Review Of Ursula K. Le Guin's 'Steering The Craft'

What makes a good story? Is it theme? Plot? The characters? One might say it is the words used to tell the story and how they are used. Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of many novel, stories, poems as well as chapbooks, criticisms and a screenplay. In her work, “Steering the Craft,” Le Guin focuses on the composition of good writing and how words can be used to create a good piece of work. The sections of the book: “The Sound of Your Writing,” “Punctuation,” “Sentence Length and Complex Syntax,” “Repetition.” “Adjective and Verb,” “Subject Pronoun and Verb,” “Point of View and Voice,” “Changing Point of View,” “Indirect Narration, or What Tells,” and “Crowding and Leaping” delve into the art of storytelling and techniques on how to use

The chapters contain a certain aspect of writing, each beginning with a brief overview, and sample passages from other works that further illustrate Le Guin’s point. Also, there are multiple exercises for each section that illustrate how to apply what one has learned. The exercises are very helpful to apply Le Guin’s techniques. Personally, I found Exercise Seven: POV exceptionally helpful to my writing (91). In this exercise, the writer tells a story from a single point of view, using limited third person. Then, one has to tell the same story from a detached narrator point of view followed by the same story told from an observer narrator and an involved author point of views. This exercise was helpful to see which details are divulged and become known to the reader based on who is telling the story. The detached narrator was more omniscient, therefore more detail was needed in the story. The third person narrator only knew so much, so that narration was much more concise and contained less details about the other goings on of the story. I often struggle with which point of view to use in my stories, so this exercise was very helpful in determining which point of view to use based on what or which aspect of the story I want to