Books On Writing: Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin

Showing the Cleverness…

I feel like every book On Writing I end up gushing about. I’ll at least try to make Steering the Craft’s review more specific…

By far the first thing that stands out is that Steering… is quite short. It’s semi-ironic most writers know how to draw out a story, and so most non-fiction on writing is your typical 300 pages if not longer. Le Guin however, knows what she is talking about and knows how to communicate it in few words.

Despite its shortness, within Steering the Craft you’ll find exemplars, exercises (good ones too not just the loose writerly exercises you’ll find with a Google search, there are some actually quite tough ones in here) and well described elements of writing. Le Guin largely focuses on the micro or the prose level of writing, however there are key points of narration covered such as POV.

Basically if you’re a writer and you skip this one its your loss! I only hope to one day be half as clever with words as Le Guin.

Key Lessons from Steering the Craft:

• Don’t neglect punctuation! But also don’t hesitate to use it creatively
• Sentences: your main goal of every sentence is to get the reader to the next one. Vary length, style and complexity to create an original path.
• Rhythm – prose should have rhythm but it shouldn’t be samey or sing-song as this will be annoying to read
• Don’t mess up your tenses and don’t mess up your POV
• Know when to ‘crowd’ and when to ‘leap’ : crowding is filling up the page with rich details, leaping is skipping over what isn’t needed. (so much easier written as a bullet point than done)

Anyone else read this one? Thoughts?