An Awfully Big Blog Adventure

Steering the bones? Checking out two writing handbooks by Tracy Darnton

I've finally looked at a couple of my unopened writing books.  

Steering the Craft - A 21st-century guide to sailing the sea of story by Ursula K. Le Guin. 

And Writing Down the Bones - Freeing the writer within by Natalie Goldberg which is now in its 30th anniversary edition. This a recommended reading book on an MA course I'm teaching so I thought the time had definitely come. 

Let's start with Writing Down the Bones and some full disclosure from me - I'm the uptight, stressy, guilt-ridden kind of writer who's always hoping for a routine and never finding one. I don't relax. I have an annual guided meditation creative session with the Sassies at Folly Farm and I find it difficult and uncomfortable and this year I didn't do it at all. I am not very hippy/Zen. I am the opposite of that. I am not the natural audience for this book.

However, I did like the suggestions she made of topics for writing practice to spruce up my own list of prompts - and there are one or two I will definitely use. The 'Fighting Tofu' (!) chapter could have been written for me talking about ways to break the cycle of guilt, avoidance and pressure. I was very interested in her chapter urging women writers to make more statements in their writing rather than use culturally-embedded qualifiers and modifiers. I'm on the lookout for that in my writing - perhaps, somehow, maybe. Aren't I, isn't it? 

Whilst I felt like I was on the outside, looking in, not quite getting it, as I worked through Writing Down The Bones, I positively looked forward to reading a chunk of Steering the Craft each day and doing the writing exercises. I must be team Ursula Le Guin.  I can tell from all the Post-it notes I've left in there, that this book really worked for me. I've marked up sections on the peer-group workshop about the importance of listening to critique comments in silence to share with my students as I couldn't possibly put it any better. 

I liked the exercises which interrogated my choice of language, the use of repetition, word and sentence length. I too easily get caught up in my characters and plot and foreshadowing and endings and I enjoyed how Steering the Craft made me slow down and look at the words on the page for once. For copyright reasons, the examples given are more likely to be from Dickens and Charlotte Bronte than any recent work, but I enjoyed reading the excerpts. The exercises were enjoyable and useful - I will use them again. Most of all, I liked the warm authorial tone of the book. I liked the cover, the slim volume, the layout. I'm gushing. Reader, I liked this book.

Let me know if there are any others you think I should try out...

(And I must thank Chitra Soundar for suggesting I read Steering the Craft. She obviously knew me well!)

Tracy Darnton is the author of YA thrillers The Rules and The Truth About Lies. Her next thriller, Ready or Not, is out in May. She is an Associate Lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa Uni.