Steering the Craft

It came out of a workshop she ran on the Oregon coast, first published in 1998 and considerably revised in 2015, and the workshop structure survives. Ten short chapters, each on one thing, each followed by an exercise you’re 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. That’s rarer in craft books than it should be. There’s no encouragement, no permission-giving, and no chapter about believing in yourself.

I’m fond of very few craft books, and this is one of them. Le Guin writes like a working novelist who respects your time, and after the permission-slip tone of so many writing guides, her briskness feels like being taken seriously.

Why does Steering the Craft start with sound?

Because it’s 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 neighbors, the pattern of stresses, the repetition of consonants that either binds a phrase or clatters.

The instruction is to read your work aloud, and she means it as the primary way of hearing what you’ve made. Most writers who do it at all treat it as a proofreading step. A sentence that’s wrong will usually announce itself in the mouth before the eye finds it, and I’d put this advice at the top of any list I was asked to make.

She’s 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’s not, and only the ear knows.

The vary-your-sentence-length rule is wrong for exactly this reason. It turns a matter of listening into a mechanical chore, and writers who follow it produce prose that sounds like a metronome with hiccups.

Watch: 0009 - Steering The Craft By Ursula K Le Guin, Andre Should Be Writing

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’s precise about which effects become unavailable in each. Then she’s 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 can’t have, and doesn’t notice. I wish every new novelist had this chapter pinned above the desk. A head-hop in limited third breaks the spell instantly, and the writer rarely notices because they already know what everyone in the scene is thinking.

Her position on deliberate shifts is worth having too. Changing point of view is allowed and it’s 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’ve worked on than any other single piece of craft advice, and I’ve 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 doesn’t 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’s failing to do. A flat scene is frequently one that’s crowding material that should be leapt, and a rushed one is usually leaping something the reader needed crowded. I can’t think of a more useful pair of words for a writer to carry around. I can diagnose nearly every draft I’d call flat or rushed with them in a minute. She borrowed the terms from a comment about Vonnegut’s writing, and the borrowing doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re the right words and no better ones exist.

Do the exercises in Steering the Craft work?

Yes, which is unusual.

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 passage with no punctuation at all, no commas, periods or paragraph breaks, so you hear what punctuation 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.

This is where a teacher parts company with a cheerleader, and cheerleaders write too many craft books. Prompts make people feel productive. Le Guin’s exercises make them better, whether or not they enjoy the process.

Each is small enough to do in twenty minutes and each isolates one variable. That’s what makes it teaching instead of encouragement. She also includes notes on doing them in a group. That’s 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’s explicit that this is a book about prose and she doesn’t 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 isn’t the book, and Le Guin would tell you so.

Verdict

If I could hand a writer one book about the sentence, it’s 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.

My only small complaint is that it’s so short I keep wishing she’d written a companion volume on structure. Short of that, nothing I know does more for a writer’s sentences, and I’d give up a dozen fatter craft books before I’d give up this one.

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