Steering the Craft - Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is a modern master and it shows in her clear and concise explanations. Just tear out the last chapter and you’ll be fine.
Tone: personal and authoritative, Le Guin writes with all the weight of her years and many awards
What: A master’s class on sentence structure, word choice, tone, POV, and narration. Please skip the chapter at the end on writers groups.
Who: Ursula K. Le Guin is an SFWA Grandmaster and author of the Earthsea chronicles and The Dispossed. You may have heard of her.
Read it When: The book opens with the caveat that it is “not for beginners” and that is true. However, if you can string a few sentences together, you’ll get something out of this book. You are working on developing your voice. You want to work through a series of exercises. You are working with a writers group (read my notes below).
% on Topic: High
Keywords: Rhythm. POV. Voice. Sentences.
Ursula Le Guin needs little introduction. She worked primarily in speculative fiction, is the author of the Earthsea stories and The Left Hand of Darkness. She also wrote many short stories including “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” which seems to swing around with new responses about once a decade. Steering the Craft was originally written in 1998 with the subtitle "Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew" and updated in 2015 with the subtitle "a 21st-Century guide to sailing the sea of story." The new version had “substantial revisions” according to reviews at the time. This makes it feel fairly fresh, with references to working with others online and the trials of publishing on the internet.
Steering the Craft is surprisingly technical. It covers grammar concepts extensively and includes a glossary of terms in the back of the book. Which is a thing I think few writing books think to do. Le Guin covers sentence building narrative tense and POV in depth with simple authoritative descriptions and then extensive examples from literature.
Some things, like her commentary on the rhythm of words, will stick in your mind and change your writing for the better:
“The rhythm of prose depends very much—very prosiaclly—on the length of the sentences.” p.23
“Style is a simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm.” p. 32
The book also shines for its writing exercises, which include methods both for working alone and for working with others. They are some of the best exercises I’ve come across and I highly recommend actually doing them. They are explicitly designed to help you build an understanding of how prose functions, from dialogue to description to advanced concepts like crowding (to slow down time and increase awareness) and leaping (skipping over unnecessary detail). Her last section on indirect narration is especially good for those working on developing their voice with exercises to help put you in the head of your characters, even the ones you don’t like so much.
And here’s where I recommend you stop reading, or at least stop listening to what she has to say. Because the final section on “The Peer Group Workshop” is just plain wrong. For all of her wisdom in the earlier book she completely fails to question the received wisdom of the Milford method she recommends in her writing group section. For instance she writes:
“If you truly can’t endure the Rule of Silence, probably you don’t really want to know how other people respond to your work. You choose to be the first and last judge of it. In this case, you won’t fit happily in a group. This is absolutely OK. It’s a matter of temperament. Some artists can work only in solitude. There may be periods in an artist’s life when they need the stimulus and feedback of a group, and periods when they do better working alone.” p.135
Forgive me, this is bull crap. Like the “write every day” advice in On Writing, this is advice that is actively harmful to new writers and only good for a small portion of pre-professionals.
For those of you not subjected to this method yet (or hopefully ever), the Milford method holds that in critique, the writer should be absolutely silent (no matter what) while the rest of the group goes around and critiques the work. This is ostensibly to make the writer to listen to what others have to say. However, this often also results in unfairly harsh critique, leaves writers unable to respond to racist or misogynist responses to their work, and results in a “winnowing” effect on the ranks of people subjected to it. The Clarion Writers Workshop, where Le Guin was likely exposed to this technique, no longer uses it because it was found to make a portion of their participants give up writing completely.
Maybe Le Guin never had someone critique her own work with malice (though given when she was writing I doubt it), but I guarantee she saw it as a teacher. The “rule of silence” can only work in an environment of trust, and so, so often the beginning writer encounters bad actors or people who think they have to be harsh to help others improve. The “rule of silence” encourages, even requires, the worst kind of abusive dynamic and we can and have grown past the need to tolerate it in the name of self improvement. Not willing to be silent while someone tears down your work with malice aforethought is not a “temperment” issue.
/rant
Overall, this is still a very good, very useful writing book in the early chapters. Le Guin is a modern master and it shows in her clear and concise explanations of core concepts, the careful selection of examples from literature, and the excellence of the writing exercises. If you are looking to improve your writing I recommend it. I even recommend doing the writing exercises with a group if possible. Just tear out the last chapter and you’ll be fine.
For more on why most workshops are moving away from the Milford method, see this article from Tor. For an alternative method I do recommend see Mary Robinette Kowal's ABCD method.
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