The Scene and Its Materials
Scenes, sequels, dialogue exchanges and descriptive details: the building blocks of a draft.
A book for fiction writers
The Craft Behind the Story
A Systematic Guide to Structuring and Revising Fiction
When something isn’t working, this book helps you find out why and decide what to change. A practical guide to the choices that shape a novel, from a single scene to the structure of the whole book.
Ebook by Attila Kulik · Available on Apple Books
New: the companion volume, The Craft Behind the Story: Reference
18 chapters 4 parts 6 appendices
A guide to writing and revision
The idea
Start with a change you can name.
Advice about fiction often speaks of a novel’s pace, tension or voice in broad terms. Revision comes down to specific choices: cutting a scene, moving a chapter, dropping a viewpoint or bringing a reveal forward.
The Craft Behind the Story examines each part you can change: what it contributes, what the reader would miss without it, and how to judge whether it works.
Inside the book
From the smallest detail to the whole story.
The four parts move from scenes and details to the structure of a whole novel, ending with a method for editing a draft.
The Joins
Transitions, chapter breaks, backstory, flashbacks and multiple timelines: how the pieces connect.
The Architecture of the Whole
Openings, middles, endings, viewpoint, subplots, reveals, arcs and theme.
Beyond the Book and Into Practice
Series, genre and the structural edit: putting the book’s tools to work on a manuscript.
Made to use on a draft
A method you can take back to the page.
Each chapter pairs close reading with questions and revision tools, helping you turn what you notice in a story into a decision about your own draft.
01
Diagnostic tests
Seven to ten questions in each chapter to help you examine your own draft.
02
Failure patterns and remedies
Common symptoms, their causes and possible repairs, alongside published examples that show when an apparent flaw succeeds.
03
One story, revisited
An invented family novel returns throughout the book, so you can see the same draft from scene level to whole-book structure.
04
Checklists and exercises
Revision prompts for every chapter, plus a symptom index and a master checklist arranged in revision order.
The companion volume · Now on Apple Books
The Craft Behind the Story: Reference
A Textbook of Narrative Structure
The two books share eighteen chapters, chapter numbers and terminology. Each stands on its own. The guide is for novelists working on a draft; the Reference develops the argument behind the method for readers, teachers and students of fiction.
- The theory at length: Genette, Barthes, Swain, Booth, Brooks, Grice and Goffman, Woloch, and research on how readers process narrative.
- Ten or more failure patterns in most chapters, each with its symptom, mechanism, remedy and exception.
- Close readings of Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby and more, alongside recent fiction, film and television.
- For teachers: exercises, seminar questions and an assessment rubric for every chapter.
Begin with the draft you have
Find the question behind the problem.
Whether you are planning a novel or revising one, The Craft Behind the Story helps you examine its structure and choose your next step. Its companion, The Craft Behind the Story: Reference, develops the theory behind the method.