Interpreting Le Guin on Voice, Sound, and "Serious Writing"
Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (New York: Mariner, 2015).
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is a great argument for reading books twice. It seemed to me on first read that there was little in the way of concrete advice for what she calls the “serious writer.” Returning to my highlighted volume as a reference text rather than a nonfiction read, I see this was mainly reader error. What I failed to pick up on in my first read was Le Guin’s central thesis: that writing’s voice and its sound are the same concern, and that learning how to convey this to the reader formed the bedrock of her writing process.
Again, my error: this is very plainly rendered. On all of page two, Le Guin writes: “An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer." This thesis of the book recurs throughout. The next chapter, on punctuation, makes an analogy to music—that punctuation is to a sentence as a rest note is to a bar of music (12); a comma, period, semi-colon, dash, etc. tells the reader (and writer) where to mentally place the silence. In the third chapter, she provides examples on how sentence length impacts how writing sounds, particularly in its rhythm (23). Writing is sensory for Le Guin not only in the importance of sensory descriptions, but how the prose literally sounds in the ear.
I have known for some years how important the sound of certain kinds of prose can be to its success, but it took returning to this text to understand the layers involved in exactly what she means. Her thesis is exemplified in her fiction. There is a short story of hers that I have been trying and failing to read in its entirety for a comical amount of time. The story is called “Brothers and Sisters,” found in various collections; it can be read in its entirety under “Excerpt” here. Its first paragraph reads:
The injured quarrier lay on a high hospital bed. He had not recovered consciousness. His silence was grand and oppressive; his body under the sheet that dropped in stiff folds, his face were as indifferent as stone. The mother, as if challenged by that silence and indifference, spoke loudly: “What did you do it for? Do you want to die before I do? Look at him, look at him, my beauty, my hawk, my river, my son!” Her sorrow boasted of itself. She rose to the occasion like a lark to the morning. His silence and her outcry meant the same thing: the unendurable made welcome. The younger son stood listening. They bore him down with their grief as large as life. Unconscious, heedless, broken like a piece of chalk, that body, his brother, bore him down with the weight of the flesh, and he wanted to run away, to save himself.
Nothing falters my confidence as a writer faster than reading this opening paragraph. Look at the way sound operates here: “His silence was grand and oppressive.” The mother is yelling, “a lark to the morning.” “The younger son stood listening” to “his [brother's] silence and her outcry.” Her sorrow BOASTED OF ITSELF? I’m bereft by composition alone! I need a strong cup of coffee and a walk in the snow.
The above paragraph is obviously a great example of diegetic sound, but if you read it aloud, it also gives a strong sense of the author’s voice. These effects continue: the story’s fourth paragraph shows the younger son, Stefan, having left this madness and gotten drunk, stumbling to the edge of town and breaking down crying for his brother. In my copy of Orsinian Tales, this one paragraph is the exact length of a full page:
He left the hospital to get his lunch. Everybody asked him about his brother. “He’ll live,” Stefan said. He went to the White Lion for lunch, drank too much. “Crippled? Him? Kostant? So he got a couple of tons of rock in the face, it won’t hurt him, he’s made of the stuff. He wasn’t born, he was quarried out.” They laughed at him as usual. “Quarried out,” he said. “Like all the rest of you.” He left the White Lion, went down Ardure Street four blocks straight out of town, and kept on straight, walking northeast, parallel with the railroad tracks a quarter mile away. The May sun was small and greyish overhead. Underfoot there were dust and small weeds. The karst, the limestone plain, jigged tinily about him with heatwaves like the transparent vibrating wings of flies. Remote and small, rigid beyond that vibrant greyish haze, the mountains stood. He had known the mountains from far off all his life, and twice had seen them close, when he took the Brailava train, once going, once coming back. He knew they were clothed in trees, fir trees with roots clutching the banks of running streams and with branches dark in the mist that closed and parted in the mountain gullies in the light of dawn as the train clanked by, its smoke dropping down the green slopes like a dropping veil. In the mountains the streams ran noisy in the sunlight; there were waterfalls. Here on the karst the rivers ran underground, silent in dark veins of stone. You could ride a horse all day from Sfaroy Kampe and still not reach the mountains, still be in the limestone dust; but late on the second day you would come under the shade of trees, by running streams. Stefan Fabbre sat down by the side of the straight unreal road he had been walking on, and put his head in his arms. Alone, a mile from town, a quarter mile from the tracks, sixty miles from the mountains, he sat and cried for his brother. The plain of dust and stone quivered and grimaced about him in the heat like the face of a man in pain.
