So, I’ve recently been reading Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. Its a book for individual people wishing to expand their skillset (and understand craft at a deeper level) and for workshop groups and the like to expand their skillsets together. She uses examples from her own workshop groups, and of course her professional merits/experience as a well-beloved published author.
It is not didactic nor entirely opinionative on what “writing is meant to mean” and more-so sharing specific tools, skills, and exercises that hopefully aid you in challenging, growing, and expanding your craft in interesting new ways.
I thought to share some of the exercises used inside the book (encouraged by Le Guin herself) to see if ya’ll would like to participate in comments or in private.
So far, I’ve done two (fully) exercises and one part of the third (still have two more to go) so I’ll show them here and share my own variants in summarizing texts below if anyone wants to discuss/take a look 
. Ofc, all credit given to Le Guin (quoting Steering the Craft directly in the exercise bits).
Exercises
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Exercise One: Being Gorgeous
Summary of the chapter: In this section, Le Guin wants the reader/author to write for plasure and play, listen to the sound, and see the rhythm in the sentence. Write for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself to show off and have fun. Be noisy, or be hushed. She hesitated to suggest any “plot” but if you need hook she said: Might try telling the climax of a ghost story. Or invent an island and start walking across it–what happens?
PART ONE: Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that’s meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, reptation, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect, any kind of sound effect you like–but not rhyme or meter.
PART TWO: In a paragraph or so, describe an action, or person feeling strong emotion–joy, fear, grief. Try to make the rhythm and movement of the sentences embody or represent the physical reality you’re writing about.
(Note: I decided to combine part one/part two into one larger piece, that’s just me tho.)
Exercise Two: Am I Saramago?
Summary of the chapter: In this section, Le Guin talked a lot about the importance of learning grammatical rules, but also how to challenge grammatical rules as a specific stance. To know why and how to use grammar, and it impacts the sentence, rhythm, etc. She talked of how sentences should “lead into one another” and continue forward action. She says “this exercise is pure consciousness-raiser. I’m trying to get you thinking about the value of punctuation by forbidding you to use it.”
Write a paragraph to a page (150-350) words of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices).
Suggested subject: A group of people engaged in a hurried or hectic or confused activity, such as revolution, or the scene of an accident, or the first few minutes of a one-day sale.
Excerise Three (partly): Short and Long
Summary of the chapter: In this section, Le Guin talked about sentence variation and specifically punctuation/syntax, while putting a heavy emphasis on the rhythm of language–and how it is the best part of writing, it is your voice, the way you tell a story. She talked about how different authors (Twain, Dickenson, Woolf) used long sentences (with lots of semi-colons, em-dashes, and comma’s) to continue a long sentence meant to mirror stream of consciousness or continue one long action.
PART ONE: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100-150 words, in a sentence of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each must have a subject and a verb.
PART TWO: Write half page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, that is all one sentence.
She suggested some subjects here: For part one, some kind of tense, intense action–like a thief entering a room where someone’s sleeping. For Part Two: A very long sentence is suited to powerful, gathering emotion and to sweeping a lot of characters in together. You might try some family memory, fictional or real, such as a key moment at a dinner table or a hospital bed.
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If you don’t want to share your completed exercises, that’s totally okay! Le Guin also included some “group discussion” questions that we might all discuss.
Questions (for discussion)
EXCERCISE ONE:
- Did concentrating on the sound of the writing release or enable anything unusual or surprising? A voice you haven’t often used?
- Did you enjoy being gorgeous, or was it a strain? Can you say why?
EXCERCISE TWO:
- How did writing it feel like; how it different from writing with the usual signs and guides and breaks; whether it led you to write differently from the way you usually write or gave you a different approach to something you’ve tried to write.
- Was the process valuable? Is the result redable?
EXCERCISE THREE:
- If either part of the exercise forced you into writing a way you’d never ordinarily choose to write, consider whether this was enjoyable, useful, maddening, enlightening, etc. and why.
My exercises (currently unedited haha).
Exercise One: Be Gorgeous
A photo of them sits in the dresser beside her desk—need specified due to the fact there were two dressers in her room, and the other was beside her bed. Inside the middle drawer of this dresser, with ring-hung knobs of antique quality (a gift from her mother, wood old and stained with rings from coffee cups and that time she used the wrong wood cleaner) sat a photo of them inside.
Prom, she recalled. Her second one. Her first was during junior year, with her pregnant friend with a name like “LSD” because her parents thought it funny. Her second was her second senior year—because she was a loser that didn’t do schoolwork and mostly worked and wrote—gone with three friends. All men. All queer. None into her, or so she thought.
Two were dates. Boyfriends. She confused their names often. Was it Jobby and Bake? Or Jake and Bobby? Fumbled on tongues, twisters, though it wasn’t really. Her “date” if you could call him that was had a name that reminded her of the “Board Shorts Boy” from Pretty Little Liars—a guilty pleasure of her youth.
