On Writing by Stephen King and Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin

These are very different books.  On Writing is partly memoir, partly an inspirational work, partly a guide to the writing life, and also, in small part, a guide to writing.  Steering the Craft is a technical writing workshop in written form, complete with exercises and instructions on beginning your own writing group.

In composing his writing manual, King relies almost entirely on story.  He tells stories to illustrate the importance of "reading a lot, and writing a lot". He tells stories about the pernicious adverb,  and invents stories to illustrate their evil.  He tells stories about agents, about writing careers, about adding and removing detail in your work, and even tells stories about writing the book that we hold in our hands.  What his book is NOT about is language. This is ironic, given that the story that King tells about the origin of On Writing is that he was inspired by Amy Tam, who bemoaned the fact that no one ever asks writers of popular fiction about language.

In contrast, it's no surprise to learn that Le Guin is the daughter of professors. Steering the Craft reads like a beginning textbook for a creative writing class.  Let's start at the sentence level, and cautiously expand to discuss elements of story like Point of View.  Let's illustrate our points with references from various literatures. Let's give students an opportunity to practice what we've just covered by including exercises.  Let's learn.

I found both books useful, but I picked up more useful nuggets from King's book than from Le Guin's, despite the fact that I love Le Guin's novels and don't find King's very interesting.  Oh well.

I do regret a bit that I read these two books simultaneously.  I have a long-standing insecurity about paragraph breaks. After you get past the basics of  "one subject, one paragraph", just how are you supposed to decide exactly when to start a new paragraph?  I've always felt that there was some secret that I was missing.  But one of these two books gave me a great insight: after you get past the basics, paragraphs are about the rhythm of the work.  I wish I knew which of these two authors to credit.