Two Books for Writers

Ursula le Guin was and is one of my favorite writers, and when she published a book on writing some twenty years ago, I grabbed it at once. I wasn’t disappointed. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew has been my go-to book on writing ever since, most especially because it contained the only writing exercises and prompts I ever felt I would learn something from doing that I couldn’t have learned from simply writing a story for publication.

I was therefore pleased to discover that three years ago, Ms. Le Guin published an updated and revised edition with the same title but a somewhat shorter subtitle. This one is Steering the Craft: A 21^st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. I ordered it immediately.

If you deeply disliked the original version, I doubt you’ll like this one much better. The principles are the same; the exercises are almost the same (I noticed one addition and one subtraction, and I think a few rephrasings, but that was all). What’s changed are the explanations and examples. In the introduction, Le Guin says that she felt the need to clarify things to better meet the needs of new writers in the 21^st century, when publishing is struggling to cope with the changes brought by electronic media and more and more writers are trying to bootstrap themselves and each other in peer-critique groups.

Clarity is a good word for the result, and I suspect that I will learn as much from laying the two texts side-by-side and going through them sentence by sentence as I will learn from the exercises themselves. Like the first edition, this is not intended as a book for beginners, though I suspect that for a particular variety of beginner it would be just the thing. People learn in different ways, and most of the how-to-write advice nowadays follows a very different set of protocols from the ones Le Guin uses.

Le Guin does not discuss dialog, action, the opening hook, how to structure a scene or a novel, or action-reaction/scene-and-sequel. She’s concerned with the tools every writer needs: the sound of language; the effects one can get from using (or not using) punctuation, different syntax, and sentence lengths; rhythm and repetition; adjectives; tenses; voice and viewpoint; implication; focus and control. She does beg writers to make each exercise about an act or action, rather than a static description … and immediately points out that “action” can be “a journey down a supermarket aisle or some thoughts going on inside a head.”

Story is, she says, about movement – starting in one place and ending up somewhere different – and the strong implication is that if what you want to do is write stories, your writing exercises should also be about movement and change. Even if the exercise is only a couple of hundred words.

One of the things I like about these exercises is that they are targeted, limited, and relatively non-repetitive. Most of them run from one paragraph to one page, and there are never more than four exercises in a given chapter. The implicit assumption is that if you feel the need to repeat an exercise, you have the brains and the creativity to do so without Le Guin giving you a specific, detailed topic. I really like it when a teacher or facilitator starts from the assumption that their students are intelligent.

(One of my other writing textbooks tends to exercises like “Write a scene in omniscient viewpoint describing a soldier on a battlefield accidentally killing his brother.” I hate that kind of exercise; it doesn’t give my brain room to move. Some folks, though, really like having everything laid out to that level of detail, so they can concentrate on whatever they’re supposed to be learning without having to also make things up. If that is your preferred style, Le Guin’s book isn’t for you.)

The second Le Guin writing book I want to talk about is new, possibly the last thing she published (it was in the middle of being edited when she died). It’s Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing  and is a collection of three interviews conducted by David Naimon. The first interview focuses generally on fiction; the second, on poetry; and the third, on non-fiction. The conversations aren’t limited to Le Guin’s work – there are personal anecdotes and opinions and humor and wisdom, along with discussions of her writing process. (I find it enormously reassuring to hear Ursula le Guin say “Getting started is hard. I throw away endless first pages…”)

It’s a tiny book – barely larger than a mass market paperback, and only 138 pages – but it’s the sort that will repay reading and re-reading and reading again in conjunction with some of her other work. One of the things that profoundly impressed me in these interviews is the degree to which Ursula le Guin was a profoundly auditory writer. (Yes, I should have realized that ages ago. I didn’t.)

Knowing this suddenly made quite a few elements of The Language of the Night and Steering the Craft far more comprehensible to me than they had been, and I now have every intention of going back and re-reading pretty much every Le Guin title I own from that vantage point. There are worse ways to spend a month.