A New Beginning, Beginning A New Thing
It’s been a long time. COVID exhaustion, then things kinda seeming to get better, then a summer…. I have been writing, which is something. The first draft of The Rules, the first Ghildor book, is nearly complete.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Like everybody else, I’ve been in the odd writers’ group, with indifferent success, but a passing remark in my current one sent me straight to eBay. Maybe you knew this, but I didn’t: Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a book of exercises and commentary for writers of fiction!
Bibliography entry for the old-fashioned, like me:
LeGuin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1998.
Now if you’ve read every word of this blog (and if you haven’t, you should question your life-choices), you know how much I admire LeGuin’s writing, critical acumen, and just general wonderfulness. Surprise, surprise, I think Steering the Craft is fantastic.
Here’s a quote from Appendix 2, which explains some basic grammar and syntax that anyone who’s serious about English ought to know. She is flagging something that drives me bananas—which I have never seen anyone but LeGuin (and myself, internally) find troublesome:
A Note Concerning the Potential Mood
“I think he may come” and “I thought he might come” mean the same thing in two different time-frames: the speaker considers/considered an uncertain future event to be possible.
“I think he might come” is a colloquial usage with the same or nearly the same meaning as “I think he may come.”
The present potential, “may,” is increasingly often used in a past-tense context: “I thought he may come.” …
[CIL’s insertion: here’s an example from a best-selling novel that makes the point perhaps more effectively because it doesn’t sound so dreadful; I’ve changed character names to protect the guilty, both fictional and otherwise:
Sammy had discussed Davidson exhaustively with source Q and suggested that Davidson may have been responsible for the murder.]
… To my ear, this is an impossible combination; it self-destructs. I hear “may” as a form having to do with the future of the present, not the future of the past. I can be comfortable with it only if written, “I thought, ‘He may come.’” “May” is, however, now so frequently used in a past-tense context that this distinction between “might” and “may” may well be a goner. (STC 162)
[One more insertion: the abbreviation STC is an academic-style abbreviation for Steering the Craft. I could use “LeGuin 162” (or ”LeGuin, 162,” depending on which convention I’m attending), but I might want to quote from other LeGuin books in this series, so I’m pre-abbreviating.]
The core of the book isn’t about grammar, of course. It’s about writing fiction, and ways to think about things writers do and can do (and shouldn’t do), and examples to help that thinking, and exercises for challenging and exciting the writerly brain. It’s witty, opinionated, elegant, funny, and in many places brilliant.
You’ve probably already guessed why I mention this: I’m going to walk through, chapter by chapter, and do the homework.
Each chapter takes up a topic, and I’ll write a little discussion and reflection about LeGuin on that topic, what I think, plus location information for finding the prose examples she suggests reading. (Most of the examples are out of copyright now, so probably on Gutenberg anyway.) To conclude the first entry on this chapter, I will present an exercise (rarely, two) that she offers, and you and I will go off and do the homework. Well, I will, anyway.
Then, in the next week, I’ll show what I came up with, and do some criticism (what, as she notes, is these days called “critiquing”). Quite possibly this will lead to more exercises, because LeGuin often gives several linked assignments, revising the results of Exercise 1 in light of new instructions and so forth. Once I get done with a chapter this way, I go on to the next.
I figure, I’ll learn a lot, you’ll have something to read that will be thoughtful and perhaps interesting (at least, if you are interested in questions of prose style in fantasy/scifi, which is kind of my bag in this blog), and we’ll also all come out with an even greater appreciation for Ursula K. LeGuin. Who knows: you might get hooked on these exercises, run out and buy the book, and become a fantasy novelist! (Not that there’s anything specifically fantasy about any of this, or very little; that just happens to be what LeGuin and I were and are most into, writing-wise.)
By way of preliminary conclusions to an introduction (???), here are the topics covered, in order:
- The sound of language
- Punctuation, syntax, the narrative sentence and paragraph
- Rhythm and repetition
- Adjectives and adverbs
- Tense and person of the verb
- Voice and point of view
- Implicit narration: imparting information
- Crowding, leaping, focus, and control (STC xii)
One more concluding remark, which may serve as a teaser: LeGuin does not agree with a great deal of what has become standard in “how to write” stuff. Much of that stuff is fairly old, and she often trashes it head-on, gleefully. I adore this. But she also has a great technique that we should all take to heart, in that she presents examples of really excellent writing which does just the sort of thing she’s talking about—sometimes (in fact often) seemingly “breaking the rules.” And to give some idea of what she means by “good writing,” here are the first three authors from whom she quotes extended examples: Gertrude Stein, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain. (Her favorite, by the way, is Virginia Woolf.)
So let’s all get excited to dig into some virtual writing class, a seance writer-group with Ursula K. LeGuin, and in the meantime, let’s all go read some truly excellent prose.
May I suggest reading some LeGuin?