Steering the Craft

Lockdown is the time to write your first novel, they say, but I missed the boat. I spent the beginning of it finishing the CIEP Medical Editing Course – and then needed cheering up because I missed the crew I did it with, and though we weren’t locked down anymore, by that point EVERYTHING was cancelled. So I did the CIEP Fiction Editing Course, just for fun.

What fun it was. Tinkering with texts to see how they work and how you could make them work better is like being a ship’s engineer. After decades of working with academic style guides, it was terrifying and liberating to be out on the sea of story with the maps ripped up. A bit like starting out as a freelancer. Until I discovered a whole new set of conventions that not everyone agreed on, but were certainly entrenched in a lot of places (a bit like… you get the point).

I’d absolutely recommend CIEP courses if editing is your thing, and this one gave me the tools to become a ship’s engineer for fiction. But what I needed next was a treasure map.

Steering the Craft: A 21^st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula le Guin was that map. It is very short, beautifully written and reinforced a lot (but not all!) of the fiction editing course material. The advice is very clear and backed up with solid evidence, part of which you create yourself.

Each chapter ends with exercises. You launch by writing one paragraph and navigate towards drafting a whole story. Then you go back into ship’s engineer mode to block leaks, to correct list and trim.

Le Guin gives examples from her own work and that of a host of other greats from Neale Hurston to Woolf, via Twain and Tolkien. She shows you how to work through this book in a writers’ group (you could write together online or offline) but stresses that if you’d rather go it alone, that’s fine. Even if you’re sailing through it in splendid isolation, her clear voice accompanies you throughout, asking difficult questions, reassuring, giving glimpses of how you could approach things from a completely different angle if you ran aground or got caught up in a storm.

I set out to work through this book to get a new feel for storytelling from the inside, to help me in my own work with writers. I ended up with a dozen story stubs that, if I kept at it, could expand into a whole novel.

If you normally do a very different kind of writing (copywriting, technical translation, academic research?) this book would be an investment. Not just because narrative nonfiction is becoming such a big thing, but because it will get you right down to the nuts and bolts of how you write, and how you could write.

If you’re starting to write fiction, or work with fiction authors, get hold of a copy. I found Steering the Craft difficult to put down because I wanted to find out what happened next – in the new stories I was starting to write.

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