The orientation budget is a metaphor, and it carries an assumption that should be stated rather than smuggled in: that orientation is a cost to be kept down, that a reader’s attention is scarce, and that the well-made transition is the one nobody notices. Those are descriptions of a literary culture, broadly the realist and commercial fiction of the last half-century, not of narrative as such. The method in this chapter is calibrated to that culture, and it is useful in revision because most drafts are written in it.
The metaphor cannot describe several of the books this chapter has used. “Time Passes” narrates an ellipsis of ten years at length and is, by the budget’s arithmetic, a crossing that costs more than the scenes it joins. Pedro Páramo declines to signal its shifts between speakers, between times and between the living and the dead, because its proposition is that those distinctions do not hold in Comala. Fielding’s prefatory essays spend lavishly and buy a narrator’s company, which is much of what Tom Jones is for. None of these is a fault the method failed to catch, and none is an exception it can absorb by widening its thresholds; they are transitions whose value lies in what the budget treats as expense.
The budget therefore survives as an instrument for making an expenditure visible, so that a writer can confirm it as a choice. A join that spends two hundred words, or withholds its anchor for a page, may be right; what the method asks is that the writer know what the spending buys and be able to say so. The tests stop being useful at the point where they begin to decide for her.
See also: the Reference coda; the Reference analysis of Pedro Páramo.