The ten tests below are for revision, not composition: several ask questions only a finished scene can answer. The output of each should be a sentence describing what the scene does, not a pass or a fail, since ten sentences describe a scene and ten ticks describe nothing. A failed test is a question about a choice, and every test here is failed by at least one scene this chapter admires.
Test 1 — The want test
What does the viewpoint character want in this scene, right now, in one sentence?
Failure. No engine: the passage is an occasion, not a scene.
Exception. Scenes of pure reception, where bad news comes to someone who wanted nothing.
Test 2 — The resistance test
Complete: “___ wants ___, and ___ is in the way.” What did getting it cost?
Failure. Activity rather than scene; nominal resistance overcome for free.
Exception. The want granted at once, where the granting is the disaster (Great Expectations, chapter 18).
Test 3 — The value-shift test
What is true at the start that is no longer true at the close, in two parallel sentences?
Failure. The engine idles: a want is pursued and nothing moves.
Exception. Scenes establishing the normal, whose shift arrives in a later scene; run the test on the pair.
Test 4 — The extraction test
Remove the scene. What would the reader fail to learn, feel or expect, and which later scene becomes unearned?
Failure. A satellite given a kernel’s length.
Exception. A plant whose value appears only forwards, which is why the test runs in both directions.
Test 5 — The domain-count test
Which domains does the scene serve, as distinct from occupy?
Failure. One annotated letter: under-used space.
Exception. Rests and normal-establishing scenes, which should serve one.
Test 6 — The redundancy test
Has the reader already received this shift?
Failure. The book is repeating itself, usually in its middle.
Exception. Repetition as argument (Kafka’s The Trial, chapter 5).
Test 7 — The summary-substitution test
Rewrite the scene as three sentences of summary. What is lost?
Failure. A summary inflated into a scene.
Exception. Atmosphere is always absent from a summary; the question is whether the book needs it here.
Test 8 — The entry-and-exit test
Does the scene start as late and end as early as it can?
Failure. The scene opens before the want is in operation, or runs on past its last movement.
Exception. A slow entry that builds the normal the shift will break (the reaping morning in The Hunger Games).
Test 9 — The pressure test
Does information arrive under pressure, or is it delivered?
Failure. Exposition in disguise: a briefing with stage furniture.
Exception. Exposition that is itself the crisis (the Grand Inquisitor).
Test 10 — The register test
Is the story due for an action unit or a reflective one, and which is this?
Failure. Several units of one register in a row: incident without consequence, or brooding without motion.
Exception. A deliberate run of one register to produce exhaustion or stasis.
The exceptions are all discussed in this chapter: the Kafka and Dostoevsky cases among the failure patterns, The Hunger Games among the worked analyses.
Reading the results together
Failures cluster, and the cluster points to the remedy. When tests 1 (Want) and 2 (Resistance) fail together, the scene has no engine: find the want or convert the passage to summary. When test 3 (Value shift) fails alone, the engine idles: make the pursuit cost something. When tests 3 (Value shift), 4 (Extraction) and 6 (Redundancy) fail together, they usually mark a fossil of discovery drafting, which can be cut once its one useful sentence has been moved. When tests 1 to 3 (Want, Resistance and Value shift) pass but test 5 (Domain count) returns four or five domains, the scene is overloaded and needs less.
When a scene fails test 3 (Value shift), the instinctive remedy is to add an event, which treats a structural absence as a shortage of content. The stronger remedy is to find the shift already latent in the scene, which the writer has usually muffled by continuing past it (test 8: Entry and exit) or by having a character announce it.
The reverse outline
The tests examine one scene; the reverse outline examines a book. Go through the finished draft and write one line per scene, in order, in a single document. Write each line in the language of consequence rather than of event: not Elena and Dov talk in the doorway but Elena gets the new key and not the reason. Add each scene’s length and domain letters, then read the document straight through. A line that will only come out event-shaped marks a satellite; two lines that say the same thing mark redundancy; a run of six lines without an R or a P shows a domain gone dark; and the end of the first movement arriving at forty per cent of the book shows a problem of proportion no scene-level test can see.
See also: the Reference protocol, with each test’s procedure and a table of combined failures; The Middle (Chapter 11), for redundancy at the scale of the book.