Steering the Craft
By Ursula Le Guin
This is one of the better-written books on writing that I've read so far. It is full of exercises that actually teach you how to become a better writer if you're willing to put in the work. It's a book that focused on practice.
View on AmazonA skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
What is has to do is move—end up in a different place from where it started. That's what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.
What I like about all the exercises is that they have descriptions of things to talk or think about after you complete them. These encourage you to think critically about how the exercise made you feel and the results it generated.
Writing Exercise: Being Gorgeous
Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use any kind of sound effect you like but NOT rhyme or meter. Relax control and encourage the words themselves—the sound of them, the bears and echoes—to lead you on. Forget about trying to make your style invisible. Concentrate on the sounds.
Good writing always gives pleasure to the ear.
Punctuation
Rest signs in music are for silence, and punctuation in writing serves very much the same purpose.
The wrong punctuation choices can alter the meaning of a phrase completely.
On standards
Our standards for writing are different than for speaking. They have to be, because when we read, we don't have the speaker's voice and expression and intonation to make half-finished sentences and misused words clear. We have only the words. They must be clear.
To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution. If you don't know the real rules, you may fall for fake ones.
On sentences
In a narrative, the chief duty of a sentence is to lead to the next sentence.
A sentence needs coherence most of all. It has to hang together. If a sentence can't even hold itself together how is it supposed to lead you to the next sentence?
It's a myth that short-sentence prose is 'more like the way we speak.' ... people often use more long, well-articulated sentences when they speak than when they write.
There is no optimum sentence length. The optimum is variety.
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
Varying your voice
It might be a good exercise to deliberately manipulate your writing voice. If you find that your first draft is in an authorial or formal voice, try it again in a more familiar voice. Or shift into a more "torrential" mode and let it pour out.
On repetition
Use the dictionary or thesaurus discreetly, and only when you must vary the word choice:
The Dictionary Word, the word that really isn't your word, may stick out of your prose like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons, and it will change the tone.
Adjectives and adverbs
Remove all the qualifiers from your writing—such as rather, or a little. Kind of is another.
If the meaning of the adverb can be contained within the verb, the writing will be clearer. "They ran quickly" vs. "They dashed" etc...
On the passive voice
People often use the passive voice because it's indirect, polite, unaggressive, and admirably suited to making the thoughts seem as if nobody had personally thought them and deeds seem as if nobody had done them, so that nobody need take responsibility. Writers who want to take responsibility are wary of it.
Crowding and leaping
How do you decide what to include and what to leave out? Feel free to crowd in the first draft, then during revision think about what merely pads, repeats, or slows down the story. Cut until what counts is all that's left. Leap boldly.
Reference
Le Guin, U. K. (2015). Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.