Steering the craft : exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew / Ursula K. Le Guin.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Ursula K. Le Guin generously shares the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime's work.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness, Walker, 1994), the author of more than 30 novels, short stories, poetry, children's books, and essays, demonstrates here why she is a master of her craft. The title refers to a workshop she gave at the Flight of the Mind in 1966; collected here are the discussion topics and exercises for self-guided study. Although she focuses on the technical aspects of writing, Le Guin's skill pushes this beyond a handbook or style manual. Through "opinion pieces" about specific concerns, through her eclectic selections of writing to illustrate various techniques and the progression of exercises crafted to give experience to the novice and to flex the muscles of more seasoned writers, Le Guin's style is warm and encouraging, yet her standards of what turns writing into art are clearly defined and never compromised. A separate section covers collaborative workshops and "peer review" groups, offering sound suggestions for making the time spent both productive and challenging. Highly recommended.‘Denise S. Sticha, Seton Hill Coll. Lib., Greensburg, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Le Guin, a well-known science fiction writer who also has a reputation for excellence as a writers' group leader, has put down on paper what she instinctively knows about the craft of writing and what she has learned from teaching it. The result is this instructive, supportive guide for writers who desire to be a productive member of a criticism group or want to pursue their art alone. Concerning the latter situation, Le Guin makes an important point: "Group criticism is excellent training for self-criticism, but until quite recently no writer[s] had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned by doing it." The author goes on to take the reader-writer through a cogent course touching on such topics as punctuation, syntax, repetition, adjective and adverb use, point of view, voice, and other necessary concerns in writing both fiction and nonfiction narratives. Illustrative examples from outstanding writers and exercises for the reader round out this noteworthy handbook. --Brad Hooper

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ursula K. Le Guin was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California on October 21, 1929. She received a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1951 and a master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952. She won a Fulbright fellowship in 1953 to study in Paris, where she met and married Charles Le Guin.

Her first science-fiction novel, Rocannon's World, was published in 1966. Her other books included the Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The Lathe of Heaven, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and The Telling. A Wizard of Earthsea received an American Library Association Notable Book citation, a Horn Book Honor List citation, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979. She received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She also received the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. She also wrote books of poetry, short stories collections, collections of essays, children's books, a guide for writers, and volumes of translation including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by Gabriela Mistral. She died on January 22, 2018 at the age of 88.

(Bowker Author Biography)