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.
Author
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
