Appendix A — Glossary

This glossary consolidates the terms defined in the eighteen chapters. Where two chapters used one word in different senses, this edition gives each sense its own name, and the entry says which word belongs to which idea. Each entry ends with links to the sections of the full text in Reference where the term is defined or used; the chapters’ own glossaries in Reference keep the fuller chapter-specific wording. The six chapters new to this edition (Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture, Chapter 8; The Middle, Chapter 11; Arc and Theme, Chapter 12; The Reveal, Chapter 15; Series and Genre, Chapter 17; and The Structural Edit, Chapter 18) add their own terms, each linked to the chapter’s full treatment; where a new chapter uses a word already defined, its sense is added to the existing entry.

A

Absent opposition — A failure pattern: the opposing force disappears for long stretches of the middle, so the protagonist’s moves have no price. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Absorption — The operation of folding a prologue’s material into Chapter One, or relocating it to its proper place in the main timeline, and deleting the label. The standard remedy for a unit that earns its existence but not its exteriority. Ch 10 · 1.2, Ch 10 · 7.0.

Access — The domain of purpose in which a grant buys presence at events the existing vantage cannot attend. Ch 13 · 4.1.

Accessus ad auctores — The medieval schoolroom’s standard prefatory apparatus, supplying an author, subject, intention, manner, order and utility before the text was read. The ancestor of the orientation functions now distributed between prologue, blurb and genre shelf. Ch 10 · 3.4.

Accumulating middle — A shape of middle that gathers knowledge, with an investigator in the broad sense as its protagonist and the reader’s question as its pressure. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Achrony — Genette’s term for an event whose position in story time cannot be fixed from the text. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Act Two — The screen form’s name for the middle, which brings the three-act model with it; it suits many novels and not all. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Action beat — An action inserted between turns in place of an attribution; called simply a beat in the first edition. The most efficient object in an exchange when it carries a second function, and a tag with extra words when it does not. Distinct from the beat of The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) and Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2). Ch 3 · 5.3.

Adjacency pair — A two-turn sequence in which the first part makes a particular second part conditionally relevant: question/answer, greeting/greeting, offer/acceptance-or-refusal. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. Its importance for fiction is that the absence of the expected second part is itself an event. Ch 3 · 3.2.

Advance mention (amorce), or seed — Genette’s term for an apparently insignificant detail whose significance becomes visible only in retrospect. The unit of fragmentary closure. Ch 10 · 6.2, Ch 10 · 6.6.

Advance notice (annonce) — Genette’s term for an explicit announcement of something to come. The unit of the choric or proleptic prologue, closed by arrival rather than by recognition. Ch 10 · 6.2.

Aftermath — Everything between the climax and the last word. The Ending’s neutral term (Chapter 16), preferred to denouement because it presupposes no shape. Ch 16 · 2.3.1.

Alignment — Whether the reader learns a withheld fact with a character, ahead of one, or after. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Allocation and arrangement — Rung 2 of the revision ladder: the viewpoint grant, the threads, the order of times, the prologue and the book’s form. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Allocation problem — The Viewpoint Shift’s term (Chapter 13) for the structural decision about how a finite quantity of reader attention and identification is distributed across a cast. Ch 13 · 1.1.

Anachrony — Any discordance between the order in which events occur in the story and the order in which the narrative presents them. The genus of which analepsis and prolepsis are the species. Ch 7 · 3.1. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): any discrepancy between story order and text order (Genette). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Anagnorisis — Aristotle’s recognition: a change from ignorance to knowledge. At an ending, the mechanism by which existing information is reorganised rather than new information supplied. Ch 16 · 3.3, Ch 16 · 6.2.

Analepsis — Genette’s term for narration, after the fact, of an event earlier than the point in the story at which the narrative currently stands. The formal name for what Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) calls a cutaway. Ch 7 · 3.1. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): an anachrony that goes back to an event earlier than the present of the narrative; external, internal or mixed according to whether its extent lies before, within or across the start of the main narrative (Genette). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Analogy (Levin) — A relation between plots in which the secondary action repeats the primary action’s pattern in a different key. Ch 14 · 3.2.

Anchor — The first concrete cue after a gap that answers when, where or whose vantage this is. Its function is not to inform but to stop the reader continuing in the abandoned frame. Twelve types are tabulated at Ch 5 · 6.3.

Anchor position — The number of words after a gap at which the anchor arrives. A measurable revision variable; thresholds at Ch 5 · 6.2.

Anchored order — An architecture that shows or announces one event early and tells the book towards it. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Animator / author / principal — Goffman’s decomposition of the “speaker” role: the one producing the sounds, the one who composed the words, and the one whose position the words express. These can come apart, and a character who separates them is deflecting responsibility. Ch 3 · 3.3.

Announced arc — A failure pattern: a change reported as a realisation rather than shown in a decision. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Answer map — Arc and Theme’s tool (Chapter 12) for theme: the book’s question, and each major character’s criterion rewritten as an answer to it. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Anthology — A series whose volumes share a premise, title or frame and nothing else. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Arbitrary arrangement — A failure pattern: a departure from story order for interest the departure does not produce. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Arc — The course, across a whole book, of the rule by which a character resolves dilemmas. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Arrested ending — A close that stops mid-action, before the outcome. Strategy 12 at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Articulated time — Dames’s term for the experience the chapter, as a unit of the book, produces: reading divided into intervals with edges, so that a life or a history is felt as a sequence of episodes. Ch 6 · 3.1.

Asterism — The typographic mark ⁂, three asterisks in a triangle, historically used as a section divider. Ch 5 · 6.6.

Attack — The point in the story’s chronology at which the telling begins. A dramaturgical term; distinct from the opening pages, which are the text that results from the choice. Ch 9 · glossary.

Attention tax — The cost, in reader attention, of any material that diverts from the chain carrying the reader’s primary investment; coined in The Subplot (Chapter 14) as the formal counterpart of The Viewpoint Shift’s empathy budget (Chapter 13). The ending is where the refund falls due. Ch 14 · 1.2, Ch 14 · 3.8, Ch 16 · 7.1 test 6.

Attribution (tag) — The identification of a speaker: he said, she asked. Its density, its verbs and its replacement by action beats are all craft variables with a documented history. Ch 3 · 3.5, Ch 3 · 7.1 test 9.

Authority domain — The Prologue’s proposed sixth domain (Chapter 10): the prologue that establishes how the book knows what it tells, and on whose authority — by provenance, an intermediary, an authority claim, or an acknowledged limit. Distinct from the epistemological domain of The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13), which concerns what no single vantage can know. Ch 10 · 4.6.

Axes of distance — The four dimensions along which a prologue may be separated from the main narrative: time, place, viewpoint, register. One is normally load-bearing and the others incidental. Ch 10 · 6.1.

B

Backstory — The past told: conveyed by summary, implication, report or dialogue, without the reader living through it. One of the two registers into which the fork at Ch 7 · 6.2 divides.

Beat — Two related senses. In general use and in The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), the smallest unit of change in a scene: one exchange, one action, one shift in the balance; the term comes from acting and screenwriting practice. In Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), one of the six named functions of the scene–sequel pair (goal, conflict, disaster, reaction, dilemma, decision), a job done rather than a quantity of prose, so that a beat may occupy a page or a subordinate clause. The action inserted between turns of dialogue is an action beat. Ch 1 · 2.4, Ch 2 · 2.4, Ch 2 · 4.

Belatedness — In trauma theory, the property by which an overwhelming event is not fully registered at the time of its occurrence and returns afterwards, intrusively and out of sequence. Caruth (1996); contested. Ch 7 · 3.7.

Book map — A table with one row per scene of a draft and columns for position, story time, place, viewpoint, goal and decision, thread, change, what is learned, deposits and promises, from which the other chapters’ instruments are read. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Bounded grant — A viewpoint grant held for one chapter or section, with no return. The cheapest form of a later grant. Ch 13 · 6.3 no. 6, Ch 13 · 6.6.

Braid — An architecture that alternates two or more strands, each chronological within itself; converging when the interval shortens until the strands meet in time, parallel when it holds. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Braided middle — A shape of middle in which two or more lines of action alternate and the pressure comes from their crossings. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Braiding — The interleaving of two or more chains in discourse time: how often the narrative changes thread, at what points, and in what proportions. Ch 14 · 6.1.

Braiding rhythm — The pattern of crossings across a whole book: even, accelerating, decelerating or interrupted. Ch 14 · 6.6.

Bridging object — The Transition’s proposed sixth technique (Chapter 5): a physical thing continuous across a gap, whose recurrence does the anchoring by identity rather than by resemblance. Distinguished from the match-cut at Ch 5 · 4.6. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): at the scale of a book, an object present in two strands whose changed condition or custody measures the interval between them; a means of convergence by identity (proposed in The Transition, Chapter 5, adopted at this scale with that condition in Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture, Chapter 8). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Broken back — A failure pattern of the turned middle: a midpoint so large that the second half reads as a different book. Ch 11 · full treatment.

C

Capitulum / kephalaion — Latin and Greek for a “little head”: a division of a text, originally created as a finding aid, usually with a summarising heading. The ancestor of the modern chapter. Ch 6 · 3.1.

