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In Steering the Craft, a book that takes the form of a workshop for budding writers, Ursula K. Le Guin opens with the argument that adults need to reawaken a lost childlike sensitivity to the material elements of language in their writing:
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 soundeffects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.
Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. 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. Some writers keep this childish love for the sounds of language. For them language is not a way to deliver a message, but, as McLuhan said, is the message. Others "outgrow" their oral/aural sense of language as they learn to read in silence. That's a loss. I think an awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer. Fortunately it's quite easy to cultivate, to relearn, reawaken. (19; emphasis in original)
Keeping in mind the pun on "craft" in the title of her book, we can read this passage as an elaboration of one of Le Guin's favorite metaphors, that of the homeward journey. Adult writers must steer their craft-both art and vessel-back to the beginnings of language, to a period when the oral and aural pleasures of speech hold sway. For a sensitivity to sound is "an essential skill" in writing, and this sensitivity is intimately linked to the writer's experiences of language during childhood. This is not to say that the experiences in question occur exclusively for children, since there are some writers who retain a "childish love for the sounds of language," and continue to experience language in the manner of a child. Yet, following the metaphor of return suggested by the title and opening sentences of Steering the Craft, even these writers must have forgotten or outgrown what Gérard Genette calls the "lost...