The five patterns below are described by mechanism rather than surface, so that the remedy follows from the cause. Each ends with a published work that commits the fault and succeeds, because a pattern that is sometimes right has to be diagnosed rather than banned. The Reference chapter’s full catalogue adds seven more: the free goal, the stalled sequel, borrowed motivation, the passive protagonist, the deferred decision never paid, the free disaster and the named emotion.
The clean win
Symptom. The scene ends in unmixed success: the character wanted the thing and got it.
Mechanism. A costless satisfaction spends the reader’s desire instead of renewing it, and leaves nothing for the next goal to be built from. The damage therefore shows one unit later, when the following scene’s goal has to be invented, so a clean win is rarely a local problem.
Remedy. Leave the win intact and charge for it: trust, time, an ally’s good opinion, a fact the character would rather not have learned.
Exception. In Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–46) the hero’s schemes succeed one after another, more or less as designed, and the novel is not slack. Each of his wins is somebody else’s disaster, and Dumas gives the victims sequels, so the chain is intact and has been handed to the losing side. The cost to the winner is deferred across the whole book, as his method destroys people it should not have touched.
The skipped sequel
Symptom. Disaster, section break, new goal, with no reaction and no weighing between them.
Mechanism. The conversion of an outside event into an inner state never happens, so the decision that follows has nothing to issue from. Readers report characters who behave “randomly” or “coldly” and blame the characterisation.
Remedy. Insert one sequel, a paragraph long, after the most costly disaster in the sequence, and reread. The surrounding material often stops feeling thin without further change.
Exception. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) omits the reaction beat almost entirely, and the omission is its moral argument: violence is narrated without registration because a world that registered it would be a different world. The distinguishing question is whether the missing beat is legible as missing. McCarthy’s absence is felt on every page; a draft’s absence is merely absent.
The false dilemma
Symptom. Two options are offered and one is plainly correct.
Mechanism. The reader completes the weighing before the character starts, so every further line reads as delay, and the character, who cannot see what the reader sees at a glance, is made to seem slow merely to fill a page.
Remedy. Write the two costs first, one sentence each. If one sentence is hard to write, the dilemma does not yet exist.
Exception. The Remains of the Day is built of false dilemmas. Stevens weighs choices whose right answer is obvious to every reader (whether to speak to Miss Kenton, whether to leave his father’s deathbed to serve dinner) and chooses wrongly each time, at great length. The dilemma is false from outside and real from inside, and the gap between the two positions is the novel. A false dilemma fails when the narration cannot see what the reader sees, and works when it can.
The sequel without a decision
Symptom. Reaction and dilemma are fully delivered, and then the sequence dissolves into a break and a change of subject, as though nothing were pending.
Mechanism. An appetite is created and not satisfied: the reader has been drawn into a weighing and released without payment. It differs from the deferred decision in one respect, which is that nothing is coming. In drafts it usually means the writer does not yet know what the character decides.
Remedy. Write the decision, however provisionally. A wrong decision that can be revised forces the next scene to have a goal; an absent one does not.
Exception. In Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey returns to Ireland after her sister’s death, having secretly married Tony in New York, and for a long stretch decides nothing. She leaves Tony’s letters unopened and drifts towards Jim Farrell and the life her mother would like for her. The decision arrives when Miss Kelly, the shopkeeper she once worked for, lets her know she has heard about the marriage; Eilis books her passage back at once. The book succeeds because the missing decision is replaced by the return of an earlier one: the secret marriage, Eilis’s own act, comes back as the disaster that forces her hand. A missing decision has to be replaced by another engine, not simply left out.
The escalation treadmill
Symptom. Every scene ends worse than the last, every test of the chain passes, and the reader still reports that the protagonist does not change and that the stakes have stopped mattering.
Mechanism. Two faults combine. Readers habituate to magnitude, so each disaster must outdo the previous one to register at all. And the criterion never moves: the engine works perfectly and is attached to a person who is not going anywhere.
Remedy. Stop escalating size and look for the hinge. Find the one decision that should be made on new grounds, and let the disasters around it be smaller.
Exception. Kenneth Lonergan’s film Manchester by the Sea (2016) refuses the hinge on purpose. Lee Chandler, named guardian of his nephew after his brother’s death, carries a guilt that cannot be outranked: years earlier a fire he caused killed his three children. Asked to stay, he tells his nephew that he “can’t beat it”, arranges for a family friend to adopt the boy and leaves for Boston, offering a spare room. The film’s subject is a criterion that cannot move, and its refusal of an arc is the argument. What it does not do is escalate: its disasters stay domestic in size, which is why the static centre reads as grief rather than as a stalled plot.
See also: the Reference catalogue, with a table from symptom to mechanism; The Purposes of a Scene, “Failure Patterns” (Chapter 1), for the scene that does no job at all.