Begin Steering the Craft (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) by iconic author Ursula LeGuin. The subtitle, please:
Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator* or the Mutinous Crew
This will be the first thing of LeGuin’s I’ve read since The Dispossessed.
The author approaches writing here as a craft rather than an art or a means of self-expression (or therapy). Good enough. I need a reintroduction to thinking about writing – it feels like such a foreign landscape these days – and stumbled upon a recommendation for the LeGuin book while browsing around. I have faith in serendipity.
LeGuin includes in her book a writing task for fledglings which she calls the Chastity Exercise – no adverbs, no adjectives. She says this of the exercise:
I invented the Chastity Exercise for my own use when I was a very Lone Navigator of fourteen or fifteen. I couldn’t give up chocolate milkshakes, but I could do without adverbs for a page of two. It’s the only exercise I’ve suggested in (I think) every workshop I’ve taught. It seems to be useful to us all.
*Lone Navigator, c’est moi.