Cascade — The failure in which a repair changes a fact that other units depend on and the consequence goes unchecked. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Catalogue — A list whose order is doing work — geographical, social, causal, formal. Distinguished from an inventory by being shuffle-variant. Ch 4 · 6.3, Ch 4 · 8.1.

Category detail — A detail true of the type rather than of the instance: a kitchen with a stove, a forest with trees. Orients cheaply; establishes nothing. Ch 4 · 7.1, test 3.

Causal chain — The relation by which a scene’s disaster produces the following sequel’s reaction, and that sequel’s decision produces the following scene’s goal. Ch 2 · 3.7.

Chain — A sequence of scenes linked by causality in the sense established by Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), such that each descends from the one before. The defining requirement of a subplot. Ch 14 · 2.1.

Chain structure — A recognisable arrangement of scene–sequel pairs across a narrative, with characteristic benefits and costs. Twelve are tabulated at Ch 2 · 6.3.

Chapter architecture — The pattern a book’s breaks and larger divisions make as a whole, considered as an object of design. Ch 6 · 6.6.

Chapter break — A structural boundary placed deliberately within the stream of scenes and sequels, whose position determines what a reader carries with them if they stop. Ch 6 · 2.1.

Character compression — Woloch’s account of the effect of restricted character-space on a character’s presentation: flatness, the type, the repeated identifying tag. Not an absence of depth but the visible mark of depth excluded. Not to be confused with compression in Scene and Sequel’s sense (Chapter 2). Ch 13 · 3.3, Ch 13 · 7.1 no. 10. Named so in this edition to keep it apart from Scene and Sequel’s compression (Chapter 2) of page-space against story-weight.

Character zone — Bakhtin’s term for the field around a character in which the narration itself becomes contaminated by that character’s speech habits, so that the boundary between narration and quoted speech becomes porous. Ch 3 · 3.4, Ch 3 · 9.4.

Character-space — Woloch’s term for the particular and delimited position a character occupies within a narrative, and the friction between an implied person and the room afforded them. Ch 13 · 3.3.

Character-system and plot-system — Woloch’s term for the arrangement of many character-spaces into one structure of distributed attention (Ch 13 · 3.3); The Subplot (Chapter 14) extends it to the distribution of chains across a cast, the plot-system (Ch 14 · 3.5).

Characterisation — The observable sum of a character’s traits, as distinct from the character revealed in choice (McKee). Ch 12 · full treatment.

Cheat — A failure pattern: a passage before a reveal that supports only the first reading and is stated on the narration’s own authority. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Circularity — Closure by returning to the beginning’s language, image or situation. Torgovnick’s category; strategy 1 at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Circumstantial particularity — Watt’s term for the specificity of time, place, name and object that constitutes the novel’s formal realism. Ch 4 · 3.1.

Cliffhanger — An ending on visibly unresolved danger or crisis. The most expensive exit available and the fastest to fatigue. Ch 6 · 4.1.

Climax — The last major confrontation or disaster; the peak of conflict. A part of the ending, not a synonym for it. Ch 16 · 2.3.1.

Clock — A deadline or limit in the middle, known to the protagonist, whose remaining time visibly shortens. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Closing reveal — A reveal in the last part of a book, with no successor question inside it. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Closing the distance — The point, or points, at which the main narrative catches up to, recontextualises, completes, or deliberately refuses to close what the prologue opened. Four modes: total closure, fragmentary closure, recontextualisation, deliberate non-closure. The return of Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7), the point at which a cutaway ends, is a different term. Ch 10 · 6.5.

Closural allusion — Herrnstein Smith’s term for content that signals ending by association rather than by structure — night, sleep, departure, death, silence — and so lends a chapter’s or a book’s close a borrowed finality. Free closure, and dangerous for that reason. Ch 6 · 3.5, Ch 6 · 8.10, Ch 16 · 3.2.

Closural strategy — A named shape an ending can take, with characteristic purchases and costs. Sixteen are tabulated at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Closure — The reader’s felt sense that the book has arrived rather than stopped. Distinct from resolution, and separable from it in both directions. Ch 16 · 2.3.2.

Coda — A short final movement in a changed key, continuous with the narrative. Distinguished from an epilogue, which is displaced. Ch 16 · 2.4.

Cold open — A scene begun in motion with framing deferred. A gambit available to any chapter, frequently and wrongly labelled a prologue. Ch 10 · 2.3.

Cold read — A reading of a revised draft by a reader who has not read an earlier one, or by the writer after an interval long enough to have forgotten what she meant. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Companion — A book set in a series’ world whose question is unrelated to the series question; it makes no promise across volumes. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Completing analepsis — An analepsis that fills a gap the narrative previously left open; it arrives into a slot the reader already has. Contrasted with the repeating analepsis. Ch 7 · 3.3.

Complication — Anything that stands in the protagonist’s way in the middle: an obstacle, a refusal, a delay. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Compression — The setting of page-space against story-weight for a given beat. The principle is that the two should track each other; the failure is a default register applied regardless. The Viewpoint Shift’s effect (Chapter 13) of restricted character-space is character compression. Ch 2 · 5.1.

Conflict — The resistance a goal meets, whose function is to change the goal’s shape rather than merely to postpone its achievement. Ch 2 · 4.2.

Congruence — Torgovnick’s criterion: whether an ending emerges from the novel’s own logic or is imposed on it from outside. Ch 16 · 3.5, Ch 16 · 8.12.

Connotation — The mood, class signal, judgement or thematic freight a detail carries because this true thing was reported rather than another. A second-order signification, culturally supplied and historically volatile. Ch 4 · 6.1.

Consequence — The property of a reveal that changes what a character does or what the ending means. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Constant — Something visibly unchanged in a character against which a change can be read (from The Ending, Chapter 16). Ch 12 · full treatment.

Contained middle — A shape of middle that holds its protagonist in a fixed situation, confinement, waiting or illness, so that its engine is time and the arrivals it brings. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Contextual frame — Emmott’s term for the reader’s running mental representation of a specific episode’s context — who is present, where, and when — maintained across sentences and bound to persons. A transition must recall a frame or switch to a new one; failure to bind characters to a frame produces the unanchored opening; a prologue builds a frame and immediately suspends it. Ch 5 · 3.2, Ch 9 · 8.8, Ch 10 · 3.9, Ch 10 · 6.2.

Contract (narrative) — An obligation the opening pages create in the reader, which the remainder of the book must honour. Used in The Opening Pages (Chapter 9) as a diagnostic category rather than a formal-critical claim. Ch 9 · glossary.

Contrast (Levin) — A relation between plots in which the secondary action inverts the primary one. Ch 14 · 3.2.

Contrast (viewpoint domain) — The domain in which a grant buys access to a materially different way of seeing. Distinct from Levin’s contrast between plots in The Subplot (Chapter 14). Ch 13 · 4.3.

Controlling idea — McKee’s term for a theme stated as a value and the cause by which it is won or lost. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Convention — A feature readers expect of a genre, semantic or syntactic. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Convergence — The relation a secondary chain eventually bears to the primary one. Literal convergence is intersection in event; thematic convergence is relation without intersection. Ch 14 · 6.1. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): the point at which strands meet: of times, when one strand catches up with another; by cause, when an act in one produces the situation in another; by identity, when a person or object is found in both. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Convergence by coincidence — A failure pattern: strands joined by a link that carries no cause and changes no meaning. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Convergence point — The page at which deleting a thread would break the main plot’s causal logic; the moment at which the subplot’s kernels become the main plot’s. Ch 14 · 3.4, Ch 14 · 7.1 test 5.

Conversational implicature — Grice’s term for meaning generated beyond what is said, computed by the hearer on the assumption that the speaker remains cooperative despite a visible breach of a maxim. The identification made in The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3): subtext is conversational implicature. Ch 3 · 3.1, Ch 3 · 6.2.

Conversion arc — An arc in which the criterion changes once, at a single priced decision. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Cooperative Principle — Grice’s overarching maxim: make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the exchange. Its four attendant maxims are quantity, quality, relation and manner. Ch 3 · 3.1.

Copy-edit — The check of a text’s correctness and of the continuity of its facts. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Core promise — The convention whose breach a genre’s readers treat as a breach of contract: solution, union, the threat met, the kept rule or significance. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Count norm — The conventional number of descriptive elements used to establish a place or person in a given period. Currently two or three; in 1835, hundreds. Ch 4 · 3.6, Ch 4 · 7.1 test 8.

Coy narrator — A failure pattern: a narration that announces its withholding without feeding it. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Criterion log — Arc and Theme’s tool (Chapter 12) for arc: a character’s largest decisions in order, with the options, the choice, the rule and the cost. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Crossing character — A character with business in two or more chains, whose crossings are motivated rather than convenient. Not to be confused with the hinge of Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2). Ch 14 · 5.3. Called the hinge character in the first edition; renamed because Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2) keeps hinge for its own term.

Curiosity — Sternberg’s term for the interest generated by uncertainty about the past, as distinct from suspense (the future) and surprise (a past gap the reader did not know existed). Ch 7 · 3.4.

Curiosity reveal — A reveal that answers a question the reader knew she had (after Sternberg’s curiosity). Ch 15 · full treatment.

Cutaway — Backstory and Flashback’s cover term (Chapter 7) for any passage in which the narrative leaves the temporal position of its present action for earlier material, in either register. Ch 7 · 2.1.

