On Madison Smartt Bell's "Narrative Design"

Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form (1997) is perhaps, to borrow from the author’s introduction, the first real “craft-centered” working guide to narrative fiction I’ve ever picked up, as I’m fairly certain I have more holistically-minded creative writing guides such as Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones in my workshopping history as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Whereas texts like Goldberg’s attempt to tap more into the Zen of self-directed writing—or, to be more practical, establishing the non-judgmental and creatively favorable conditions one may attempt to write in—Bell dispenses with the How-to and cuts to the chase: the work itself is all. We are given a selection of stories by established and well-known authors (including Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Gaines, Percival Everett, and William T. Vollmann) divided between “Linear Design” and “Modular Design” of narrative; then each story is annotated with brief notes at each phrase or area of interest, including a summary analysis of the usual conventions, including Plot, Character, Tone, Dialogue, Design, Theme, etc. The result is the story has been “workshopped” with both a precise eye for technique and a greater appreciation of the larger craft trends within the story which happen as a result. Naturally, my initial concern upon reading Bell was, “Would this approach succeed with a story by someone who wasn’t Ernest Gaines?” and so forth; for novice writers looking to learn anything from other novice writers in addition to the professionals, however, the number of ways a particular narrative could be dissected in this regard could be fine-tuned to meet the aims and level of the course itself without sacrificing any of the analytical rigor involved.

Narrative Design, then, is not much of a starting point for writers—but it could be a decent place to have students get their hands messy in without so much as writing a single creative word of their own. It eschews the sort of in-chapter exercises normally seen in mainstay creative writing course textbooks like Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, et. al., and assumes the model method will pay dividends once the writer recognizes his or her own idea of creative writing. Following a pointed critique of the Iowa Workshop style’s tendency towards “groupthink” drafts, Bell indeed refers to this “inner process” of writing which the Iowa Workshop looks to subdue in favor of, as he sees it, classroom draft conformity and harsh judgment for those who stray off the path. Regarding this point, there is not much elaboration, other than further explaining the idea of creative writing as self-hypnosis, drawing upon an improvisional-spontaneous live reading by Gordon Lish using only four words printed on separate cards (which later would be published as his My Romance). This is a rather large jump to make from what is already soft ground, to be sure, and one that may have required Bell to delve into his inner Goldberg more—especially since he stipulates that this process should always remain private, shielded from classmates and instructors alike. Still, the upshot of Bell’s approach is apparent: the writer being allowed to select his or her own best narrative design so it may ultimately form the crucial “unconscious apprehension of [effective narrative] structure” that so skillfully evades workshop instruction.