Last night I sat up reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1998 book Steering the Craft, a collection of writing exercises for the “Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.” I’m currently a lone navigator, getting used to being alone with my craft, so I marked a number of Le Guin’s writing exercises to try out later this week.

Discussing sentence variety, point of view, and the treatment of time, Le Guin shares exquisite excerpts from some of the writers I love most: Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and especially Virginia Woolf. Reading Le Guin’s excerpts makes me want to return to a bunch of classics, Bleak House and To the Lighthouse in particular. I’d forgotten the sense of rhythm that governs Woolf’s prose–the way it builds and paces itself and carries the reader along.

Steering the Craft reminds me of another book on reading and writing: Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer, which invites us to read attentively, focusing on technical artistry and craft.  If dialogue, detail, and narration are our subjects, then Kafka, George Eliot, and Chekhov (especially Chekhov) can be our mentors and our guides.

Whereas Prose is content to illustrate and reflect on the great writers’ techniques and strategies (and to supply an essential reading list), Le Guin places her excerpts in the service of the writer’s craft. She provides exercises and prompts for writers and writing peer groups, and she offers frank encouragement to any writer who is willing to put in the hard work:

Once we’re keenly and clearly aware of these elements of our craft, we can use and practice them until–the point of all the practice–we don’t have to think about them consciously at all, because they have become skills.

A skill is something you know how to do.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

There’s luck in art. There’s the gift. You can’t earn that. You can’t deserve it. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.

Le Guin has an entire chapter in her book on the uses of repetition, and she’s very eloquent on the power of rhythm to drive language forward. We see those skills–rhythm and repetition–at work in her prose, especially in the final paragraph from this excerpt. Notice how effectively she repeats the words “deserve” and “earn” and “learn.”  With more repetition, she creates a memorable (and almost prophetic) sequence, beginning with “there is, there is,” and then “you can’t, you can’t” and finally “you can, you can, you can.”