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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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.

Morality and grammar are related. Human beings live by the word. Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” I’ve had that sentence pinned up over my desk for a long time.

Lying is the deliberate misuse of language. But language misused through “mere” ignorance or carelessness breeds half-truths, misunderstandings, and lies.

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. Bureaucrats, politicians, administrators, etc., use the “There is . . .” construction to avoid taking responsibility for a statement.

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

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.

If short-sentence prose goes on very long, whatever its content, the thump-thump beat gives it a false simplicity that soon just sounds stupid. See Spot. See Jane. See Spot bite Jane.

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.

The first chapters of many great novels bring in an amazing amount of material that will be, in one way and another, with variations, repeated throughout the book.

present tense affords intense focus and detached affect* while past-tense narration gives a better sense of the continuity, variety, and depth of experience.

Voice is a word critics often use in discussing narrative. It’s always metaphorical, since what’s written is voiceless until read aloud. Often voice is a kind of shorthand for authenticity (writing in your own voice, catching the true voice of a person, and so on).

It might seem that the writer needs a gift of mimicry, like an impersonator, to achieve this variety of voices. But it isn’t that. It’s more like what a serious actor does, sinking self in character-self. It’s a willingness to be the characters, letting what they think and say rise from inside them. It’s a willingness to share control with one’s creation.

Instead of talking, let other people talk through you.

If you’re a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don’t censor, don’t control. Listen, and write.

It has to do with what is included in a story and what is omitted. It has to do with details. It has to do with focus—the focus of the sentence, the paragraph, the piece as a whole. I call it Crowding and Leaping, because those words describe the process in a physical way, which I like.

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.

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.

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.

No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.

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.

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.