She’d dressed in a dress meant for homecoming, a wine red, or a strange magenta? Whatever, it was dark with red undertones. Or maybe pink? He’d worn a suit. She’d had to work that day, eight hour shift dishwashing. Left the retirement center at noon with her hair stashed in a bonnet to keep the curl from the night before. Her mother picked her up. She smoked cigarettes on the car ride to her house. Her mother grumbled, but didn’t complain.
She’d showered the greasy stink of fried oil and wet food off her before doing up her makeup—which Bobby… Jobby… said made her look like a “hot bitch”. Board Shorts arrived dressed in a suit. He said nice things, and her mother made her take photos. Board Shorts had a speckled face, worn from acne, and she remembered staring at a pustule before glancing quickly away. He didn’t have a father that could teach him how to shave. Razor burn and acne. Grandma and step-grandma. His grandma was mean, called and yelled on the phone, do better—she said. He was a super senior like her. Ended up graduating, but only because they did the (online) tests for him.
At the homecoming dance, they’d taken pictures, bounced balls high up into the sky. It wasn’t even technically their school. They went to one for “troubled youth”. The kind who spray paint walls, or have panic attacks in the bathroom. None were judged. They were there because they were queer and needed meds.
People all around grinded. She remembered eating food and laughing. It was a fun night. Her friends had gifted her a picture frame—for slots for four photos of them at Prom, and one other she couldn’t remember.
They’d stopped being friends on one of their birthdays. It was a sour night—and she remembered being drunk, and looking up the moon. That was a few months after her father went septic—and before that had a stroke—and before that yelled often enough that her soul ebbed and flowed away.
Sometimes she regretted it, when she glanced at the drawer with the rings. You’ve change—a text message from one of them had read.
She hadn’t. She’d just gotten less.
Exercise Two: No Punctuation
So this shopkeeper right just walks up into this shop that feels like it has more than four walls he walks up to the cashier and is like I gotta get some new shoes and he points down at a ruffled pair of slippers he is wearing they’re pink with little bows at the top and a hole where you can see his toe clearly his wives and the shopkeeper stares down at these atrocious slippers for a minute before looking back up and just staring at this man he asks him how he ended up in this situation to begin with and the man says well I had a pair of real nice business shoes leather buffed sparkled so good I could see my face in them most handsome shoes a man can have but my wife didn’t like them said they were too black and too pretty and overshined her shoes altogether so I got rid of them and then I had a pair of comfortable sneakers for yardwork and such you know the drill but one of them accidentally got caught in the mower blade got chewed up and so I had to throw them out they was my only two pair of shoes and now I have none been wearing these slippers all weekend long waiting for your shop to open the man tells the story with an exasperated expression caught between deep annoyance and a resolved sense of this is the way life is the shopkeeper sympathizes deeply with the man he is a shoemaker after all and to a shoemaker of sensible sense and good posture this story was less a tale of inconvenience and more tragedy so he asks the man if he would like more than one pair of shoes in case this ever happened again and the man says well now I am much too poor to afford more than one pair just a pair of decent business shoes might do and the shopkeeper sighs and turns to his rack of shoes and he debilitates over them because his wife has been saying how he is too friendly with customers and easily manipulated but such a tragic story deserves an ending of hope he thought so he puts his hands to his face and he thinks and he thinks and then aha decides that he will give the man not his best pair of handmade shoes but his second best pair and he puts them up to the counter and he tells the man only half price they are having a big sale and the man pays in kind and puts the shoes on right there and says cheerfully now this might be the best pair of shoes I have ever owned thank you kind sir and the shopkeeper grins proudly and off on his way the man went from the shop with his slippers tucked into his pocket and a new pair of shoes hopefully not destined for the fate of his others
Exercise Three: (specifically only part two) One long sentence.
The gravel of his small town was held inside his clenched fist, chewed between his teeth; till it turned to dust swallowed despite the sting and closing of his throat and the well of indignation; the gravel was in his shoes, biting into his heels with every step as he walked and walked and walked through the town—but when he bent and peeled his shoe, and shook it free, nothing fell out; because the stab came not from the gravel of the street but the gravel in his gut—gravel that trickled down his intestines and squeezed out from teeth and toenails whenever the townspeople looked at him; looked and stared and whispered things behind his back, like how he had no father, and how his mother was insane, and how his grandma was the best of them, and how his grandfather’s been looking peaky lately; and their words are a pile of that gravel in his gut—and sometimes he has problems grinding that to dust, forgetting, forgetting, forgetting—forgotten he tells himself as he shoves on his shoe and walks down the road with rocks stabbing his heels; his grandpa sits on the porch of their too-small home, thatched roof to which he was named—Thatch—because it was the first thing his mother saw when she held him close; he looks to his grandfather—setting sun like butter on his yellowed skin veiny and age-spotted, his grandpa looks up from the book he reads about bugs and offers a chip-toothed smile; and Thatch cannot find the words to say: Grandpa I need new shoes; because the man is old, yellow, and the man is so tender Thatch can’t always say the gravel in his shoes and the gravel in his gut might be because of him, too, them, too.