Steering the Craft Quotes

“And here’s an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule:   Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”   This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“There are a limited number of plots (some say seven, some say twelve, some say thirty). There is no limit to the number of stories.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work. Group criticism is great training for self-criticism. But until quite recently no writer had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned it by doing it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

“It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“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 am I 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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“It’s childish to assume people will understand unexpressed meanings. It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“it’s one of the great sunrises in all literature. Mark Twain: from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled-up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

“THE POET CAROLYN KIZER SAID TO ME once, “Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.” Maybe storytellers are interested mostly in life and commas.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Ultimately you write alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Crafty writers...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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

“The discipline of art is freedom.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“All you need may be a character or two, or a conversation, or a situation, or a place, and you’ll find the story there. You think about it, you work it out at least partly before you start writing, so that you know in a general way where you’re going, but the rest works itself out in the telling. I like my image of “steering the craft,” but in fact the story boat is a magic one. It knows its course. The job of the person at the helm is to help it find its own way to wherever it’s going.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“I’m a little shy about telling anybody to go read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, since it’s quite an undertaking; but it is a wonderful book. And from the technical aspect, it’s almost miraculous in the way it shifts imperceptibly from the author’s voice to the point of view of a character, speaking with perfect simplicity in the inner voice of a man, a woman, even a hunting dog, and then back to the thoughts of the author . . . till by the end you feel you have lived many lives: which is perhaps the greatest gift a novel can give.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“I’m not going to discuss writing as self-expression, as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things, but first of all—and in the end, too—it is an art, a craft, a making. And that is the joy of it. To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Morality and grammar are related. Human beings live by the word. Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” I’ve had that sentence pinned up over my desk for a long time.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you don’t read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, you’ll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

“A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind's ear. We mostly read prose in silence, but many readers have a keen inner ear that hears it. Dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble: these common criticisms of narrative are all faults in the sound of it. Lively, well-paced, flowing, strong, beautiful: these are all qualities of the sound of prose, and we rejoice in them as we read. Narrative writers need to train their mind's ear to listen to their own prose, to hear as they write.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

“Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“If it’s a complex subject, it probably can’t be expressed in any words at all except all the words of the story.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“As my knowledge of the real world is sketchy, I provide a fantasy subject. Don’t be afraid; it’s just an exercise. You can return to the real world immediately after and forever.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“I feel like writing the last two paragraphs all over again, but that would be rude. Could I ask you to read them over again?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Too many people who yatter on about “you should never use the passive voice” don’t even know what it is. Many have confused it with the verb to be, which grammarians so sweetly call “the copulative” and which doesn’t even have a passive voice. And so they go around telling us not to use the verb to be! Most verbs are more exact and colorful than that one, but you tell me how else Hamlet should have started his soliloquy, or how Jehovah should have created light.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story