This means that if you click the link and purchase the item, I may receive a small commission. Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you want to try it out, use my link and we both get a free month 🙂 It’s a truly amazing app to help you remember what you read. The quotes above were gathered using Readwise. Want to read more? Find Steering the Craft here: Bookshop You will notice a difference in the quality of your writing: it will be more beautiful, purposeful, and complex. If you are serious about your writing, you should buy it, read it, reread it, and work each example several times. I can’t possibly reproduce the finer details of Le Guin’s advice in a thorough yet shortened manner. But remember that you write alone, and ultimately you are the only person who can judge your work.

Le Guin provides some useful advice for members of peer group workshops on how to give and receive criticism. Getting feedback from others can be useful to help you improve, especially if you feel stuck. It may also show you what you want to write. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. Once we’re keenly and clearly aware of these elements of our craft, we can use and practice them until-the point of all the practice-we don’t have to think about them consciously at all, because they have become skills. Le Guin has also created one or more workable exercises for each skill to help you practice. It takes craft.Įach section comes with examples from other masterful writers. Writing a sentence that expresses what you want to say isn’t any easier than plumbing or fiddling. What comes next, beyond the basics, includes the sound of the prose,sentence construction, voice, point of view, and more. It is not a book for beginners it meant for people who have mastered their grammar and other basics and want to elevate their writing to the next level. Throughout the course of the book, she continually blew my mind with her ability to explain a writing concept using her mastery of that concept. By sharing her expert advice in such a public form, she really is steering the craft. Le Guin, a master of narrative and the craft of writing, shares a lifetime’s worth of writing tips.

Steering the craft by ursula k le guin