D

Decision — The sequel’s terminal beat: a commitment to a new concrete objective, which becomes the following scene’s goal. Ch 2 · 4.6.

Decision (carrier of theme) — The choice at the hinge, read as the book’s verdict on its question. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Declared decline — A convention declined with a sign inside the book early enough to be believed, a replacement promise that the book keeps, and the declined question kept in view. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Declined convention — A convention a book invokes and does not pay. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Declined reveal — A book’s refusal, kept visible to its end, to disclose a fact or to adjudicate between accounts; at book scale, the form of The Viewpoint Shift’s epistemological domain (Chapter 13). Ch 15 · full treatment.

Decoy reading — A first reading supplied by a character with a reason to believe it, so that the reader’s error is attributable. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Defamiliarisation (ostranenie) — Shklovsky’s term for the artistic device of making the habitual perceptible again, chiefly by describing an operation and withholding its name. Ch 4 · 3.3.

Deferred answer — The failure of a series that holds its question open across volumes without advancing it. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Deferred decision — A sequel whose reaction and dilemma are shown but whose decision is withheld past a break, and later paid. Ch 2 · 6.2.

Denotation — The literal referent: what a detail names, plainly. Ch 4 · 6.1.

Denouement — The untying; the classical aftermath, with the implication that entangled facts are being separated. Ch 16 · 2.4.

Descriptive pause — Genette’s term for discourse during which story time does not advance. The structural form of description’s cost. Ch 4 · 2.2.

Desis and lusis — Aristotle’s tying and unravelling. The division falls at the turning point, which makes the aftermath structurally half the work rather than an appendix. Ch 16 · 3.3, Ch 16 · 6.6.

Dialogue exchange — A passage of spoken interaction between two or more characters, each pursuing a want through what they say, in which the balance of information, power or feeling is measurably different at the end than at the start. Ch 3 · 2.1.

Diegetic threshold — The Prologue’s term (Chapter 10) for the prologue’s constitutive hybridity: typographically paratextual (labelled, set apart, skippable) and ontologically diegetic (part of the story). The boundary Genette’s system does not quite accommodate. Ch 10 · 3.1.

Digression — Non-narrative material occupying a subplot’s page-share; has no chain and cannot be assessed by The Subplot’s tests (Chapter 14). Ch 14 · 2.4, Ch 14 · 8.11.

Dilatory space — Brooks’s term for the narrative middle, which resists the ending it desires. The theoretical form of deferral. Ch 2 · 3.2. In The Middle’s sense (Chapter 11): Brooks’s term, built on Barthes’s hermeneutic code, for the middle as the stretch in which the end is postponed; its detours are what keep the action from reaching its end too soon. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Dilemma — The weighing of options each of which carries a real cost, none obviously correct. Ch 2 · 4.5.

Dimension count — The number of situational dimensions (time, space, protagonist, causality, intentionality) a gap changes. The Transition’s best single predictor (Chapter 5) of how much orientation a gap requires. Ch 5 · 3.3, Ch 5 · 7.1 test 2.

Dinkus — A small typographic ornament, commonly three spaced asterisks, used to mark a section break where a blank line would be lost at a page boundary. Ch 5 · 6.6.

Direct linkage (Levin) — A relation between plots in which the secondary action affects the primary one causally. Ch 14 · 3.2.

Disaster — The scene’s terminal state: worse off, or a success whose cost exceeds its value, or a success revealed to have been the wrong goal. Ch 2 · 4.3.

Disclosure map — The Reveal’s tool (Chapter 15) for timing: a row for each withheld fact and a column for the reader and each character, recording when each learns it. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Disnarrated — Gerald Prince’s term for what a narrative reports as not having happened: the imagined, feared, rehearsed or explicitly denied event. The basis of the subjunctive scene. Ch 1 · 6.3 (mode 13).

Displaced sequel — A structure in which the disaster belongs to one character and the reaction to another. Ch 2 · 6.3.

Dispreferred response — In conversation analysis, a second pair-part that declines what the first proposed. Systematically marked by delay, hesitation, token agreement, an account and mitigation — which is how skilled novelists write reluctance. Ch 3 · 3.2.

Distance — How far a prologue sits from Chapter One, measured along the four axes. Ch 10 · 6.1.

Distinguishability test — The diagnostic that exchanges the contents of two viewpoint sections and asks whether a reader could tell. Ch 13 · 7.1 no. 4.

Distributed exposition — Sternberg’s mode in which antecedents are dispersed throughout a narrative and never gathered. Ch 7 · 3.4.

Domain of purpose — A register in which a unit of narrative can do work. The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) sets out four — plot, character, theme and texture — and each later chapter applies them at its own scale, usually adding one: for a detail the domains are plot, character, world, theme, texture and temporal; for an ending, plot resolution, character-arc completion, thematic closure, emotional catharsis, the final image and formal closure. The proposed additions are the relational (The Purposes of a Scene, Chapter 1; The Dialogue Exchange, Chapter 3), silence (The Dialogue Exchange, Chapter 3), temporal (The Descriptive Detail, Chapter 4), structural (Backstory and Flashback, Chapter 7), authority (The Prologue, Chapter 10), epistemological (The Viewpoint Shift, Chapter 13), temporal counterpoint (The Subplot, Chapter 14) and formal closure (The Ending, Chapter 16) domains, each with its own entry. Ch 1 · 4, Ch 4 · 4, Ch 16 · 4.

Dormancy across volumes — The absence of a carried thread from one or more volumes, measured in volumes and in the reader’s months. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Dormancy interval — The number of pages between consecutive appearances of a thread. The maximum interval, not the average, is diagnostic. Ch 14 · 6.6.

Double ending — Two endings supplied, or the choice between them exhibited. Strategy 15 at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Double plot — Two chains of comparable weight, neither clearly subordinate; the object of Empson’s and Levin’s studies. Ch 14 · 2.4.

Double reading — The reading of a passage twice, under the understanding before and after a reveal. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Double-reading table — The Reveal’s tool (Chapter 15) for preparation: every passage bearing on a reveal, with its first and second readings. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Dramatic irony — The domain in which a grant buys the reader knowledge a character lacks. Ch 13 · 4.2.

Dramatisation — Rendering an occurrence such that narrative time approximates story time. Defined in The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) by duration rather than by the presence of dialogue, action or sensory detail. Ch 1 · 3.3.

Drift — A deliberate delay of the anchor, used to reproduce a character’s disorientation. Distinguished from an orphaned cut by the criterion that the anchor still arrives, late and on purpose. Ch 5 · 6.5.

E

Early reveal — A reveal in the first third of a book, which turns curiosity into consequence. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Earned — Of an ending: resting only on material the book already deposited (Claim 1), and answering a pressure the book built (Claim 2). Ch 16 · 6.1.

Echo close — An ending on a resonant image, gesture or line, carrying thematic rather than plot charge. Ch 6 · 4.4.

Economy of the repair — The notes a repair answers set against the tests it reopens and the words it adds. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Edit by addition — The failure in which every note is answered by adding material, so that the draft grows, slows and states what it should show. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Edit by committee — The failure in which several readers’ prescriptions are partly adopted, so that the book moves towards no reader’s book and away from its own. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Edit list — The record of each note and failing test: where it was felt, the rung of the symptom and of the cause, the repair, the tests reopened and the status (mended; kept and defended; passed to the line edit). Ch 18 · full treatment.

Ekphrasis — Extended verbal description of a made object, especially a work of art. The oldest descriptive set piece; Homer’s shield of Achilles is the founding case. Ch 4 · 6.3.

Ellipsis — Genette’s duration category: story time elapses while discourse time is nil — a stretch of story passed over in silence. Classified as explicit, implicit or hypothetical; as definite or indefinite; as qualified or unqualified. It is what a completing analepsis later fills. Ch 5 · 3.1, Ch 7 · 2.4.

Empathy budget — The Viewpoint Shift’s working metaphor (Chapter 13): reader identification as a finite pool divided among viewpoint characters. Formalised by Woloch’s character-system (Ch 13 · 3.3) and criticised at Ch 13 · 16.

Enactment — The confirmation of a new criterion by a situation the book has shown before, answered differently. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Ending — The final unit of a novel, distinguished by having no subsequent scene to correct it and by being the material through which the reader retroactively re-reads the whole. Comprises climax and aftermath. Ch 16 · 2.1.

Endless edit — The failure of an edit with no stopping rule, which continues on the lowest rung and moves the book away from its first conviction. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Entrelacement (interlace) — The medieval romance technique of following one thread to a point of suspension, announcing the departure, and taking up another. Ch 14 · 6.2.

Episodic middle — A failure pattern: sequences joined by a constant and not by cause, which could change places without loss. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Episodic series — A series whose volumes close everything and carry only the hero, his world and his rule. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Epistemological domain — The Viewpoint Shift’s proposed sixth domain (Chapter 13): a vantage granted to demonstrate that no single vantage can know the events. In The Prologue (Chapter 10), the prologue that establishes on whose authority the book speaks is the authority domain. Ch 13 · 4.6. The Prologue’s authority domain (Chapter 10) is its counterpart at a book’s threshold and is not a domain of the grant (§4.6, the ruling).

