Craft on My Commute #5: Steering the Craft

I needed to reach the end of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story to really appreciate the guiding metaphor for her book. I expected that this book would focus on how to construct a compelling story through plot, themes, and character, but the lessons she presents are more about how to understand, traverse, and reveal stories that already exist. Hers is not the first book I've read that suggests that stories are somehow out there waiting to be discovered and honed, as opposed to something that writers build. 

While I still need to built up faith that I'll find the stories I'm meant to write, I'm glad I found my way to LeGuin's succinct, elegant guidebook. The text clearly defines and provides examples of the tools writers use to explore and uncover their stories: word choice, sentence structure, point of view, verb tense, and narration. If you have a rough idea of these concepts, but want to make that knowledge more precise, this book is a great place to start. Her discussions of verb tense and different types of narrators were clear and simple, and revisiting them in this essential way refreshed my thinking about how to identify and use these narrative elements. She delivers her advice efficiently and with a lot of charm (even when being a bit of a curmudgeon), which made the time I spent reading and learning from her delightful.  

If you are looking for writing exercises, the ones LeGuin includes in this book are great. She introduces each with a clear description of what idea the exercise is designed to teach or demonstrate and provides examples of how to alter the instructions so you can explore a different aspect of the lesson. The subjects of the exercises range from word choice and sentence structure to exploring narrative points of view to managing exposition and backstory. One thing I like about her exercises in particular is that you don’t need to apply them to a work in progress. LeGuin provides a few simple scene or story ideas to help you get the most out of the exercise and the accompanying lesson.

While reading this book, I realized that I may not have ever read one of LeGuin’s novels. (If I have, it's been decades.) Friends, if you are a LeGuin fan, which of her books would you recommend to a new reader?