It was indeed a Superior comestible ( that ’s magic), and he put it on the stove because he was allowed to cook on that stove, and he baked it and he baked it till it was all done brown and smelt most sentimental. and one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick. And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind that you must particularly never touch. Once upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. Rudyard Kipling: from “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin” in Just So Stories: And there’s nothing in either nonsense or beauty that restricts it to children. Rudyard Kipling has let generations of kids know how nonsensically beautiful a story can sound. The Just So Stories are a masterpiece of exuberant vocabulary, musical rhythms, and dramatic phrasing.

Fortunately it’s quite easy to cultivate, to learn or reawaken.

An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer. Others “outgrow” their oral/aural sense of what they’re reading or writing. Some writers keep this primal interest in and love for the sounds of language. They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use them in all the wrong places. Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. This is just as true of prose as it is of poetry, though the sound effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.

Both the meaning and the beauty of the writing depend on these sounds and rhythms. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. The sound of the language is where it all begins. Le Guin’s updated edition of Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, available now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The following is the first chapter of Ursula K.

Steering the craft by ursula k le guin