This is usually the point in the story where I want to close the book and go do something far less taxing to my self-esteem. Stefan is in his environment and establishing the environment, but more importantly, he is actively thinking about anything other than his injured brother. It is not clear from the outset that he is going to break down, and when he does it’s quite startling.
It would be interesting to deconstruct this paragraph on world building terms; per Steering the Craft, this is arguably a good example of what Le Guin terms “crowding,” a trick of focus (124). It is, again, a good example of diegetic sound—again we have sound and silence dominating the description.
But what’s especially incredible is what this passage does with voice. Not as pertains to Stefan’s viewpoint or personality—his voice, his interiority, is not well represented here. But that’s not the intention of the passage. Rather, this paragraph conveys a state of mind, a removal from oneself: Stefan is not concerned with himself. He does everything he can to avoid his own interiority. Rather, he is part of the environment. The environment reflects Stefan’s mindset better than Stefan does himself; it is as complex and desolate as Stefan, as quiet and as loud. It quivers and groans, a proxy for the man. In showing us Stefan through the lens of the environment—understanding that the perils of this environment have created the central tragedy in the first place—the narration sets up with astonishing effectiveness what sort of story this is going to be.
*
This is not the essay I sat down to write. I sat down to write about how obscure I find Le Guin’s conception of the “serious writer.” I wanted to know more about what Le Guin meant by this. I think she means it synonymously with “people who have already worked hard at their writing,” but sometimes she uses it as a means of contrast: “the serious writer” appears to be on the other end of a continuum from “the beginning writer.” Other times Le Guin deploys “serious” to describe works instead: “But most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot or retold without fatal loss except in their own words” (123). Here, “serious” operates as a major lever of implicit meaning. She means to say, good, complex. She means, thought-out, considered, drafted and redrafted, refined. But she may also mean, beginning. She may mean to contrast “serious writing” with popular writing, pulp writing. She is a genre writer, so I won’t degrade her legacy by implying she is against genre conventions, but she may consider some science fiction serious and other forms of it frivolous. I would like to know more about what she thought about that.
I consider myself someone who has worked hard at my writing. It will be twenty years next month since I made sitting down to write in some form part of my daily practice—eventually, my identity—and I have seldom wavered. My writing history has distinct phases; when I have been in school, I’ve tended to have an off-again relationship with fiction. I refine my nonfiction writing during these times, which is equally important to me. This waxing and waning is something I’m struggling to make peace with as I enter a new career as a translator. For a number of reasons—mainly because it is such a writing-heavy job, but also because different aspects of writing are emphasized—I have found translation conventions relatively easy to learn, but also found that my grasp on fiction writing has considerably diminished.
I can’t, won’t, blame this solely on my translation practice. My relationship to writing fiction was evolving before I started that training. I jettisoned my self-publishing career for a number of reasons, but mainly due to the realization that I did not want to play the game self-publishing forces its authors to play. I did not want to churn out content. I wanted, in Le Guin’s terms, to be a serious writer.
This reprioritization has had several implications for my writing practice. I’ve had to focus on developing skills that I have certainly toyed with before, but never committed to properly learning—mainly, that is, developing voice. I do have a writing voice, but after 20 years of it, it no longer interests me. It does not strike me as creative or dynamic. It does not challenge me. And most importantly, when I say it does not interest me, I mean that I am often bored in the process of reading the fiction I produce these days.
If I’m bored, my reader almost certainly will be.
I am one of those annoying sorts of people who likes to work, because I like improving my skills. After churning out 400k+ words every year between 2017 and 2021—and hitting at least half that number for a few years before that—I became adept at doing the same thing really well. I had dug myself into an impressively deep rut, and two years after realizing I was in it, I still haven’t completely figured out how to climb out.
All to say: I am entering—perhaps have entered—a new phase of my writing life whose dimensions are not yet clear to me. I dislike the language around “discovering” one’s style because of its passivity—perhaps a “serious” writer is one active in the development of their skills—but this is effectively what I am now trying to do, without the faintest idea of how to do it.