Equivocation — A sentence true under both the first and the second reading. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Escalating chain — A shape of middle: one line of action, in which the outcome of each sequence causes the next and costs more than the last. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Escalation — A complication that changes what the protagonist can do, by narrowing the options, or what doing it will cost, by raising their price. A delay that does neither is not an escalation. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Event boundary — In cognitive psychology, the point at which a perceiver segments continuous experience into a new event; marked by a measurable processing cost. Ch 6 · 3.6.

Event-indexing model — Zwaan, Langston and Graesser’s account of readers monitoring incoming events for continuity along five dimensions, with a measurable processing cost at each discontinuity. Ch 5 · 3.3.

Explaining strand — A failure pattern: material from another time that recurs like a strand but only accounts for the present, with no question of its own. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Exposition — Information about antecedents necessary to understand the present action. A category of content, not a location in the text. Ch 9 · glossary.

Extent (amplitude) — How much story time an anachrony itself covers. Independent of reach. Ch 7 · 3.2. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): the story time an anachrony covers (Genette). Ch 8 · full treatment.

External analepsis — An analepsis lying entirely before the starting point of the first narrative. Ch 7 · 3.3.

External focalisation — Genette’s category in which the narration reports less than a character knows: behaviour and speech without interiority. Ch 13 · 3.1, Ch 13 · 6.3 no. 13.

Extraction test — Removing a scene to determine what the reader would fail to learn, feel or anticipate, and which later scene becomes unearned. Ch 1 · 7.1, test 4.

Eye-dialect — Respelling that records no actual difference of pronunciation (wuz, sez), and therefore marks a speaker as non-standard without representing anything. Ch 3 · 8.9.

F

Face-work — Goffman’s term for the mutual maintenance of social value in interaction. An exchange turns when one party stops protecting the other’s face. Ch 3 · 3.3.

Falling arc — An arc in which the criterion is replaced by a worse one, usually through decisions each defensible on the old rule. Ch 12 · full treatment.

False advertising — The failure in which a prologue promises a more exciting, violent or mysterious book than the one that follows. The prologue’s version of The Opening Pages’s borrowed hook (Chapter 9) and The Ending’s mismatched final note (Chapter 16). Ch 10 · 8.2.

False ellipsis — A gap that contains the event the book turns on, presented as an ordinary interval. Genette’s paralipsis wearing an ellipsis’s clothes. Ch 5 · 8.8.

False reveal — A disclosure presented as true and later corrected by another. Ch 15 · full treatment.

False victory and false defeat — Snyder’s names for a midpoint at which the protagonist seems to have won or lost and the stakes are raised, after which the opposition closes in. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Feuilleton — The serial novel printed at the foot of a French daily newspaper, and the format that produced the highest-frequency chapter endings in the history of fiction. Ch 6 · 3.3, Ch 6 · 9.3.

Fictions of concord — Kermode’s term for the imagined shapes by which we give an undifferentiated middle a beginning and an end. Ch 16 · 3.1.

Final image — The literal last thing the book shows, considered as a domain rather than a decoration. Ch 16 · 4.5.

First grant — Viewpoint established while the reader’s investment across the cast is still forming. Cheap. Ch 13 · 6.6.

First narrative (récit premier) — Genette’s term for the temporal level a narrative establishes as its principal one, against which all anachrony is measured. Without one, there is no anachrony, only a sequence. Ch 7 · 3.1.

First reading; second reading — The understanding of a passage before a reveal, and after it. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Flashback — The past dramatised as a scene, moment by moment, subject to every rule governing a scene. The second register of the fork. The term is a twentieth-century import from cinema. Ch 7 · 2.1, Ch 7 · 3.8.

Flat and round characters — Forster’s terms: a character “constructed round a single idea or quality”, and one “capable of surprising in a convincing way”. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Flouting — Breaching a Gricean maxim openly, in a way the hearer cannot fail to notice, thereby generating an implicature. Distinct from violating, which is covert. Ch 3 · 3.1.

Focalisation — Genette’s term, developed by Bal, for the regulation of narrative information according to a perceiving position: who perceives, as distinct from who speaks. It determines whose scene a scene is and whose selection a detail is. Ch 1 · 3.4, Ch 4 · 4.2, Ch 4 · 7.1 test 5, Ch 13 · 3.1.

Focaliser — Bal’s term for the subject of focalisation. Ch 13 · 3.1.

Footing — Goffman’s term for a speaker’s alignment to what is said, to the other participants, and to their own role in the utterance; it shifts continuously, often within a turn. Ch 3 · 3.3.

Form audit — The test on rung 2 that asks of every formal pattern a book declares whether it is completed, modified for a reason the book shows, or removed from where it was declared; formal closure as adopted at the scale of the book. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Formal closure — The Ending’s proposed sixth domain (Chapter 16): the completion, modification or disruption of the book’s own structural pattern, as distinct from its story. Closes the formal contract of The Opening Pages (Chapter 9) Ch 16 · 4.6. Ch 16 · 4.6.

Formula — A conventional story structure a culture’s readers know (Cawelti). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Fragmentary closure — Closing a prologue’s distance in several small instalments across the book rather than in one late reveal, so that the dormant frame is periodically re-primed. Ch 10 · 6.6.

Frame recall — Emmott’s term for retrieving a previously constructed contextual frame rather than building a new one. Much cheaper than frame switching, and systematically over-paid for in drafts. Ch 5 · 3.2.

Frame repair — Correcting a contextual frame built on a mistaken assumption. The actual cost of an orphaned cut: not confusion, but the dismantling of a confidently built false representation. Ch 5 · 3.2.

Frame switch — Abandoning the primed contextual frame for another. The cognitive event a transition manages. Ch 5 · 3.2.

Free goal — A scene goal with no origin in any prior decision. Ch 2 · 8.1.

Free hinge — A failure pattern: a change of criterion made after the plot has removed its cost. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Free indirect style — Third-person narration whose diction and judgement are contaminated by the character’s, without quotation marks or attributive tags; Cohn’s narrated monologue. Ch 9 · glossary, Ch 13 · 3.2, Ch 13 · 5.3.

Function — Propp’s unit: an act defined by its significance for the course of the action, irrespective of who performs it. The direct ancestor of the beat. Ch 2 · 3.3.

G

Gambit (opening) — A recognisable strategy for beginning, with characteristic costs and benefits. Twelve are tabulated at Ch 9 · 6.5.

Gap-closing move — The Dialogue Exchange’s term (Chapter 3) for the moment at which text and subtext are allowed to say the same thing. A climactic device, available once or twice in a novel, and spent when used. Ch 3 · 6.5.

Genericness — The property of a detail that survives transplantation into another book. Ch 4 · 7.1, test 3.

Genre — For a writer, the set of expectations a reader brings to a book she has identified as one of a group of works treated as alike. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Genre in costume — The failure of a book that uses a genre’s semantic elements without its syntax. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Giveaway — A failure pattern: preparation that supports only the second reading, or too densely supports both. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Goal — A concrete, immediate objective, legible before the resistance begins, specific enough that success can be scored. Ch 2 · 4.1.

Gradual reveal — A truth disclosed in increments, each confirming the reader’s inference. Ch 15 · full treatment.

H

Hairline crack — The smallest deviation from routine sufficient to answer “why now”. Ch 9 · 6.6.

Handoff — A transition that changes viewpoint, location or both. The most expensive technique in the taxonomy, because it typically shifts three or four dimensions at once. Ch 5 · 4.5.

Hard cut — A gap crossed with no bridging language; the orientation cost is transferred entirely to the opening sentence of the new unit. Ch 5 · 4.1.

Head-hopping — A change of focalisation within a scene in a book whose established narration is limited. Distinguished from omniscience, which is the same movement in a book that has established the right. Ch 13 · 2.3, Ch 13 · 8.1.

Held note — A distance deliberately left open for the whole book, as a permanent condition rather than an unpaid debt. Distinguishable from negligence only by the book’s wider behaviour towards its own frames. Ch 10 · 6.5.

Hermeneutic code — Barthes’s term for the narrative mechanism of posing an enigma and delaying its resolution. Ch 9 · glossary.

Heteroglossia — Bakhtin’s term for the stratification of a language into the competing discourses of classes, professions, generations and regions, which the novel stages. The scholarly ground for the requirement that characters sound different. Ch 3 · 3.4.

Higher bar — The Prologue’s first principle (Chapter 10): a prologue must justify not merely existing but existing outside the main narrative. A unit failing the first test is cut; one failing only the second is absorbed. Ch 10 · 1.2, Ch 10 · 3.10.

Hinge — Scene and Sequel’s proposed addition (Chapter 2): the point between dilemma and decision at which the character’s criterion for choosing changes. Where arc happens. The word is reserved for this sense: the chapter-ending type is a recasting close and the character with business in two chains is a crossing character. Ch 2 · 4.7.

Holding pattern — A failure pattern: the middle waits for an event scheduled at its end, and nothing in the waiting changes it. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Hook — The arresting first line or paragraph. One instrument within the opening’s task, not a synonym for it. Ch 9 · glossary.

Horizon of expectations — The expectations, formed by earlier works, against which a reader receives a new one (Jauss). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Hybrid — A book that makes two genres’ core promises and keeps both. Ch 17 · full treatment.

I

Idle reveal — A failure pattern: a reveal that changes nothing a character does or the ending means. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Imposed ending — An ending congruent with something other than the book: a convention, a publisher, a readership, an author’s fatigue. Ch 16 · 8.12.

