Laurie Champion, Sul Ross State University
Offers concrete advice for organizing fiction.
Antonya Nelson, author of Living to Tell Them and Nobody's Girl
Madison Smartt Bell's Narrative Design is one of those books you might need to take with you to your writerly desert isle. It offers all of the essential instructions for writing fiction, as well as providing wonderful examples of the end product, and then supplying brilliant analysis of them. His is a thorough, fascinating, forgiving, good-hearted, unique, and - most impressively - useful book.
Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
This is the most insightful, outright useful, most inventive guide to writing that I've seen.
Elizabeth Evans, University of Arizona
Here are terrific examples of line-by-line reading of terrific stories. Bell offers the student reader terrific examples of line by line readings of terrific stories. I'm impressed
Sam Blate, Montgomery College
This is the book I've wanted someone to offer for twenty years. Structure is by far the most effective tool to teach beginning fiction writers.
Jeff Minerd, co-editor, Writer's Carousel
Bell does the best job I have come across so far of explaining what the traditional linear structure of a story is and why a story should have it.
Clarence Brown, Trenton Times
Madison Bell has chosen fine stories by writers whose work is not shopworn by having gone from one anthology to another for years....His extremely detailed and often brilliant commentary can often take more pages than the story itself....This is the best book of its kind that I have seen since Lionel Trilling's The Experience of Literature.
Alan Davis, editor, American Fiction
It's the first book I've seen that gets to the heart of the matter and won't let go....Useful to classroom writers and writing students of every stripe.
Wendy Coural, Cabrillo College
An original approach; useful; excellent and lucid introduction.
Josh Allen, Queens College
An excellent study, first of its kind.
Book Description
With clarity, verve, and the sure instincts of a good teacher, Madison Smartt Bell offers a roll-up-your-sleeves approach to writing in this much-needed book. Focusing on the big picture as well as the crucial details, Bell examines twelve stories by both established writers (including Peter Taylor, Mary Gaitskill, and Carolyn Chute) and his own former students. A story's use of time, plot, character, and other elements of fiction are analyzed, and readers are challenged to see each story's flaws and strengths. Careful endnotes bring attention to the ways in which various writers use language. Bell urges writers to develop the habit of thinking about form and finding the form that best suits their subject matter and style. His direct and practical advice allows writers to find their own voice and imagination.
Book Info
Discusses how to analyze the use of time, plot, character, and other elements of fiction and guides the reader to see each story's flaws and strengths. Softcover. DLC: College readers.
About the Author
Madison Smartt Bell, author of eight novels and two story collections, teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft and Form FROM THE PUBLISHER
With clarity, verve, and the sure instincts of a good teacher, Madison Smartt Bell offers in this book a roll-up-your-sleeves approach to writing. Focusing on the big picture as well as the crucial details, Bell examines twelve stories by both established writers (including Peter Taylor, Mary Gaitskill, and Carolyn Chute) and his own former students. He shows how to analyze the use of time, plot, character, and other elements of fiction and guides the reader to see each story's flaws and strengths. Careful endnotes bring attention to various writers' different ways of shaping language.
Art & Photography
Book Info
