Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction

Available October 2010
ISBN 0-230-58055-6
$16
For more information, visit www.palgrave-usa.com

Focused on the challenges faced by aspiring writers, Brady illuminates how technique serves “story logic,” the particular way fiction makes meaning. She offers a closer look at craft fundamentals (plot, characterization, point of view, imagery, style, and setting), including examples from classic and contemporary fiction and writing exercises.

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“Even writers—even, alas, teaching writers—often believe that creative writing can’t really be taught (or presumably, therefore, learned), because it is, as Catherine Brady tells us, “often intuitive, opportunistic, and spontaneous” and thus beyond our conscious control.  In her marvelous Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, Brady not only makes the case that these skills can and should be consciously taught and learned, but shows us how, uncovering the subtle processes and techniques that master writers bring to their craft, not as formulae but as practices and habits of imagination.  Through clear, passionate readings and through exercises designed both to locate and to free their users, Brady helps writers develop the skills that will help them to hone and then to take advantage of their intuitions and opportunities, at once spontaneously and with writer’s guile.  I learned from this book. I will use it in my classroom and at my desk.”
—Katharine Coles, University of Utah

“Catherine Brady’s Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction is one of the few books on the craft of fiction that is written with the same kind of imaginative range and depth, intellectual rigor, and tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty that create the best fiction.  … Brady gives us the flexible principles she has discovered through her careful examination of the myriad techniques of fiction writing and their relationships to that most mysterious and essential element of craft, story structure.  This is a book that anyone serious about learning the art of fiction should read, and reread.”
—David Jauss, author of Black Maps and Alone with All That Could Happen

“What a welcome book.  Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction is not a rigid text but rather a lively conversation that encourages writers to be both playful and attentive.  Catherine Brady, an accomplished author and a talented teacher, is a spirited guide through such challenges as plot, characterization, point of view, and figurative language.  Brady’s exercises are original and provocative.  This comprehensive, intelligent book inspires emerging writers and experienced writers to look anew at opportunities for developing the art of narrative writing.”
—Valerie Miner, Stanford University, author of After Eden