Chapter ten, the final chapter, of Steering the Craft is about “Crowding and Leaping.”

Crowding is defined by Le Guin:

It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and cliches, never to use ten vauge words when two will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward.

And leaping:

But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listening is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.

Anyway, so this is the final installment of my run down of this book. I’ve found it incredibly useful as I revised as it provided me with many great reminders.

my friend, Jordan Rosenfeld (who also has a brand new web site–click on her name and check it out).

Let’s skip ahead to chapter nine of Steering the Craft, which is chock full of rich and useful information. This chapter is on “Indirect Narration, or What Tells.” Here’s the bit that leapt out at me:

If all people in the memoir say only what the author wanted to hear, all we hear is the author speaking–an interminable monologue. Some fiction writers do the same thing. They use their characters as mouthpieces for what they want to say or hear. And so you get the story where everybody talks alike, and they all talk like the author.

Check it out: interview with Myfanwy Collins.

Chapter six of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft on “Subject Pronoun and Verb” is one of my favorite chapters. I underlined or starred about 3/4 of the paragraphs. Here’s the bit that grabbed me the most, though:

To discuss the use of tense, we have to realize that in fictional and nonfictional narrative, the “past tense” is not past and the “present tense” is not present. Both are entirely fictive. The story, whether or not it’s based on a real even, exists only on the page. The only real present time is the reader’s.

You will not want to miss this: A Hundred Years at 15, written by my brilliant friend Xujun Eberlin.

Chapter four of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is on repetition, but I’ve not much to say on that one–rather am skipping right to the brief chapter five on “Adjective and Adverb.” What I loved was this:

“Somehow” is a weasel word; it means the author didn’t want to bother thinking out the story–“Somehow she just knew….” “Somehow they made it to the asteroid….” When I teach science fiction and fantasy writing I ban the word. Nothing can happen “somehow.”

I’m positive that somewhere in something I’ve written, I’ve used somehow. My task now is to seek it out and rewrite.

Keeping in line with my F. Scott Fitzgerald obsession of late, I finished reading This Side of Paradise yesterday (from the Library of America edition of Novels and Stories 1920-1922). Of course, I loved this portrait of the artist as a young man (though not as much as Gatsby or Tender is the Night)–and was tickled in reading how closely Fitzgerald’s own chronology fits that of Amory Blaine, the protagonist. Here’s just at taste:

Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek, but it turned bluish-black just the same.

Chapter three of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is devoted to sentence length and complex syntax. She says, wisely:

Rhythm is what keeps the song going, the horse galloping, the story moving. Sentence length has a lot to do with the rhythm of prose. So an important aspect of the narrative sentence is–prosaically–its length.

And then there is this bit which is pure gold:

When Henry James began dictating his novels to a secretary, his tendency to qualify and parenthesize and embed clause within clause got out of hand, clogging the narrative flow and making his prose totter on the edge of self-parody. Listening with a careful ear to one’s prose isn’t the same thing as falling in love with the sound of one’s voice.

Last night, Allen and I watched–well, watched is being generous, really–let’s say instead that we fast forwarded through the latest version of King Kong, and somewhere in the middle of the scene when the dinosaurs, and Naomi Watts, and King Kong were flailing around in the vines before they tumbled to the ground, Allen dubbed the ape, “Kong ex machina.”

I’m not sure I need to say much more about this film than I have said above.

My favorite part of the second chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is her “opinion piece” (i.e. rant) on “Grammatical Correctness.” Here’s just a bit of it:

I detest the self-righteous tones of those who sneer at other people’s speech, and I distrust their motives. But I have to walk a razor’s edge here in this book, because the fact is that “incorrect” usage, in written prose, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect voice, is disastrous. It can invalidate a whole piece. How can a reader trust a writer who seems to be ignorant of the medium she works in?

The first chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is about the sound of writing. I very much liked this quote:

A good reader has a mind’s ear. Though we read most of our narratives in silence, a keen inner ear does hear them. Dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble: these are faults in the sound of prose, though we may not know we hear them as we read. Lively, well-paced, flowing, strong, beautiful: these are all qualities of the sound of prose, and we rejoice in them as we read. And so good writers train their mind’s ear to listen to their prose–to hear as they write.