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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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.