In medias res — Beginning inside action already under way, deferring antecedents. From Horace’s Ars Poetica. Ch 9 · glossary.

Incipit — The opening words of a text, considered as a citable unit. Ch 9 · glossary.

Induction — A framing scene with characters of its own, watching or presenting the main action. Elizabethan and Jacobean in origin; the ancestor of the frame narrative. Ch 10 · 2.4, Ch 10 · 6.3.

Inevitability (retrospective) — The reader’s post-hoc sense that the ending could not have been otherwise. Independent of predictability. Ch 16 · 6.2.

The infinite field — The Descriptive Detail’s term (Chapter 4) for the unlimited set of true facts available about any described object or place, from which description selects. Ch 4 · 1.1, Ch 4 · 3.7.

Instalment — One continuous run of a strand. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Interest deficit — Backstory and Flashback’s first principle (Chapter 7): at the moment a cutaway begins, the reader is holding an open present-tense question, and the costs of suspension, frame-holding and chronology-tracking are incurred before the past material delivers anything. Originates here; used in The Transition (Chapter 5) and The Subplot (Chapter 14). Ch 7 · 3.9.

Interiorised scene — A scene whose duration is governed by the pace of thought rather than of action; consciousness rendered at scene speed. Ch 1 · 6.3 (mode 9), Ch 1 · 9.8.

Internal analepsis — An analepsis falling inside the span of the first narrative, and therefore working in territory the reader already occupies. Ch 7 · 3.3.

Internal focalisation — Genette’s category in which narration is restricted to what one character knows. Subdivided as fixed, variable and multiple. Ch 13 · 3.1.

Intertitle — Genette’s term for the title of an internal division: a chapter or Part title. Ch 6 · 3.4.

Interval — The distance in story time between two strands at a given point. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Interval legibility — Whether a reader can estimate the size of a gap. Independent of whether the gap is explicit: an implicit ellipsis can be perfectly legible if the far side carries evidence. Ch 5 · glossary.

Inventory — An unselected list; shuffle-invariant; without a governing principle. Ch 4 · 8.1.

Involuntary memory — Proust’s mémoire involontaire: the past recovered by sensation rather than by the intellect, and not reachable by intention. Register 8. Ch 7 · 6.4, Ch 7 · 9.1.

Iterative — Genette’s frequency category: narrating once what happened many times (every Sunday he would…). A transition instrument in disguise, crossing indefinite time while characterising, and register 4 among the registers of the past. Ch 5 · 3.1, Ch 7 · 6.4.

J

Joins — Rung 4 of the revision ladder: chapter breaks, transitions, cutaways and the opening pages. Ch 18 · full treatment.

K

Kernel and satellite — Chatman’s terms, after Barthes’s noyaux and catalysers. A kernel is a narrative moment that opens an alternative and cannot be deleted without destroying the narrative’s logic; a satellite amplifies a path already taken and can be deleted, though the discourse is impoverished. The Subplot (Chapter 14) uses the pair to test whether a thread has branching points of its own. Ch 1 · 3.4, Ch 14 · 3.4.

Kind — A genre with its full repertoire of features, as distinct from a mode (Fowler). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Knowledge boundary — The limit of what a vantage can know; a generative resource rather than a restriction. Ch 13 · 5.3, Ch 13 · 7.1 no. 8.

L

Label test — The diagnostic of replacing “Prologue” with “Chapter One” and asking what changes. Its third and most interesting outcome is that something is gained. Ch 10 · 7.1, test 3.

Last ordinary day — The proposed fourteenth prologue type: the routine immediately preceding a rupture the main narrative will investigate, in which nothing happens and the dread comes from the reader’s foreknowledge. It needs fragmentary closure, since it holds objects to be recognised and no event to be arrived at. Ch 10 · 6.3, Ch 10 · 9.9.

Later grant — Viewpoint introduced after the book has trained the reader to follow a smaller set of vantages. Expensive, in three separable charges. Ch 13 · 6.6.

Launching line — The Transition’s term (Chapter 5) for the last sentence before a gap, considered as a transition instrument. A departure that names a destination pre-pays the arrival. Ch 5 · 5.3, Ch 5 · 7.1 test 3.

Lie, the — Weiland’s term for the false belief a character holds at the start of an arc. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Line edit — The revision of sentences and paragraphs inside a scene whose job is taken as given. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Local repair — The failure in which a symptom is mended where it was felt when its cause lies on a higher rung. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Lockstep braid — A failure pattern: strands at one rate, with crossings that produce no variation. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Lost reader — A failure pattern: instalments that do not tell the reader which time she is in. Ch 8 · full treatment.

M

Macro-edit; micro-edit — Susan Bell’s terms for a writer’s reading of a draft whole, for structure and proportion, and her revision of it line by line. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Managed ellipsis — The Transition’s structural definition (Chapter 5) of a transition, together with re-anchoring: a gap whose edges have been finished. Ch 5 · 1.2.

Match-cut (echo transition) — A gap crossed on a repetition — of a word, image, action, sound or syntactic shape — so that the join itself carries meaning. Ch 5 · 4.3.

Metonymy — Naming a thing by something associated with it. The characteristic figure of realist prose. Ch 4 · 6.3.

Middle — The long stretch between the commitment that ends a novel’s beginning and the movement that begins its ending, usually half the book or more, and the part of a draft that most often loses its readers. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Midpoint — A turn near the centre of the book that changes the protagonist’s relation to the goal: the goal itself, what the protagonist knows about it, or the protagonist’s mode, from reacting to the opposition to acting against it. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Mirror moment — Bell’s term for a moment at the centre of a novel in which the protagonist looks at who they are and what they must become. Ch 11 · full treatment. In Arc and Theme’s sense (Chapter 12): Bell’s term for the scene at the centre in which the protagonist sees what they have become; in arc terms, where the old criterion is seen to cost. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Mixed analepsis — An analepsis beginning before the first narrative and continuing into it. Ch 7 · 3.3.

Mode — A genre’s character carried, as an adjective, into a work of another kind, borrowing conventions without, by default, the core promise (Fowler). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Moral argument — Truby’s term for a story’s argument about how to live, conducted through the actions of the hero and the opponent. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Mosaic — An architecture whose units are ordered by association, theme or memory rather than by time. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Motif — A detail repeated across a text with variation, so that the change becomes legible as meaning. A measuring instrument. Ch 4 · 6.5. In Arc and Theme’s sense (Chapter 12): a recurring object, image or phrase that carries a theme by returning in changed contexts. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Motivation-reaction unit (MRU) — Swain’s sentence-level pattern of external stimulus followed by internal response; the causal chain at paragraph scale. Ch 2 · 4.0.

Multi-timeline — Of a non-linear book whose anachronies are organised as two or more strands. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Multiple focalisation — Genette’s category in which the same events are focalised successively through different characters. The structural signature of the epistemological domain. Ch 13 · 3.1, Ch 13 · 4.6.

Multiplicity — Making one unit of text — a scene, a detail, a transition, an opening — discharge several narrative functions at once. Introduced in The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) and applied at each scale after it; produced by selection, not by condensing. Ch 1 · 5, Ch 4 · 5, Ch 5 · 5, Ch 9 · 5.

N

Narratable, the — D. A. Miller’s term for the instability, deviance and desire from which narrative arises and which closure eliminates. Ch 16 · 3.9.

Narrative desire — Brooks’s term for the reader’s want, produced and sustained by the text, for the end that will confer meaning on the middle. Ch 2 · 3.2.

Narrowing and price — The two ways an event in the middle acts on the option list: it closes one of the protagonist’s open moves (narrowing), or makes a move cost more (raising its price). Ch 11 · full treatment.

Negative detail — A detail that names what is absent, missing or refused. Ch 4 · 6.3, Ch 4 · 9.4.

Nested order — An architecture that opens one time inside another and closes them in reverse. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Non-linear — Of a book whose anachronies form a pattern at the scale of the book. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Normalisation — Establishing a world’s rules by delivering them as subordinate information inside a sentence about something else, unremarked by the viewpoint character. Ch 9 · 4.2.

Novum — Suvin’s term for the validated novelty distinguishing a science-fictional world from the empirical one. Ch 9 · glossary.

Number (part-issue) — A physical instalment of a serially published Victorian novel, typically thirty-two pages and three or four chapters. Often the real unit of design. Ch 6 · 3.3, Ch 6 · 9.1.

Number plan (the “mems”) — Dickens’s surviving working notes for each monthly number, showing chapter allocation and scheduled withholding. Ch 6 · 3.3, Ch 6 · 9.1.

O

Objective correlative — Eliot’s term for a set of objects or events adequate to a particular emotion, offered as the only way of expressing emotion in art. Ch 4 · 4.4, Ch 4 · 9.5.

Objects of a reveal — Event, identity, motive, telling and world: what happened, who someone is, why an act was done, what the text itself is, and the rules of the story’s world. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Obligatory scene — A scene a genre’s readers expect and miss if it is absent (Coyne). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Offered exit — The Chapter Break’s term (Chapter 6) for the chapter break considered functionally: an opportunity to stop, whose price the writer sets. Ch 6 · 2.1, Ch 6 · 3.7.

Omniscience — Zero focalisation: narration not restricted to any character’s knowledge. Ch 13 · 3.1, Ch 13 · 6.3 no. 10.

