Reviewed for BIW by Connie Weber
Instead of giving her reader lots of philosophical and biographical information, in her book Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin gently guides writers through a series of exercises to help focus and hone the writing. She quotes classic literature from Jane Austen to Mark Twain to Virginia Woolf, illustrating her points on topics such as rhythm and repetition, adjectives and adverbs, and voice.
She doesn’t distinguish between fiction and non-fiction in her exercises. To Le Guin, it is all narrative, and it’s all telling a story. From that basis, she takes the reader/writer through exercises such as “being gorgeous,” “chastity,” and “changing voices.” Sprinkled amongst the exercises and classic passages are gems for the writer to put on the wall above her desk: “The judgement that a work is complete–this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it–can come only from the writer and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.” The book also includes topics and ideas for writers’ groups, directions for peer group workshops, an appendix on verb forms, and a glossary of terms.
Le Guin gives her straightforward opinion when it comes to elements of craft and points of style. She hopes that her strong opinions will spark discussion and disagreement, thereby forcing the writer to clarify and substantiate her reasons for making specific choices in her work. For example, Le Guin is not impressed by the current “trendiness” of using present tense, or what she calls the “focused narrative tense.” She believes it “sacrifices the larger time-field to achieve keen, close focus.” She argues that by using the present tense, the writer’s possibilities are limited. “A narrow focus isn’t more immediate: it merely leaves out more.” Whether you agree or not, the discussion is an important one to ponder, and throughout her book, Le Guin challenges her reader with such topics.
Steering the Craft is an informative, practical and useful guide for beginning writers, and there’s much to glean for more experienced writers, as well.
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