You might consider getting Madison Smartt Bell's book, Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form.
Bell is a National Book Award-winning novelist and a creative wirting teacher. He taught in the MFA programs at Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and is permanent faculty at Goucher College in Maryland. He wrote Narrative Design to be a textbook for creative writing classes about how to critically read a text as a writer to understand how it works (or doesn't work).
The book includes the full text of a dozen short stories (six by well-recognized, published authors; six by student writers) and Bell dissects each one to show the mechanics and craft of the writing. He analyzes each story on a standard set of elements: plot, character, tone, time management, dialogue, suspense, POV, imagery, design, and theme.
Bell's book is intended to be a model for how students should critique each other's work in a writing workshop, or how a writer can analyze their own work.
You might consider getting Madison Smartt Bell's book, Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form.
Bell is a National Book Award-winning novelist and a creative wirting teacher. He taught in the MFA programs at Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and is permanent faculty at Goucher College in Maryland. He wrote Narrative Design to be a textbook for creative writing classes about how to critically read a text as a writer to understand how it works (or doesn't work).
The book includes the full text of a dozen short stories (six by well-recognized, published authors; six by student writers) and Bell dissects each one to show the mechanics and craft of the writing. He analyzes each story on a standard set of elements: plot, character, tone, time management, dialogue, suspense, POV, imagery, design, and theme.
Bell's book intended to be a model for how students should critique each other's work in a writing workshop, or how a writer can analyze their own work.
I recommend the book Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form by Madison Smartt Bell.
Bell is a National Book Award-winning novelist, and has taught creative writing in the graduate programs top writing schools like Iowa, Stanford, and others. He is director of the writing program at Goucher College in Maryland.
Narrative Design collects 12 short stories: six from professionals, six from Bell's own students. Then Bell provides an in-depth analysis of each story, as he would for a story in one of his workshops.
Narrative Design was originally written as a textbook for creative writing courses, but it was re-published in trade paperback form for a broader writing audiences. It's accessible and understandable enough to use on your own as a learning tool.
Madison Smart Bell, Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form
It's the closest thing to a writing-workshop-in-a-book-form that I've seen. Bell analyzes stories from both student authors and professional authors to show how the narrative design of each works.
In addition to being a great (though not very well-known) novelist, Bell has taught at top writing programs like Iowa and Johns Hopkins and led the writing program at Goucher College in Maryland for several years. He knows what he's doing.