Review
Ursula K. LeGuin has long been one of my favorite writers, so I was naturally interested in reading her book on the craft of writing. This book is built around exercises for a workshop she conducted, so it is very much a workbook, rather than a textbook. There are ten chapters, each with a series of exercises focusing on some aspect of writing (such as sentence length, verb tense, adjectives and adverbs, etc.) Each chapter is introduced by a few pages of LeGuin's thoughts about the chapter's topic.
Be aware that this book is about the craft of writing; it is mostly devoted to the concrete business of putting words together well: sounds, parts of speech, sentences, paragraphs. This is not a book of grand thoughts about plotting your next novel, character development, setting, or any of the other large-scale facets of writing a novel or story. LeGuin, though, is one of the most sophisticated and elegant prose stylists in the speculative fiction genres, so there is much to learn from her within this somewhat narrow scope.
The exercises (do work through them, that is what the book is for) are strange and challenging. They are not designed to produce great polished prose (they are intended to be done "on the spot" in a workshop environment), but instead stretch you to become conscious of details of writing that you might take for granted. They are a great tool to bring one's own stylistic habits into focus - sometimes embarrassingly so - and open up the possibility of using the language in different ways than you customarily do.
Although her commentary is succinct, it is always thought-provoking. Rather than just stating that a certain practice is good or bad, she examines it, pulls it apart, and considers what it offers the writer. Sometimes she even goes against the grain of conventional wisdom, but articulates her thinking well enough that we have a clearer understanding of the issue.
The narrowness of the topics covered in this book, and the fact that the text consists of personal observations and opinions, rather than comprehensive teaching, make Steering the Craft unsuitable as a one-stop book on writing fiction. Rather, it is a book for people who already love writing and want to develop their technical skills. It won't teach you how to write fiction, but it will guide you to mastery of the fiction writer's most important tool, the language itself.