Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form
An excellent study, first of its kind.  --Josh Allen, Queens CollegeAn original approach; useful; excellent and lucid introduction.  --Wendy Coural, Cabrillo CollegeBell 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.  --Jeff Minerd, co-editor,Writer's CarouselHere 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  --Elizabeth Evans, University of ArizonaIt'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.  --Alan Davis, editor,American FictionMadison 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'sThe Experience of Literature.  --Clarence Brown,Trenton TimesMadison Smartt Bell'sNarrative Designis 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 -usefulbook.  --Antonya Nelson, author ofLiving to Tell ThemandNobody's GirlOffers concrete advice for organizing fiction.   --Laurie Champion, Sul Ross State UniversityThis 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.  --Sam Blate, Montgomery CollegeThis is the most insightful, outright useful, mostinventiveguide to writing that I've seen.  --Howard Norman, author ofThe Bird Artist