Steering the Craft

It came out of a workshop she ran on the Oregon coast, first published in 1998 and substantially revised in 2015, and the workshop structure survives.

Ten short chapters, each on one thing, each followed by an exercise you are meant to sit down and write. Sound of your prose. Punctuation and grammar. Sentence length and complex syntax. Repetition. Adjectives and adverbs. Verb tense and person. Point of view. Changing point of view. Indirect narration. And crowding and leaping.

She assumes you can already write and treats you as a colleague, which is rarer in craft books than it should be. There is no encouragement, no permission-giving, and no chapter about believing in yourself.

Why does Steering the Craft start with sound?

Because it is the foundation and almost nobody teaches it.

Her position is that prose has a sound whether or not you attend to it, and that a reader hears it even when reading silently. Rhythm, the length of a sentence against its neighbours, the pattern of stresses, the repetition of consonants that either binds a phrase or clatters.

The instruction is to read your work aloud. Not as a proofreading step, which is how most writers use it if they use it at all, but as the primary means of hearing what you have made. A sentence that is wrong will usually announce itself in the mouth before the eye finds it.

She is also good on the point that beginning writers are frequently told to vary sentence length as a rule, when the actual instruction is to listen and let the meaning determine the length. A run of short sentences is right when the material is urgent and wrong when it is not, and only the ear knows.

What does Steering the Craft say about point of view?

Two chapters, and better than anyone.

She distinguishes the modes cleanly: first person, limited third, involved author or omniscient, detached author, and observer-narrator in both first and third. For each she gives what it buys and what it costs, with examples, and she is precise about which effects become unavailable in each.

Then she is blunt that inadvertent shifts are the commonest fault in amateur manuscripts. A writer in limited third slips for one sentence into another character’s head, or into information the viewpoint character cannot have, and does not notice.

Her position on deliberate shifts is worth having too. Changing point of view is allowed and it is expensive, and the cost is paid in reader trust. Do it at a structural break, do it clearly, and know why.

That section alone has fixed more manuscripts I have worked on than any other single piece of craft advice, and I have used it in editorial letters more times than I can count.

What is crowding and leaping?

The chapter that gives the book its most useful vocabulary.

Crowding is loading the page with pressure and detail, meaning the specifics that make a moment vivid and the accumulation that makes it matter. Leaping is jumping over everything that does not matter, sometimes a few seconds and sometimes twenty years.

Good narrative does both, alternately. A story that only crowds is exhausting and never arrives. A story that only leaps is a synopsis.

Naming the two lets you see what a scene is doing, and more usefully lets you diagnose what it is failing to do. A flat scene is frequently one that is crowding material that should be leapt, and a rushed one is usually leaping something the reader needed crowded.

She borrowed the terms from a comment about Vonnegut’s writing, and the borrowing does not matter. What matters is that they are the right words and no better ones exist.

Do the exercises work?

Yes, which is unusual, and it is worth saying why.

Most craft-book exercises are prompts. Write about a time you were afraid. Those produce writing and teach nothing, because nothing is being isolated.

Le Guin’s exercises isolate one variable. Write a paragraph with no punctuation but full stops, so you hear what sentence length is doing. Write a page of narrative with no adjectives or adverbs, so you find out what your verbs are carrying. Write the same short scene twice, once crowded and once leaping. Write from a point of view you find difficult.

Each is small enough to do in twenty minutes and each isolates one variable, which is what makes it teaching instead of encouragement. She also includes notes on doing them in a group, which is where the book began.

What does Steering the Craft deliberately leave out?

Everything above the sentence.

No plot, no structure, no character, nothing on how to finish a book or what to do when the second act collapses. She is explicit that this is a book about prose and she does not stray.

That restraint is the right decision and it means the book solves one problem completely instead of five partially. A writer whose difficulty is architecture will read it, enjoy it, and still have the difficulty.

Know which problem you have before you buy it. If your sentences are fine and your second act is a swamp, this is not the book, and Le Guin would tell you so.

Verdict

If I could hand a writer one book about the sentence, it is this one. Short, unsentimental, and written by somebody with nothing to prove.

Buy it, do the exercises, and keep it near the desk, because the point of view chapters are worth rereading every time you start something.

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