Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

Revised and updated for the twenty-first century, Steering the Craft is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag of the essentials of a writer’s craft, a generous gift from one of the great thinkers about how – and why – to write. This handbook is an accessible and profound guide to the craft of writing and editing.

Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Drawing on the global canon, Le Guin offers her inimitably witty commentary and incisive dissection, developing into an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. No other writing guide offers such a comprehensive, experienced and kind approach to “steering the craft” as a writing crew.

Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer’s shelf.