On-the-nose — Dialogue in which text and subtext coincide throughout. Not a prohibition on direct speech but on direct speech everywhere, which spends the gap-closing move before the book has earned it. Ch 3 · 8.3.

Option list — The Middle’s tool (Chapter 11) for the middle: the protagonist’s open moves towards the goal, recorded at the end of the beginning, at the midpoint and at the start of the ending. A middle works when the list shrinks and each shrinkage has a cause on the page. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Order chart — A list of a book’s units in text order, each numbered by its place in story order and placed by percentage. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Order of dependence — The relation in which one decision depends on another when changing the second can make the first wrong and changing the first cannot make the second wrong. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Orientation — The reader’s acquisition of a stable frame: who, where, when, and what counts as normal. A reader state, which exposition may or may not produce. Ch 9 · glossary.

Orientation budget — The Transition’s first principle (Chapter 5): every gap imposes a processing cost proportionate to the dimensions it changes, and a transition is the expenditure of narrative material to meet it. A revision instrument, not an aesthetic. Ch 5 · 3.7, Ch 5 · 16.

Orientation marker — Anything that tells the reader which time she is in: viewpoint, tense, period or wear, an object, a heading or a time-stamp. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Orphaned cut — A hard cut whose anchor never arrives, or arrives after the reader has committed to a false frame. Ch 5 · 8.1.

Over-labelled book — A failure pattern: orientation carried by headings alone, at the cost of the strands’ own placing. Ch 8 · full treatment.

P

Page-order edit — The failure of revising a draft in the order of reading rather than of dependence. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Page-share — The percentage of a book in which a given thread is the primary business of the scene. Ch 14 · 5.5, Ch 14 · 7.1 test 7.

Page-share audit — The procedure at Ch 13 · 5.5 for measuring the proportions of a book’s viewpoint allocation.

Paralipsis — Genette’s term for the omission of information that the adopted focalisation, or the narrative’s own vantage, ought to have supplied: a lateral rather than a temporal gap, and the mechanism of the false ellipsis. Ch 5 · 3.1, Ch 5 · 8.8, Ch 7 · 2.4.

Paratext — Genette’s term for the apparatus surrounding a text — title, cover, jacket copy, epigraph, preface, note — that conditions its reception without belonging to the narrative. Ch 9 · glossary, Ch 10 · 3.1. In Series and Genre’s sense (Chapter 17): everything that surrounds and presents a text: title, cover, jacket copy, epigraph, shelf (Genette). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Participation framework — Goffman’s account of the full set of parties to an utterance: ratified participants (addressed and unaddressed) and bystanders (overhearers and eavesdroppers). The theoretical basis of the silence domain. Ch 3 · 3.3, Ch 3 · 4.6.

Payoff — What a chapter’s ending does with its proposition: resolve, escalate, hold open, re-interpret, or exchange. Inherited by The Ending (Chapter 16). Ch 6 · 6.3.

Peak–end rule — Kahneman and colleagues’ finding that retrospective evaluation of a brief affective episode is dominated by its most intense moment and its final moment. Reported in The Ending (Chapter 16) with its limits: the extension to novel-length experience is an analogy, not a finding. Ch 16 · 3.6.

Permission to stop — The Chapter Break’s first principle (Chapter 6): every break offers the reader an exit, and the final sentence sets its price. Ch 6 · 3.7.

Phatic communion — Malinowski’s term for talk whose function is the maintenance of the channel and the relationship rather than the transfer of content. Socially essential, narratively inert. Ch 3 · 2.3.

Pinch — In the screenwriting manuals after Field, a smaller turn in each half of the middle that reminds the reader of the opposing force. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Pivot — An ending on a reveal or turn that sends the reader forward with new urgency. Ch 6 · 4.3.

Placement strategy — Where a cut falls relative to the six beats of scene and sequel. Twelve are tabulated at Ch 6 · 6.4.

Plant audit — The whole-book test: trace every element the ending relies on back to its planting. Ch 16 · 7.1, test 2; performed at Ch 16 · 9.10.4.

Plateau — A failure pattern: consecutive sequences of the middle repeat one value shift at constant stakes, so the option list never changes. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Plausibility of attention — Whether a given perceiver, in their present state and with their present want, would credibly register a given detail. Ch 4 · 7.1, test 6.

Plot-system — See character-system and plot-system.

Polyphony — Bakhtin’s term for a novel in which characters’ ideological positions retain genuine independence and are not resolved by the author’s evaluative position. The requirement behind the staged dialectic. Ch 3 · 3.4, Ch 3 · 4.4.

Positional claim — The assertion, implicit in every prologue, that this material could not have done its work from inside the main narrative. Ch 10 · 1.2.

Preference organisation — The asymmetry between the two possible second parts of an adjacency pair: acceptances come fast and bare, refusals come marked. Ch 3 · 3.2.

Preliminary exposition — Sternberg’s term for antecedents delivered up front, before the action. The prologue is its limit case. Ch 10 · 3.7.

Premature convergence — A failure pattern: strands that meet before the book has a question for the merged line. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Premature polish — The failure of line editing before the top rungs have settled. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Premise — Egri’s term for a theme stated as a proposition the play proves. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Prequel — A volume set before the others in story time; an analepsis at the scale of a series. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Presence is not a plot — The Subplot’s shorthand (Chapter 14) for the distinction between a recurring character and a subplot: recurrence without a chain is not a secondary plot. Ch 14 · 2.3.

Primacy effect — The disproportionate influence of early information on the interpretation of later information (Asch 1946; Perry 1979). It is why an opening’s promises bind, and why a prologue that advertises the wrong book is so costly. Ch 9 · glossary, Ch 10 · 3.9.

Principle of proportion — Chapter length, relative to neighbouring chapters, is read as a claim about tempo. Ch 6 · 5.1.

Privileged position — Rabinowitz’s term for locations in a text — titles, first and last sentences, chapter boundaries — that readers automatically treat as significant. A prologue occupies one twice over, which is why an unredeemed prologue detail costs more than an unredeemed detail on page 100; the last sentence of a book is among the strongest. Ch 9 · glossary, Ch 10 · 3.9, Ch 16 · 3.6.

Proairetic code — Barthes’s code of actions: the reader’s recognition of a sequence of gestures as a nameable action with a knowable completion. The mechanism of scene-level expectation; a goal is a licence to name the sequence. Ch 1 · 3.4, Ch 2 · 3.3.

Prolepsis — Narration in advance of an event that will occur later. Formally the mirror of analepsis; practically, a promise rather than a detour, and a means of converting a later analepsis into a completing structure. Ch 7 · 3.3. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): an anachrony that goes forward to a later event (Genette). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Proleptic close — An ending that narrates the future beyond the action. Strategy 8 at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Prologos — In Aristotle’s Poetics, everything in a tragedy preceding the chorus’s entrance. A definition by position rather than by function, and the ancestor of the definition used in The Prologue (Chapter 10). Ch 10 · 3.3.

Prologue — A unit of narrative set apart from the main story’s time, place, viewpoint or register, positioned before it begins, and labelled as apart, whose separation is itself doing work the main narrative’s opening pages could not do as well. Ch 10 · 2.1.

Prologue-function — The set of jobs a prologue performs, which a book may discharge without using the label. Wuthering Heights and Their Eyes Were Watching God are The Prologue’s two demonstrations (Chapter 10). Ch 10 · 9.2, Ch 10 · 9.5.

Promise inventory — A table of the conventions a book invokes, with where each is first invoked, whether it is kept, varied or declined, and where that is shown. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Promise, the — Rung 1 of the revision ladder: the kind of book, its governing question, what it declines, and whether it stands alone. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Promotion — The structure in which a thread introduced as secondary is revealed to have been primary; and, in revision, the decision to restructure a book around a subplot. Ch 14 · 6.4, Ch 14 · 7.1 test 10.

Proportion problem — The question of how much aftermath a book requires; the site of Ch 16 · 8.2 and Ch 16 · 8.3, which are opposite errors. Ch 16 · 6.6.

Proposition — The question, tension or intention a chapter raises at or near its start. Ch 6 · 6.3.

Propter hoc — “Because of this”, as against post hoc, “after this”. In logic, treating succession as causation is a fallacy; in narrative it is a competence. Ch 2 · 3.1.

Pseudo-iterative — Genette’s term for passages narrated in the iterative whose detail is too particular to have recurred. Ch 1 · 6.2, Ch 1 · 6.3 (mode 7).

Psycho-narration — Cohn’s term for a narrator’s report of a character’s consciousness in the narrator’s own language. Cheaper in empathy budget than narrated or quoted monologue. Ch 13 · 3.2.

Pull-forward question — The enigma or expectation that carries a reader from the opening to the next page and beyond. Ch 9 · glossary.

Q

Question close — An ending that raises a statable question without the danger a cliffhanger implies; a curiosity instrument rather than a suspense one. Ch 6 · 4.5.

R

Range — The set of passages a reveal recasts, by reinterpretation or falsification; distinct from the reach of Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7). Ch 15 · full treatment.

Rate — The story time a strand covers per page. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Re-entry — The opening of a later volume, which must serve a returning reader and a new one. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Reach (portée) — How far an anachrony goes from the present moment of the first narrative: the size of the leap. Ch 7 · 3.2.

