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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Fantasy is a form of narrative essentially dependent on its language,

If you aren’t interested in punctuation, or are afraid of it, you’re missing out on some of the most beautiful, elegant tools a writer has to work with.

As for the stuff in your computer that pretends to correct your punctuation or grammar,* disable it. These programs are on a pitifully low level of competence; they’ll chop your sentences short and stupidify your writing. Competence is up to you.

I detest the self-righteousness of the correctness bullies, and I distrust their motives.

How can a reader trust a writer ignorant of the medium she works in? Who can dance to a fiddler who plays off key?

It’s childish to assume people will understand unexpressed meanings. It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.

Writing can be completely conversational and informal, but to communicate thought or emotion of any complexity at all, it has to follow the general agreements, the shared rules of grammar and usage. Or, if it breaks them, it breaks them intentionally. To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.

If you don’t know the real rules, you may fall for fake ones. I keep running into fake Rules of Good Writing based on hokey grammar vocabulary. Here’s an example: Fake Rule: Sentences beginning “There is . . .” are in the passive tense. Good writers never use the passive tense.

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.

Teachers trying to get kids to write understandably, textbooks of style with their notion of “transparent” style, journalists with their weird rules and superstitions, and bang-pow thriller writers—they’ve all helped filled a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentence is a short sentence. A convicted criminal might agree. I don’t.

Listening with a careful ear to one’s prose isn’t the same thing as falling in love with the sound of one’s voice. Narrative prose consisting largely of long, complex sentences, full of embedded clauses* and all the rest of the syntactical armature,* takes some care. Long sentences have to be carefully and knowledgeably managed, solidly constructed; their connections must be clear, so that they flow, carrying the reader along easily. 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.

Nothing in your story happens “somehow.” It happens because you wrote it. Take responsibility!

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.