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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Rules” about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, “If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,” but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style—a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.

JOURNALISTS AND SCHOOLTEACHERS mean well, but they can be fatally bossy. One of their strangely arbitrary rules forbids us to use the same word twice on the same page. Thus they drive us to the thesaurus in desperate searches for far-fetched synonyms and substitutes.