Reaction — The character’s registration of the disaster, which converts an external event into the internal state a decision can issue from. Ch 2 · 4.4.

Reality effect — Barthes’s term for a detail that signifies nothing within the narrative’s economy and therefore comes to signify reality itself. Ch 4 · 3.4.

Rearranged book — The failure of reordering a draft without a reason on rung 1. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Recap at the door — The failure of a later volume that opens with summary of the earlier ones. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Recasting close — Proposed in The Chapter Break* (Chapter 6).* An ending whose final sentence changes the meaning of the chapter just concluded rather than pointing forward, so that the reader looks back. Not to be confused with the hinge of Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2). Ch 6 · 4.6.

Recency effect — The better recall of items at the end of a sequence; the counterpart to primacy. Robust for lists, and applied to novels only as a general claim about the privilege of boundary positions. Ch 16 · 3.6.

Recognition — Aristotle’s anagnorisis: a change from ignorance to knowledge, which may precede a hinge. Ch 12 · full treatment. In The Reveal’s sense (Chapter 15): a character’s change from ignorance to knowledge (Aristotle’s anagnorisis); the reveal received on the page. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Recontextualisation — A mode of closing in which the narrative never reaches the prologue but changes what it meant. Ch 10 · 6.5.

Recursive sequel — A sequel containing scenes within itself, each generating further reaction rather than resolution. Ch 2 · 6.3, Ch 2 · 9.1.

Referential illusion — Barthes’s term for the impression, produced by the reality effect, that the text is transcribed rather than constructed. Ch 4 · 3.4.

Reflector — James’s term for a character through whose registering intelligence events are refracted without the character narrating them. Ch 13 · 6.2.

Refused arc — An arc in which the character reaches the hinge, sees the new rule’s decision, and chooses by the old. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Refused ending — A text that declines to conclude and marks the refusal. Strategy 16 at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Register of the past — Backstory and Flashback’s term (Chapter 7) for a recognisable way of putting past material on the page. Fourteen are tabulated at Ch 7 · 6.4.

Reinstatement cost — The attentional expense of recalling a dormant contextual frame or thread. It rises with the interval since the frame was last primed, falls with how distinctive the thread is, and is higher when the thread was suspended mid-question. The empirical form of the prologue’s problem of distance and closing, and of the subplot’s problem of dormancy. Ch 10 · 3.9, Ch 10 · 6.2, Ch 14 · 3.7, Ch 14 · 6.6.

Relational domain — The state of a relationship — trust, power, obligation, intimacy, debt, hostility — considered as an independently shiftable value. Proposed in The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) as a fifth domain of purpose and adopted in The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3), where dialogue negotiates standing, permission, intimacy and obligation between speakers. Ch 1 · 4.5, Ch 3 · 4.3.

Relay series — A series that keeps a world and passes the centre to a new protagonist in each volume. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Relocation — Moving a prologue’s material to the point in the main timeline where it happened, as an ordinary scene, and deleting the label. With absorption, one of the two outcomes short of keeping a prologue separate. Ch 10 · 2.1, Ch 10 · 7.1, test 2.

Rememory — Sethe’s term in Beloved for a past that persists as a place in the world, which another person can enter. Ch 7 · 3.7, Ch 7 · 9.5.

Reopened tests — The tests on lower rungs that a repair can make wrong for the units it touches. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Repair — The correction of trouble in talk, with a strong structural preference for self-correction. Other-correction is rare in life and therefore aggressive on the page. Ch 3 · 3.2.

Repeating analepsis — An analepsis returning to material the narrative has already covered, in order to recolour it. The most expensive structure in Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) and the one that produces several of its greatest novels. Ch 7 · 3.3.

Reported reveal — A failure pattern: the truth delivered as information by a character or the narration, rather than found. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Reset — An architecture that tells one span of time more than once, each version starting again from the same point. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Reset hero — A series hero whose change in one volume is undone in the next without a scene. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Resolution — The answering, or legible declining, of the plot’s dramatic questions. A domain, not the ending. Ch 16 · 2.3.2, Ch 16 · 4.1.

Retold order — An architecture that tells one event several times from several vantages. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Retroactive lens — The Ending’s first principle (Chapter 16): the ending is the position from which the whole book first becomes available as a whole, and the reader’s final interpretation is performed upon everything, not only the last pages. Ch 16 · 1.1, Ch 16 · 3.10.

Retrospection, anticipation of — Brooks’s term for the reader’s forward motion in expectation of a moment from which the whole will be legible. Ch 16 · 3.4.

Retrospective reframe — A late disclosure that changes what the whole book was. Strategy 13 at Ch 16 · 6.4; Ch 16 · 8.10.

Return — The point at which a cutaway ends and the first narrative resumes. Backstory and Flashback’s requirement (Chapter 7) is that the present be changed, in knowledge, understanding, question or action. Ch 7 · 6.6.

Reveal — A disclosure of a fact the reader lacked that changes her understanding of what she has already read. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Reveal from outside — A failure pattern: a disclosure whose source lies outside the book’s causal system. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Reverse order — An architecture that tells events backwards, unit by unit. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Revision ladder — The order in which a book’s decisions are checked and repaired, in five rungs, from the promise to the scene and its materials. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Revoked arc — A failure pattern: a return to the old criterion after the hinge, because the plot needs it. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Rules of notice — Rabinowitz’s tacit conventions determining which textual elements readers treat as significant. Ch 9 · glossary.

Rung — A level of the revision ladder. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Rung-up rule — Before repairing a failure, check the rung above for its cause; treat a failure found in several places on one rung, or recurring after repair, as caused above. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Running arc — A line carried across an episodic series, advancing a step per volume while each volume closes its own question. Ch 17 · full treatment.

S

Satellite — See kernel and satellite.

Scene — A unit of story in which a character pursues a concrete immediate objective against resistance, rendered in approximately real time, such that the state of the story is different at its close. Ch 1 · 2.1.

Scene (narrow sense) — The goal–conflict–disaster half of the pair. Distinguished throughout from the loose workshop sense used in The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), and from Genette’s sense of a duration relation. Ch 2 · 2.3.

Scene and its materials, the — Rung 5 of the revision ladder: scenes, sequels, exchanges and details, followed by the line edit. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Scene break — The typographic signal that a gap exists: white space, dinkus, ornament, chapter division. Not the transition, which is the narrative material on either side of it. Ch 5 · 2.3.

Scheduled arc — A failure pattern: a change predicted from the first chapters and delivered on time. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Seed — The appearance of the new criterion before the hinge, usually in another character. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Segmentation — The division of a continuous text into units. Dames’s central category, and The Chapter Break’s subject (Chapter 6). Ch 6 · 3.1.

Selection principle — The statable logic governing which facts a passage reports. Its absence is the mechanism of the inventory passage. Ch 4 · 7.1, test 10.

Self-revelation — Truby’s term for the moment the hero sees the truth about themselves. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Semantic and syntactic elements — A genre’s building blocks, and the relations and order among them (Altman). Ch 17 · full treatment.

Sequel — In Swain’s model, the reflective half of the scene–sequel pair: reaction, dilemma, decision. Treated in full in Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2). In this book the word never means a follow-up volume; see series hook. Ch 1 · 6.6, Ch 2 · 2.1.

Serial — One story published in volumes, each closing a stage. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Serial reveal — A chain of reveals, each recasting the last. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Series — A sequence of separately published works sharing characters, a world or a continuing story, which invite reading as related. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Series hook — A deliberate non-closure creating appetite for a further volume; called the sequel hook in the first edition. In this book sequel has only Swain’s sense, so the follow-up volume is never called a sequel. Ch 16 · 8.11.

Series instalment — A later volume of a series; this edition’s term for what is elsewhere called a sequel. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Series question — The question that runs across a series’ volumes and is closed, if at all, by the last. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Sermon — A failure pattern: a theme answered one way by every character and left to statement. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Shape, the — Rung 3 of the revision ladder: the arc, the middle, the schedule of reveals and the ending, checked together. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Short circuit — Brooks’s term for an action that reaches its end too soon, without the detours of the dilatory space, and so arrives at the wrong end. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Significance fatigue — What a reader experiences when every join in a book is doing conspicuous double duty: the loss of any plain surface against which emphasis can register. Ch 5 · 5.4.

Silence domain — The Dialogue Exchange’s proposed sixth domain (Chapter 3): what is not said, who does not speak, and who is excluded from the exchange. Ch 3 · 4.6.

Simultaneity — Two threads occupying the same story time. Prose has no grammatical form for it; readers default to sequence unless told otherwise. Ch 5 · 8.10, Ch 5 · 7.1 test 8.

Situation model — In discourse psychology, the reader’s mental representation of the state of affairs a text describes, tracked across the dimensions of protagonist, space, time, causality and intentionality. It is sparse rather than complete, which is why a few chosen details can furnish it. Ch 1 · 3.5, Ch 4 · 3.5, Ch 9 · glossary.

Skip test — The diagnostic derived from Genette’s observation that the preface is a book’s most easily bypassed zone: what happens to a reader who skips this? The intended profile is nothing incomprehensible, and something lost. Ch 10 · 7.1, test 8.

Soft landing — An ending on a settled, resolved beat, making the exit free. The type that makes the others legible. Ch 6 · 4.2.

