The Craft Behind the Story: Reference

A Textbook of Narrative Structure

Introduction.

This volume treats the structure of the novel at the length of a textbook. It divides a novel into the units a writer can act on, from the scene through the joins between scenes to the architecture of the whole book and its relations with the books around it, and it gives each unit a chapter. A chapter sets out the theory behind its unit, the kinds the unit comes in, the tests that find its failures, a catalogue of those failures, close readings of published fiction, and material for study and teaching. The volume is the companion to a shorter guide for working novelists, and the Introduction says how the two books divide the work, how the chapters here are built, and what the invented novel that runs through them is.

Contents

The volume has eighteen chapters in four parts. The list gives each chapter with its subtitle; the six chapters whose subtitle ends The Full Treatment are built differently from the other twelve, as the Introduction’s second part explains.

Part I: The Scene and Its Materials

1. The Purposes of a Scene
   The Unit of Dramatised Story: Theory, Analysis and Practice
2. Scene and Sequel
   The Six-Beat Engine, the Causal Chain, and the Limits of a Mid-Century Model
3. The Dialogue Exchange
   Speech as Structure: What a Passage of Dialogue Must Do, and How to Test It
4. The Descriptive Detail
   Selection, Not Accumulation: Theory, Analysis and Practice

Part II: The Joins

5. The Transition
   Crossing the Gap: The Managed Ellipsis, the Anchor, and the Orientation Budget
6. The Chapter Break
   Segmentation, the Permission to Stop, and the Placement of the Cut
7. Backstory and Flashback
   Earning the Cutaway: The Past Inside the Present Narrative — Theory, Analysis and Practice
8. Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture
   Order, Strands and the Meeting of Times: The Full Treatment

Part III: The Architecture of the Whole

9. The Opening Pages
   The Beginning of the Main Narrative: Theory, Analysis and Practice
10. The Prologue
    The Separated Unit: Theory, Analysis and Practice
11. The Middle
    Narrowing, Delay and the Long Stretch: The Full Treatment
12. Arc and Theme
    Choice, Change and the Argument of a Book: The Full Treatment
13. The Viewpoint Shift
    Who Gets a Head, How Many, and When: The Architecture of Narrative Vantage
14. The Subplot
    The Secondary Chain and the Distribution of Narrative Attention: Theory, Analysis and Practice
15. The Reveal
    Disclosure, Withholding and the Second Reading: The Full Treatment
16. The Ending
    The Permanent Stopping Place: Theory, Analysis and Practice

Part IV: Beyond the Book and Into Practice

17. Series and Genre
    Promises Inherited and Promises Deferred: The Full Treatment
18. The Structural Edit
    The Order of Revision: The Full Treatment

The chapter numbers, titles and parts are those of the guide, so that a reader can move between the two books by number.

This Introduction

The Introduction has four parts, of which this page is the first.

1. This Volume and the Guide
   What this volume is for, what it adds to the guide, and what it leaves there
2. How the Chapters Are Built
   The two plans a chapter follows, and the conventions that hold across the volume
3. The Household Novel
   The invented novel that every chapter revises