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.

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.

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.

An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer.

Morality and grammar are related. Human beings live by the word. Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.”

To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.

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

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. Writers who want to take responsibility are wary of it. The cowardly writer says, “It is believed that being is constituted by ratiocination.” The brave writer says, “I think, therefore I am.”

I feel like writing the last two paragraphs all over again, but that would be rude. Could I ask you to read them over again?

This is part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.