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

Very, very few writers these days will share their knowledge of how to become better writers. Many will write books on how to sell what you've written or how to write novels that will fly off the shelves, but few provide any real, practical information on how to hone the craft of writing. Let such things not be said about Ursula K. Le Guin.Le Guin says that while the "gift" can't be earned, the craft of writing can. All artists practice and work at their craft: musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers....even writers. The craft can be developed and Le Guin shows us how. You won't find any pie-in-the-sky philosophies about writing in this book, just practical information which, if followed, will make you a better writer. Le Guin's chapters include:The Sound of Your WritingSentence Length and Complex SyntaxRepetitionAdjective and AdverbPoint of View and VoiceChanging Point of Viewand much more.Each chapter contains writing exercises specific to the chapter topic. (Le Guin also suggests many titles for further reading.) This book will become a gold mine to any writer of fiction or creative non-fiction. It's the perfect book to use for a writers' group or peer group. Thank you, Ms. Le Guin, for sharing your gift with us.

Long a favorite writer of mine, I was delighted to see Le Guin's offering on story writing. Her love of language comes through in these excercises as it does in her prose and poetry. Not a guide for crafting plot or character, the excercises focus on honing your experience with the words that are the bones of your writing.While a delightful read, the true value of the book comes in working through the excercises either alone or as part of a writer's group. You'll stretch your skills as a writer as you explore the uncharted waters. Ms. Le Guin will strain your creative muscles by leading you into breaking the "rules" you were taught. Whether it is writing a page of narrative with no punctuation, a paragraph with at least three repetitions of the same noun, verb, or adjective, or carefully crafting a sentence at least as long as this one, the excercises get you thinking about why you write the way you do and provide the tools necessary to accomplish what you want with your prose.Full of good advice, good examples, and good descrptions of how a writer does what they do, this book is a boon to every beginning writer and likely of use to even seasoned professionals.

I don't write fiction (yet) but reading this book actually changed how I read literature. Le Guin is a prize-winning author of science fiction novels. She runs writers workshops and this is a book of exercises such as you would encounter in one of her work groups.But the amazing thing about this book is that even if you don't write a single word or do a single exercise, it will change how you view the books you read. Her chapters on rhythm in writing (using Virginia Woolf as an example) changed how I read any novel. Now I look for the music in the words as well as the style and structure of the book. Another chapter is on "being gorgeous" or using the flow of adjectives. She gives another exercise in being abstemious with the use of adverbs. At the end of the book are ideas for starting writers' groups and workshops of your own.I list this book as a must for English teachers and for anyone who loves literature.

Steering the Craft is useful for anyone engaged in creative writing, whether the outcome is fiction or narrative nonfiction. Her exercises are meant to be consciousness-raisers, says LeGuin, whom I interviewed for my own bestselling WRITING IN FLOW, and whom I found to be quite forthcoming about her writing process. In this book, for instance, she covers how to show characters thinking, shifting points of view, the uses of repetition, and so on. Although I normally don't care for exercises as such, hers are fresh and flexible (write a page of descriptive narrative without adjectives or adverbs or dialogue; you can do this as part of whatever you're working on). An original contribution to the advice field.