Navigating the Waves: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Ocean of Storytelling

Jeff Dias: This little volume is packed with great advice and thought-provoking exercises. I wish I'd found this year's ago. Hats off to Ursula K. Le Guin and the fine students who inspired her.

United States on Aug 08, 2023

eg: I read a lot of self help books. This is one of the best, along with Stephen King's book "On Writing"

United States on Jun 24, 2023

davispigeon: I've read a lot of writing books. A lot. Most are either too vague or too mechanistic. Steering the Craft is neither. And it's really funny. So many authors of writing books take themselves FAR too seriously. I guess when you're a best-selling author, you don't need to prove yourself so you can be more relaxed.
I haven't yet done the writing exercises but they look like a lot of fun.
This one's a keeper.

United States on May 18, 2023

Jason Booth: Having read several different books on writers' craft, storytelling, and the how-tos of drafting a novel, this book is both a breath of fresh air and a concrete guide to writing the story you really want to tell. I would not recommend this for the beginner, but for someone who already has the basics under their belt and is ready for something more challenging it will prove invaluable. Although it's a slim little tome, it packs weight in its words. A great addition to any serious writer's library.

Canada on Apr 18, 2023

Alan D: Steering the Craft is a fantastic short guide packed with lots of great insights and writing exercises across a range of different aspects of the craft. Mainly aimed at the kind of writer who’s been doing this thing a little while and wants to hone their craft, it’s an excellent resource for both lone and group work. As such, it doesn’t go over the basics like how to create characters, build fictional worlds etc… But focuses more on style.

I have to admit, I haven’t tried the exercises myself at the time of writing this review - I wanted to read through and see what they were first - but I’ll absolutely be going back to do them, because they seem very useful indeed. The examples in the book are plentiful, and they’re all excerpts from classic literature (Twain, Austen, Woolf, Dickens etc…) which precisely illustrate the aspects of writing the section highlights, from how to use repetition to the different types of POV (and switching between them), and much more besides. There’s nothing specific about writing science fiction in here, apart from a passing mention about worldbuilding in the context of avoiding info-dumps, but I didn’t expect there to be....

United Kingdom on Jan 03, 2023

Michele: Simple and generous book on creative writing where I found more gems that I was expecting. It showed me how the writing journey is a universe you’ll never be able to explore in its entirety. You can only peek at a galaxy or two, and make due with the time you have been given.

Canada on Dec 28, 2021

Bobbie: Subtitled: “A 21st-century guide to sailing the sea of story”, this is a distillation of advice and exercises from the author’s own writing workshops, focusing on craft and technique. Sound and rhythm. The value of (i.e. not the detailed rules about) punctuation and grammar. Sentence length. Repetition. Adjectives and adverbs. Person, tense, point of view, voice. Exposition. What to include and to exclude. Plus examples from classic texts, and advice on how to critique in a group, face to face or online. The book’s strength is in Le Guin’s engaging advice and suggested exercises. Though I’m too lazy to do them, they made me think.

United Kingdom on Sep 14, 2020

Lara Lee: Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin is a fantastic book, but don't read it thinking it will teach you how to write a novel. Instead, read Write and Revise for Publication by Jack Smith to learn how to take an idea from an outline to a novel. Then, when you finish with that, buy this book, Steering the Craft.

In Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin talks about all the things that make good prose such as the sound of the language, rhythm, descriptions, story verse plot. She brings up all the rules we have heard over and over again such as: show don't tell; write in active voice, not the passive voice; don't use "be" verbs; and more -- and then tells you how to break them. She talks about grammar only to explain how not to be afraid of the semicolon or comas. She slices through so much of the bad advice I see over and over again online with an effortless logic that had me laughing at the truth of her statements. This is not a humorous book, but I tend to laugh at things gives me relief. Writing as contortionist around such arbitrary rules is tough! This book gives you the license and freedom to use all the tools the...

United States on Jun 25, 2018

A. J. Farrel: I try to make a habit these days of writing a review of every book I read as soon as I can after I complete it, but reviewing "Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story" by Ursula K Le Guin was always going to be a hard job. It's a book about how to write by one of the best authors of our time, and I only play at being a writer in my spare time.

This week's sad news of the death of its author makes my review of this little book even more daunting. Where even to start?

Ursula K Le Guin wrote so many excellent books that have entertained and informed me. They taught me about story, they influenced my writing style, and they showed me aspects of thought and politics in that ever-so-subtle way of dropping details into plots that was one her trademarks.

So, with this background I started to read "Steering the Craft". And I did not like it! Here was a successful and respected author telling me with the lightest of touches that I should practice my writing, hone my skills, and pay more attention to what I do. And she put exercises at the end of each chapter. And she illustrated her points with extracts from famous (although typically...

United Kingdom on Jan 27, 2018

Terrance Aldon Shaw: “Craft enables art” Ursula K. Le Guinn tells us in the introduction to her ‘Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story’. “There’s luck in art. And there’s the gift. You can’t earn that. But you can learn skill ... You can learn to deserve your gift.”

Overflowing with valuable insight and inspiration, 'Steering the Craft' is among the best single-volume works on writing I’ve ever read—and I’ve read a lot of them over the decades, positively devouring anything I can get my hands on. If Stephen King’s wonderful ‘On Writing’ is a helpful and encouraging introduction to the subject—call it Writing 101—Le Guinn offers a more advanced and rigorously focused 200-level course that will be most helpful to those already-experienced writers in search of self-improvement and a more acute understanding of how story works.

There is a difference, Le Guinn tells us, between the kind of straightforward expository prose we all learned to write in school, and the language of effective fiction—a distinction far too many aspiring storytellers have yet to grasp. The important thing for a writer, she says, “…is to know what...

United States on Nov 23, 2016