Staged arc — An arc in which the criterion changes in steps, or is recognised at one point and acted on at another. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Stalled sequel — A sequel expanded past the point at which new considerations arrive; repetition mistaken for depth. Ch 2 · 8.5.

Statement (carrier of theme) — A character or narrator saying what the book means. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Stations middle — A shape of middle: a sequence of encounters joined by a constant rather than by cause, such as a road, a voyage or a series of trials, as in the picaresque. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Steadfast arc — An arc in which the protagonist’s criterion holds under pressure and the change happens to others. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Stopping rule — An edit is finished when a pass down the first three rungs changes nothing below them, every kept failure is defended, and a cold read produces notes that do not cluster above rung 5. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Story order and text order — The sequence of events in the world of a book, and the sequence in which the book presents them (the Formalists’ fabula and syuzhet). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Strand — A line of the telling set in one time, continuous within itself, that the book leaves and resumes, and that runs on a question of its own. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Strand table — A table giving each strand its question, span, page count, rate, viewpoint, markers and meeting. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Structural domain — The proposed sixth domain: a cutaway used as an architectural device rather than for its content, to control the shape of the whole book. Ch 7 · 4.6.

Structural edit — The revision of a complete draft at the level of the decisions that span more than one scene. Ch 18 · full treatment.

Structural pacing — The domain in which the alternation of vantages is itself a rhythm instrument. Ch 13 · 4.5.

Structural shift — A deliberate change of focaliser at a scene, section or chapter boundary. Ch 13 · 2.1.

Subplot — A secondary chain of causally linked scenes with its own goal, conflict and consequence, running alongside the main plot and competing with it for page count and attention. Ch 14 · 2.1.

Subtext — The want, fear or withheld fact driving a line, legible to the reader through context, contradiction or omission but rarely stated by the speaker. Ch 3 · 6.1.

Successor question — The question a reveal leaves the reader holding in place of the one it answers. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Summary bridge — Connective narration that covers the interval itself, and the only technique that can put content in the gap. The natural home of distributed exposition. Ch 5 · 4.4.

Surprise reveal — A reveal of a gap the reader did not know existed (after Sternberg’s surprise). Ch 15 · full treatment.

Suspense and curiosity — Sternberg’s distinction between uncertainty about the future and uncertainty about the past. A proleptic prologue trades the first for the second. Ch 10 · 3.7, Ch 10 · 8.6.

Switch — A passage from one strand to another. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Syllepsis — Genette’s term for the grouping of events by a kinship other than time, of place or theme. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Sympathy engineering — The domain in which a grant complicates a verdict the reader would otherwise reach from outside. Ch 13 · 4.4.

Synecdoche — Naming a whole by one of its parts. Ch 4 · 6.3.

T

Tangent — Closure by swerving to something apparently unrelated. Torgovnick’s category; strategy 3 at Ch 16 · 6.4.

Teller rule — A reveal may falsify only passages a teller in the book could have shaped, and only if it names the teller and gives a reason. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Temporal counterpoint — The Subplot’s proposed sixth domain (Chapter 14): a thread running on a different clock, whose function is to make the main plot’s pace legible and to let the book hold a duration it could not otherwise contain. Ch 14 · 4.6. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): at the scale of a book, a difference of rate between strands that a crossing makes visible; a property of the arrangement (proposed in The Subplot, Chapter 14 for threads, adopted at this scale in Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture, Chapter 8). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Temporal domain — Proposed in The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4): the register in which a detail delivers duration, decay, repurposing, seasonality or interruption, carried chiefly by aspect, wear and maintenance. Ch 4 · 4.6. In Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8): the work a detail does in establishing duration, sequence, decay, repurposing, season or interruption; at the scale of a book, the domain of orientation (proposed in The Descriptive Detail, Chapter 4, adopted at this scale in Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture, Chapter 8). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Terminal modification — Herrnstein Smith’s device: a pattern established across the text is altered at its final instance, which signals that it will not continue. Ch 16 · 3.2, Ch 16 · 4.6.

Termination — Simply stopping. Herrnstein Smith’s contrast term for what closure is not. Ch 16 · 3.2, Ch 16 · 7.1 test 7.

Text (in the two-channel sense) — The literal content of a line: the words a court reporter would transcribe. Ch 3 · 6.1.

Thematic alibi — The unfalsifiable defence of a functionless thread on the ground that it “explores the same themes”. Ch 14 · 8.13.

Theme — A question a book tests rather than a proposition it asserts. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Threshold of a strand — The point at which recurring material from another time acquires a question of its own and becomes a strand; what the structural domain proposed in Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) named (rejected as a domain of the cutaway in Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture, Chapter 8). Ch 8 · full treatment.

Threshold problem — The Opening Pages’s term (Chapter 9) for the structural asymmetry by which the opening pages must generate reader trust without any accumulated investment to draw on. Ch 9 · 1.1.

Tick-tock — Kermode’s minimal model of plot: the listener supplies a beginning and an end to an undifferentiated series, and the interval between them becomes a duration with a shape. Ch 16 · 3.1.

Time-stamp — An explicit statement of elapsed time or temporal position at the head of a new unit; the cheapest reliable orientation available, and the most commonly defaulted to. Ch 5 · 4.2.

Total closure — The mode of closing in which the narrative reaches the prologue’s moment and completes its frame. Ch 10 · 6.5.

Transition — The narrative material, however brief, that carries a reader across a gap in time, place, viewpoint or scale. Ch 5 · 2.1.

Transition inventory — The manuscript-scale audit at Ch 5 · 5.5: every join listed with its technique, dimension count, anchor position, ellipsis type and second job.

Transportation — Gerrig’s, and Green and Brock’s, term for the absorbed state of narrative engagement; a threshold phenomenon with a start-up cost. Ch 9 · glossary. In Arc and Theme’s sense (Chapter 12): Green and Brock’s term for a reader’s absorption into a narrative world. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Trigger — The element in the present scene that motivates a cutaway. Ten kinds are tabulated at Ch 7 · 6.6; the requirement of one is a consequence of narrative distance rather than an independent rule.

Turn — One speaker’s contribution, bounded by the transitions on either side; the unit of conversation analysis and the smallest constituent of an exchange. Ch 3 · 2.2, Ch 3 · 3.2.

Turn reveal — A reveal near the middle that changes the book’s engine. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Turned middle — A shape of middle organised around a single turn near its centre, so that its first half asks one question and its second another. Ch 11 · full treatment.

U

Undated strand — A strand whose instalments are placed in time by headings alone. Ch 8 · full treatment.

Undeclared decline — The failure of a book that invokes a core promise and declines it at the end without a sign inside the book. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Undone ending — A conclusive ending in one volume reversed by a later one. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Upward discovery — The finding, while working on a lower rung, that a higher decision is wrong; it sends the writer up the ladder before work continues. Ch 18 · full treatment.

V

Value shift — McKee’s term for the movement of a charged value from one pole towards its opposite across a scene. The Purposes of a Scene’s central diagnostic (Chapter 1), and a test that any unit earning its place, an exchange of dialogue included, must pass. Ch 1 · 3.7, Ch 3 · 1.3, Ch 3 · 2.1.

Value-shift log — A record of the middle, one line per sequence, giving what is true at its start and no longer true at its close, with the stakes; it finds neighbouring sequences that repeat each other. Ch 11 · full treatment.

Variation — Keeping a genre’s core promise while changing a convention: new semantics on an old syntax, a varied obligatory scene, or a scene performed by someone unexpected. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Variation (carrier of theme) — Other characters answering the book’s question differently. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Varied repetition — Repetition in which one parameter — the object’s state, its relations, its context, or its naming — has changed, producing a differential the reader can read. The mechanism by which motifs accrue meaning. Ch 4 · 6.5.

Viewpoint architecture — A whole-book shape of viewpoint allocation. Thirteen are tabulated at Ch 13 · 6.3.

Viewpoint grant — The allocation to a character of access to the reader’s identification: to whom, how much, beginning when, ending when. Ch 13 · 6.1.

Vocative — A name or title used to address someone. Rare and marked in real speech; therefore conspicuous in fiction when used on every turn. Ch 3 · 8.7.

Volume — One work of a series. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Volume question — The question a volume is built on and must close. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Volume table — A table with a row per volume of a series, recording its question and where it closes, its step on the series question, the threads carried, the hero’s criterion, the re-entry and the last page. Ch 17 · full treatment.

Volume that owes its question — The failure of a volume that leaves its own question open at the last page to bring the reader back. Ch 17 · full treatment.

W

Want and need — What a character consciously pursues, and, in the manuals, what they must change; in Arc and Theme (Chapter 12) the need is a criterion not yet held. Ch 12 · full treatment.

Withholder — What keeps a truth from the reader until its disclosure: a vantage that does not know, a teller with a motive, or an arrangement. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Withholding viewpoint — A failure pattern: paralipsis without a reason in a narration that follows a mind which knows the fact. Ch 15 · full treatment.

Z

Zeigarnik effect — The finding that interrupted tasks are recalled better than completed ones; the usual psychological explanation of the cliffhanger, with a mixed replication record and heavy moderation by motivation. Ch 6 · 3.6.

Zero focalisation — See omniscience. Ch 13 · glossary.

Zero-context problem — The condition under which the opening pages operate: all contracts must be opened using only their own resources. Ch 9 · 3.7.

The Craft Behind the Story — Appendix A, Glossary.