What disappointed me about Steering the Craft the first time I read it is that it is full of examples of writers who have a strong sense of their style and skill, and—it seemed to me—little concrete advice on how to manifest this revered state. In many ways, I have preferred Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook as a craft book in part due to its concrete advice; he and his contributors consistently offer many possible approaches to a writing issue in bullet point form. But it is also true that VanderMeer’s goals are different than Le Guin’s. VanderMeer’s is a guide specifically to writing weird/fantastical fiction, with advice directed at authors at any level, with any objective. As we’ve seen, Le Guin’s is a guide for the “serious writer”—more specifically, the literary-inclined.
I know enough about my objective to understand that I want to develop a style’s much like Le Guin’s: often speculative, always literary, character-driven. These days I am trying to develop my style by way of short stories, all set on the same planet at different times in its history. This allows me to dig deep into world building while also workshopping style in a bunch of different contexts. I do not need to be consistent for very long with a short story; experimentation is easier in short form.
In the two years I’ve spent trying to develop voice and style on and off, the blank page has been my central enemy. Something that has not been my habit as a writer of fiction has been practicing disparate drafts—I tend to edit as I go with no clear line between the first draft and the last. I used to think this rolling editorial approach was integral to my process, but more accurately I think it was integral to the process that has come to bore me. If I really want to work on style, I need to learn to layer: set the foundation, then build the scaffolding, then raise the walls, and worry about the paint later on.
Two weeks ago I forced myself to sit down and write a draft zero for a short story, start to finish, in one sitting. I have a tendency to tank my self-esteem by reading back my own writing which I consider not up to my ability, so this practice used to be anathema to me. The 1,700-word result is basically a raw description of what happens, beat by beat. Here’s an enlightening excerpt: “Reminds her the kids have to be taken to ?somewhere? so they can do ?important activity?” Thanks ever so.
But the fact is that putting down a very detailed, if gappy, foundation is helping me understand exactly how the piece can be strengthened depending on how I fill those gaps. The gaps have become opportunities—places to make things weird. Places to insert the lessons Le Guin’s Steering the Craft actually did impart.
In her section on POV, Le Guin alludes to the semi-reliable narrator (63). Exploration of unreliability and semi-reliability has been part of what has interested me recently in narrative thrillers: how does a narrator convey what’s going on while grappling with obstacles to their perspective? In my story, my protagonist is dealing with a sensory problem severe enough that she is seeking escape from awareness of it. Both the problem and the escape create two obstacles to narrative clarity. There is also an environmental reality on this planet that obscures the senses further.
Is it so outlandish that some details of the story might not be clear—to the narrator? To the reader? Even to me?
What began as a draft zero gap has developed into a thematic opportunity. Here, I can try something that Le Guin does so well in “Brothers and Sisters”: if I choose to retain my protagonist’s lack of clarity, I can step back from her perspective and allow the environment to intervene in the narration. The ways that her clarity is literally obscured can start to develop both her voice and my voice in how this story is told.
What I had wanted going into Steering the Craft was to be told how to learn to use drafts as a method of discovering my own style, but it’s never wise to enter a book with expectations for what it never promised. Instead, Le Guin offers a different perspective on building narrative. Her final words impart that good writing is not a matter of controlling the narrative, but of stepping back from it—of “being ready to let a story tell itself” (126).
This, I think, is the real crux of the volume; Steering the Craft may be best understood as a philosophical manual. It’s meant for more established writers mainly because what it offers is so amorphous: it is a book of ideas about what’s great about Le Guin’s writing. These ideas may work for others; they may necessitate the development of a different mindset in order to work for others; and, absent a comparable mindset to her own, they may not work at all.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly important to glean from her discussion of “serious writers” except as a criterion for self-inclusion as to who might find her advice useful. There is another recurring thesis here that seems far more important: that “the important thing for a writer [is] to know what you’re doing and why” (17). Returning to Le Guin’s fiction—rereading the opening paragraphs of “Brothers and Sisters”—and overhauling my own writing process (while kicking and screaming and throwing a tantrum) wound up being integral not only to understanding what Le Guin was doing and why, but what I was doing and why.
I can’t tell you if Steering the Craft is a good craft book. I think it is certainly a good book on writing philosophy that may also impart some useful craft notes. I’m wondering now—in the spirit of letting a story tell itself—if my aversion to the phrase “discovering one’s style” is misled. Maybe there’s something in stepping back and letting the discovery of the story result in the discovery of one’s skills, if—the way the protagonist’s voice and author’s voice are separate but related beasts—the story’s focus and the author’s focus can create and feed off each other by the same great symbiotic means. If the environment of a story's development matters to the development of a writer's skill. If there's no total separation in any of this. If we become our stories. If our stories become us.