#*snartnotes

[writingwithsnails]

SNARTNOTES* ON... Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Main Takeaways:

Overall rating is 4 out of 5 stars.

Quick read, good for a train ride

Emphasis on technique (use of sound, grammar, syntax, POV, verbs, etc.) and associated building blocks

Uses classic works as examples instead of using the author’s own work

Provides a different view of what verb tense adds to your story

Last chapter focuses on why it matters what you include and what you leave out

* snail + notes = snart

First Impressions & Aesthetics: The book is…little. It is neither eye-catching nor boring, neither obtrusive nor forgettable. It even fits in my purse! The table of contents reveals that it’s not your bog-standard writing book which focuses on plotting, pantsing, and that sort of thing. Le Guin’s book focuses on technique and what creates the foundation of a good story. She teaches you what you need to know before you pick up a book on plotting and story structure.

Nitty Gritty: The first line of the first chapter hooked me because I agree 100% with her. “The sound of the language is where it all begins… The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships.” (pg 1)

And this line shows you exactly where we’re headed on this craft, the U.S.S. Le Guin, so hop off while you can. Storytelling began as an oral tradition and the chapters build on this by focusing on sound, syntax, and repetition build onto each other. One can’t happen without the other. In the chapter on syntax, emphasizes that “in most good narrative, especially long narrative, it’s less the immediate dazzle of the words than the sounds, rhythms, setting, characters, action, interactions, dialogue, and feelings all working together that make us hold our breath, and cry…and turn the page to find out what happens next.” (23)

Le Guin makes it clear that syntax and grammar lessons are necessary – almost half the book is dedicated to it. “In written prose, incorrect usage, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect or personal voice, is disastrous… To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.” (15-16). She’s also quick to tell you that you and you alone must learn the rules and put them to use. Grammar and spellchecking programs will “chop your sentences short and stupidify your writing. Competence is up to you.” (13). Learning grammar is also up to you. She suggests Strunk and White’s classic to get started.

The second half of the book peels back the layers of POV, verb tense, and narration. She suggests that past and present tense offer different levels of “complexity and size of field” (52). Present tense tends to focus on action in a single time and place while past tense, which is more natural, allows “continual referring back and forth in time and space” (52). Present tense also creates “a kind of permanent artificial emergency, which can be exactly the right tone for fast-paced action” (52). The choice of POV is also important and switching between them shouldn’t be taken lightly. “It’s a major change of voice to go from first to third person, or from involved author to observer-narrator. The shift will affect the whole tone and structure of your narrative.” (70).

The final two chapters offer another intriguing thing to think about: what you don’t include in your story is just as important as what you include. She discusses expository lumps and how “crafty writers (in any genre) don’t allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.” (96). She warns against these lumps but says that descriptive passages, which are not lumps, can move a story forward. You don’t need constant action.

“Crowding and Leaping” is exactly what it sounds like on the label. Sometimes it’s necessary to cut out words or actions to keep things tight. Sometimes you have to leap over events. Both “have to do with the focus and the trajectory. Everything that is crowded in to enrich the story sensually, intellectually, emotionally, should be in focus – part of the central focus on the story. And every leap should be along the trajectory, following the shape and movement of the whole.” (124).

And now I shall leap to the end of the review, to the compilation of quotes, because that's the most important part. I rabidly underline all the best bits and here are the ones (some aren't mentioned in the review above) that provide helpful advice and summarize the main points of the book.

Quotes:

Since narrative is what this is all about, try to make each exercise not a static scene but the account of an act or an action, something happening. It doesn’t have to be bang-pow “action”… What it 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. (xiv)

Punctuation tells readers how to hear your writing. (11)

These [spellcheck] programs are on a pitifully low level of competence; they’ll chop your sentences short and stupidify your writing. Competence is up to you. You’re on your own out there with those man-eating semicolons. (13)

Many of our schools all but stopped teaching grammar. Somehow we’re supposed to be able to write without knowing anything about the equipment we’re using. (13)

Lying is the deliberate misuse of language. But language misuse through “mere” ignorance or carelessness breeds half-truths, misunderstandings, and lies. (14)

In written prose, incorrect usage, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect or personal voice, is disastrous. (15)

Writing can be completely conversational and informal but to communicate thought or emotion of any complexity at all, it has to follow the general agreements, the shared rules of grammar and usage. Or, if it breaks them, it breaks them intentionally. To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution. (16)

I see the big difference between the past and present tenses not as immediacy but as complexity and size of field. A story told in the present tense is necessarily focus on action in a single time and therefore single place. Use of the past tense(s) allows continual referring back and forth in time and space. That’s our minds normally work, moving around easily. Only in emergency situations do they focus very tightly on what’s going on. And so narration in the present tense set up a kind of permanent artificial emergency, which can be exactly the right tone for fast-paced action. (52)

The quality of limitation may attract a writer to the present tense. Its tightly focus beam of attention affords the writer and reader the detachment of visible artifice. It brings the field very close, like a microscope, yet distances by eliminating the surround. It cuts out, minimizes. It keeps the story cool. (52)

People often use the passive voice because it’s indirect, polite, unaggressive, and admirably suited to making thoughts seem as if nobody had done them, so that nobody need take responsibility. (57)

There’s a tendency to fear descriptive “passages”, as if they were unnecessary ornaments that inevitably slow the “action”. To see how a landscape and a great deal of information about people and a way of life can be the action, the onward movement of the story. (110)

Crowding is…what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and cliches, never to use ten video words where two exact words will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications. But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listening is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct. (117-118)

Crowding and leaping have to do with the focus and the trajectory. Everything that is crowded in to enrich the story sensually, intellectually, emotionally, should be in focus – part of the central focus on the story. And every leap should be along the trajectory, following the shape and movement of the whole. (124)

Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up without a seam. It’s as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it’s trying to achieve and will take that shape if you’ll only clear away the verbiage. (126)