Steering the Craft: A Twenty-first Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of StoryFrom the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, "a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller" (Boston Globe), the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft. Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing. Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guin's own witty commentary and an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. She also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online. Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer's shelf. |
Contents
1 The Sound of Your Writing | 1 |
2 Punctuation and Grammar | 11 |
3 Sentence Length and Complex Syntax | 20 |
4 Repetition | 36 |
5 Adjectives and Adverbs | 43 |
Person and Tense | 47 |
7 Point of View and Voice | 61 |
8 Changing Point of View | 87 |
9 Indirect Narration or What Tells | 94 |
10 Crowding and Leaping | 117 |
Back Matter | 127 |
Back Cover | 143 |
Spine | 144 |
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Common terms and phrases
action adjectives and adverbs adverbs beauty Bleak House break can’t chapter clause critiquing crowd dark detached author device dialogue dingbat discussion doesn’t egdon Heath example exer exercise eyes fake rule feel first-person floyd focus frog grammar grommet happened hear involved author isn’t Jacob Jacob’s Room Jane Jane Eyre keep kind language limited third person lone navigator long sentences look means memoir Memoirists moves narration narrative prose never nonfiction noun novel observer-narrator one’s onomatopoeia paragraph passage past tense peer group plot point of view predicate present tense Princess Sefrid pronoun punctuation rassa read aloud reader repetition revision rhythm scene semicolons shift sound staring steering the craft story storytelling syntax tell there’s things Thornfield Hall thought tion told unreliable narrator UrsUla K verb viewpoint character Virginia Woolf voice whole woman words workshop writing written you’re