Our Third Book Quote for Saturday from Ursula Le Guin
“The sound of the language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships. This is just as true of written prose as it is of poetry, though the sound effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.”
~ Ursula Le Guin, Steering The Craft
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I am currently doing a series of Saturday quotes from Ursula Le Guin’s book on writing titled Steering The Craft. If you haven’t already encountered it, then hie thee to thy local library or bookshop at once—because as I’ve said in previous weeks, it is Absolutely My Favourite Work on the art, and craft, bloodstained toil, and sheer joy of writing.
The above quote is one of the reasons why: how many other tomes on writing do you know that discuss the sound of prose? Yet Le Guin is absolutely right, in my humble opinion: the sound of your language, the oral rhythm and flow of it, lie at the heart of great prose.
Le Guin provides several examples in Steering The Craft — but consider this as well, from the opening page of Dickens’ Bleak House:
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. …”
Don’t you just love it? I know I do!