Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form

First published as a Norton trade paperback 2000, 1st printing. 390pp. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "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." [publisher copy] "The most insightful, outright useful, most inventive guide to writing I've seen."--Howard Norman. "NARRATIVE DESIGN is one of the most original texts I've seen. Among the welter of half-fledged and copycat how-tos out there, here's an invitation into the mind of a terrifically intelligent writer/teacher who doesn't shrink from candid and idiosyncratic comment."--Rosellen Brown. "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."--Antonya Nelson. Pristine paperback w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding w/no creases in spine. Quite presentable.…