Steering the Craft, Ex. 1: “Being Gorgeous”
Practicing the sound and rhythm of language.
I’m pacing my way through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, a handbook on the craft of writing¹. I admire what Le Guin has to say about literature, so much so that I’ve read just the forward of a book without reading the book itself (apologies to the author)!
So far, this book is a gem. I’ll write more on this later, but for now I’m going to transcribe my exercise from her first chapter on the sound of writing. This prompt (to write a paragraph meant to be read aloud) makes me think of one of my favorite of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ journal entries. Here’s the passage² that inspired mine:
About all the turns of the scaping from the break and flooding of the wave to run out again I have not yet satisfied myself. The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf but it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running: I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by every pebble the backwater runs over — if it were clear and smooth there would be a network from their overlapping, such as can in fact be seen on smooth sand after the tide is out -; then I saw it run browner, the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds, while the strength of the backdraught shrugged the stones together and clocked them one against another…
It is pretty to see the dance and swagging of the light green tongues or ripples of waves in a place locked between rocks
And my exercise from chapter one:
Gerard sat. On a rock, overlooking the waves.
He watched as he sat. Lifting his eyes up from the paper to watch. He wrote as he watched.
He paused. Held his gaze on the water, reflecting the clouds reflecting the water. The waves reaching upward, forming cloudy crests against the cloudy sky. He watched them settle into the grey flatness of sand. He watched them crest, and break, and spread.
He wrote each word in the phrase — drawn like hydrogen bonds. Wrote building up — crest, break, and spread.
The crash of waves subsided. Shushed to a shoosh, a whisper.
A plea for placid. For quiet, grey sky.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. “Being Gorgeous.” Steering the Craft. New York: First Mariner Books, 2015.
- Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “From Note-Books, Journal, Etc.” Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. W. H. Gardner. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1985. 126–7.
