Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin

There's no sea chart for a boat in a hurricane.  But there are still some basic ways to make her seaworthy and keep her from capsizing, going to pieces, or hitting an iceberg.

I didn't get as much out of Ursula K. Le Guin's book on writing, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, as I was hoping.  It's pretty narrowly focused, eschewing big questions about character and plot and worldmaking--the things I would really like to hear from Le Guin about--for discussions of real nuts-and-bolts stuff like point-of-view, tense, and repetition.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love that stuff, and it's a lot of what I focus on in my fiction writing class.  And maybe that's the problem: Le Guin's book is full of great, practical advice, but it's mostly stuff I already believe.

It was nice to hear, however, some of my own advice repeated back to me, like:

Particularly disturbing is the effect of being jerked into a different viewpoint for a moment.  With care, the involved author can do this (Tolkien does it with the fox).  But it cannot be done in limited third person.  If you're writing the story from Della's point of view, you can say, "Della looked up into Rodney's adoring face," but you can't say, "Della raised her incredibly beautiful violet eyes to Rodney's adoring face."  Though Della may be well aware that her eyes are violet and beautiful, she doesn't see them when she looks up.  Rodney sees them.

(Beginning writers do this literally all the time, and it's always just like this: a description of eyes, or a face, or a smile.)  Or:

Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages.  As a young writer I figured that if anybody knew about short stories, it was Chekhov, so I tried taking his advice.  I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right.

The best section of the book, actually, is Le Guin's examples of the different kinds of point of view.  She tells one simple story, about a space princess who is anxious about her place in the kingdom and makes eye contact with a friendly face in a crowd, from several different points of view and the examples do a terrific job of showing how each affects the nature of the story.  I'm going to use those as examples in my class.  But the exercises she includes are not especially helpful and interesting, and though she includes a lot of really fascinating examples of authors using the tools she discusses--mostly, it turns out, Virginia Woolf--I would have liked to see them explicated or explored more.