Kathryn Craft Author
Writing Teacher
Developmental Editor

Release Date: Coming 2025

 
Overview

While drafting a novel, there are so many ways the work can just…peter out. Characters fall flat. Dialogue carries no subtext. Low on impulsion, the plot runs out of fuel midway. How can you keep your story moving through to The End—and even beyond? This book provides the antidote. Written by a former dancer and dance critic who is also an experienced developmental editor, Kathryn Craft will open novelists’ eyes to storytelling strategies that will create dynamic pacing—and engage readers.

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Introduction

This book is a movement study for novelists. That a dance critic turned developmental editor—especially one with my last name—would write a book on the craft of story movement might seem an inevitable no-brainer, but I was slow to come to the idea. Writing friends, clients, conference attendees, and even an acquisitions editor at Writer’s Digest Books had urged me to write a craft book for years (thank you, patient people). It wasn’t until preparing a presentation for a 2022 conference run by Therese Walsh, co-founder of the acclaimed Writer Unboxed blog, that my backgrounds in dance and story converged to illuminate my contribution to the already robust canon of how-to-write-fiction titles: the way every single aspect of craft I’d studied held the promise of story movement.

Sometimes it takes a few decades to realize that the journeys you’ve compartmentalized could converge as a perspective worth sharing.

From twenty years of dance training, I learned that movement is a transfer of energy—from one muscle to another, dancer to partner, performer to audience member. In this way, dance isn’t in the steps any more than story movement is inherent in black marks affixed to a white page. Dance is what the mover brings to the connection between steps, just as story movement takes place between words. It is in these spaces that author and reader interact, through questions raised, expectations managed, and ideas allowed to resonate.

My movement background primed me to think of sentences as impetus, pulse, destination. As choreographer Lucinda Childs has said, “The diagonal gives a three-dimensional feeling to dancers that cannot be achieved when they are only front and back. On the diagonal, more movement is automatically visible.” If you had to lean into that quote a bit to see what it had to offer you as a novelist, great—that’s a form of story movement. Imagine tension on a page like a diagonal pass across the stage—a longer path to get from back to front, yes, but whose shadows and partial truths invite interest.

My goal is to energize the discussion of basic story craft with a movement specialist’s perspective, buoyed by examples from published novels in a range of genres.

The techniques you find on these pages will help you create and sustain movement among many layers of story craft. The perspective I’m offering will be solidified by reading the whole book, but dip back in whenever your novel drags, gets “too quiet,” or spins out of control. Use only what gets your current project moving—there’s no need to amp up your action with amphetamine-laced espresso when a seductive invitation will do the trick. There are no rules, other than to do what it takes to achieve story movement—and that, as we’ll see, can be defined in many ways. Choose what works for you.

Creatives have a love-hate relationship with rules anyway. When starting on the long climb up Story Craft Mountain, rules can feel like guide rails that will keep you safe on a surface slippery with scree. As you get used to the climb, though, those same rails can feel confining. More importantly to the point of this book, rules are fixed and immutable. So, I won’t be offering any. Nor will I offer you a writing method, which like a stiff shoe may not at all be a good fit for your way of walking. Fixed, immutable, stiff—such adjectives will be of no use to you in our movement study. I intend to impel, provoke, and electrify as we look at the many ways your story interacts with your reader.

But let’s not dawdle right here at the opening, as that is a death knell for any writing that hopes to engage its reader. The sooner we plunge in, the sooner you can start applying fresh awareness to the movement in your manuscript.