The Book

Steering the Craft began as a workshop Ursula K. Le Guin gave at the 1996 Flight of the Mind conference and was adapted to book form in 1998. It's a slim volume with a long subtitle: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Mariner and the Mutinous Crew. It contains ten chapters, each featuring a brief lesson, literary examples, and a writing exercise. Le Guin is passionate about the interplay of words and her love of writing (and writing craft) is very clear. She uses excerpts from classic works like Jane Eyre and The Return of the Native to illustrate her points, and keeps things moving with mix of both poetry and prose. There is also a glossary of terms, an appendix delineating the forms of the verb, and a section on how to conduct a peer group workshop. The chapters cover essential writing skills such as punctuation, adjectives and adverbs, and point of view, and are a mix of author essay and literature excerpts.

My Take

Steering the Craft reminded me of high school English class. As a passionate reader and college English major, that's mostly a good thing. Unfortunately, after the first set of examples, I was back in 3rd period English, struggling to stay awake. I could hear my teacher's voice illustrating the finer points of Jane Eyre and Virginia Woolf, and my brain tuned right out. Le Guin selected classic works to illustrate her points, and while it served her purpose, I found it a chore to read. It was just like English class where you know there's benefit to learning the material, but the delivery leaves you flat.

My favorite writing books are the ones that inspire me to write. The ones where I have to keep putting the book down so I can type furiously on my laptop, barely keeping up with the ideas in my head. After reading each of Craft's exercise prompts, I set this book down, moved to the laptop and ... nothing. The instructions were clear and well-illustrated, but there was nothing to tie it back to anything of interest to me. I'm sure many writers would not have my dilemma, but I felt it was worth mentioning. If you're looking for a get up and go kind of book, this is not it. If you're looking for a serious consideration of craft, in short bursts of writing, then you may be in luck.

A big plus of Steering the Craft is that the exercises will work for writers of any genre. They are purely craft-based, and are not dependent on genre tropes or unfamiliar styles. You're not forced to write on any particular theme, and, if anything, the exercises encourage writers to push boundaries and take a stab at writing outside their comfort zones. Creating two paragraphs of prose is not intimidating, no matter how challenging the exercise.

On the negative side, I found the loose focus of the exercises distracting. Despite Le Guin's prompts, I came up blank for most of the exercises. I hate writing for practice's sake. It's hard to get invested in a "story" of 150-300 words (the suggested length for most of the exercises). You could certainly use a work-in-progress as your source material, but the exercises don't encourage continuity or building off of previous work. Unless you make a conscious effort to find common threads, the exercises stand alone. I found it helpful to set my snippets in an existing literary universe rather than creating new characters each time. It took the pressure off creating, and let me focus on craft instead. Le Guin points out that, "A rational fear of plagiarizing; and an individualistic valuation of originality, have stopped many prose writers from using deliberate imitation as a learning tool." Imitation and borrowing can be quite useful when learning craft.

While I could see the benefit to doing each set of exercises, there just wasn't anything in the text to inspire me to do them all. In a group or workshop setting, I could play off the ideas of others, and find inspiration beyond my narrow interpretation of the text. Steering the Craft is very much a workshop book, and I felt that, as a solo writer unable to share the lessons with other writers, the effect of the book was diminished. There are many valuable things to be learned here, but it could have been so much more if experienced with a group.

It's easy to see how the exercises can inform and improve your writing, but without feedback from others, you're still only as good as your ability to self-analyze. It's been my experience that authors are among the least qualified to be objective about their writing (ask an editor or agent about the pitches they receive and you'll see my point). So, while practice is always a good thing, practice without feedback outside my own skull is not so helpful.

Would I recommend Steering the Craft? Yes. It's short, informative, and gives you the tools you need to let a story tell itself. It also provides a useful framework for leading your own writing workshop, whether an intensive weekend retreat, or meetings spread over time. It may not be the most inspiring book, but you can't help but improve your writing with such a strong focus on craft.

*****

Return to Ellipsis, The Editorial Department blog