

the narrative problem I have met most often in workshop stories (and often in published work) is in handling POV: inconsistency and frequent changes of POV.

In fiction, inconsistent POV is a very frequent problem. Unless handled with awareness and skill, frequent POV shifts jerk the reader around, bouncing in and out of incompatible identifications, confusing emotion, garbling the story. Any shift from one of the five POVs outlined above to another is a dangerous one. It’s a major change of voice to go from first to third person, or from involved author to observer-narrator. The shift will affect the whole tone and structure of your narrative. Shifts within limited third person—from one character’s mind to another’s—call for equal awareness and care. A writer must be aware of, have a reason for, and be in control of all shifts of viewpoint character.

The choice of point(s) of view, the voice in which one narrates one’s story, can make an immense difference to the tone, the effect, even the meaning of the story. Writers often find that a story they want to tell “sticks” and won’t go right until they find the right person to tell it—whether it’s a choice between first and third person, or between the involved author and a limited third-person narrator, or between a character involved in the action and a bystander, or between one and several narrators.

The unreliable narrator: Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” is a classic example. We’d better not believe everything the governess tells us, and we must look through what she says for what she leaves out. Is she deceiving us or herself?

you can shift from one viewpoint character to another any time you like, if you know why and how you’re doing it, if you’re cautious about doing it frequently, and if you never do it for a moment only.

If my story’s set in Chicago in 2005, I can assume that my readers have some general idea of the time and place and how things were and can fill in the picture from the barest hints. But if my story’s set on 4-Beta Draconis in 3205, my readers have no idea what to expect. The world of the story must be created and explained in the story. This is part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making. But it’s a tricky business. 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.

Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to “load every rift with ore.” It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and clichés, never to use ten vague words where two exact words will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.

But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.

Tactically speaking, I’d say go ahead and crowd in the first draft—tell it all, blab, babble, put everything in. Then in revising consider what merely pads or repeats or slows or impedes your story, and cut it. Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine till what’s left is what counts. Leap boldly.

For a magnificent example of action writing, look at any of the sea battles in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. Everything the reader needs to know is included, but nothing more. At each moment we know exactly where we are and what’s happening. Every detail both enriches the picture and speeds the action. The language is transparent. The sensory details are intense, brief, precise. And you can’t stop reading till it’s over.

I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) that moves through time or implies the passage of time and that involves change. I define plot as a form of story that uses action as its mode, usually in the form of conflict, and that closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax. Climax is one kind of pleasure; plot is one kind of story. A strong, shapely plot is a pleasure in itself. It can be reused generation after generation. It provides an armature for narrative that beginning writers may find invaluable. But most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot or retold without fatal loss except in their own words. The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.

We don’t have to have the rigid structure of a plot to tell a story, but we do need a focus. What is it about? Who is it about? This focus, explicit or implicit, is the center to which all the events, characters, sayings, doings of the story originally or finally refer. It may be or may not be a simple or a single thing or person or idea. We may not be able to define it. If it’s a complex subject, it probably can’t be expressed in any words at all except all the words of the story. But it is there. And a story equally needs what Jill Paton Walsh calls a trajectory—not necessarily an outline or synopsis to follow, but a movement to follow: the shape of a movement, whether it be straight ahead or roundabout or recurrent or eccentric, a movement that never ceases, from which no passage departs entirely or for long and to which all passages contribute in some way. This trajectory is the shape of the story as a whole. It moves always to its end, and its end is implied in its beginning.

Crowding and leaping have to do with the focus and the trajectory. Everything that is crowded in to enrich the story sensually, intellectually, emotionally, should be in focus—part of the central focus of the story. And every leap should be along the trajectory, following the shape and movement of the whole.

Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this: in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end; I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself.