The ten tests are for revision, not composition; applied while drafting they produce a writer who cannot put anything in the past without a permit. Before running any of them, decide once whether they apply to your book. They assume that the present carries the engine, and in a novel whose present is deliberately thin, a drive west, a night’s conversation, a man dying in a room, tests 1 (Momentum), 3 (Removal) and 8 (Placement) will report failures that are not faults. Run tests 1 to 4 (Momentum, Register, Removal and Trigger) first, since there is no point tuning the trigger of a cutaway that should be a sentence. Tests 3 (Removal) and 7 to 10 (Chronology, Placement, Completing or repeating and Proportion) need the manuscript, not the passage alone. Record a sentence, not a verdict; every test is failed on purpose by a book worth reading.
Test 1 — Momentum
What present question is the reader waiting on when the cutaway begins, and how hard is she pressing: low, moderate or at its peak?
Failure. The timing was not chosen.
Exception. The Remains of the Day, whose present asks almost nothing.
Test 2 — Register
Run the compression check: keep the scene, keep the sentence, or keep neither?
Failure. Over-dramatised backstory.
Exception. Lost, whose format gave nearly every episode a flashback strand, whatever the material.
Test 3 — Removal
Cut it and read the surrounding twenty pages: what is lost, and in which domain?
Failure. A decorative past.
Exception. Proust’s Combray, where the accumulation is the argument.
Test 4 — Trigger
Is the departure motivated by something in the present, and if not, can this narration afford to go without one?
Failure. An unmotivated jump in close third.
Exception. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, whose narrator simply goes.
Test 5 — Return
Cover the cutaway and read the sentence before it against the sentence after: does the present resume, or has it changed?
Failure. The untethered return.
Exception. “El curioso impertinente” in Don Quixote, which changes nothing.
Test 6 — Reach and extent
How far back does it go, how much time does it cover, and are they in proportion to what it delivers?
Failure. A whole context built for one scene.
Exception. Sutpen at the plantation door in Absalom, Absalom!
Test 7 — Chronology
Could a reader at this point write the events in the order they happened? Ask one, and compare with yours.
Failure. Confusion where withholding was meant.
Exception. The Good Soldier, where reconstruction is the reading.
Test 8 — Placement
Name three other places this cutaway could go: would it cost less, and recolour more, at any of them?
Failure. The right material in the wrong place.
Exception. The scar in Odyssey XIX, at the peak of the recognition.
Test 9 — Completing or repeating
Is it filling a gap the reader knew was there, or returning to material already told, and if so, what does this pass add?
Failure. Redundancy, or a gap never opened.
Exception. Beloved, some of whose returns add only weight.
Test 10 — Proportion
How much of the book is in the past, and does its declared structure acknowledge that?
Failure. A retrospective novel organised as a present-tense one.
Exception. Wuthering Heights, nearly all retrospect inside a diary’s frame.
Three refinements sharpen the tests. In test 3 (Removal), perform the removal on paper and leave it out for a day, since a writer reading a passage just deleted supplies it from memory. In test 6 (Reach and extent), record whether the reach shortens as the cutaway runs; a long analepsis that closes on the present makes its own momentum, and one that stays at a fixed distance must find momentum elsewhere. In test 10 (Proportion), as a rough guide offered by the Reference chapter and not from a count, under about a twentieth of the book in the past raises the question whether the characters have any history, up to about a fifth is the ordinary range for a present-driven novel, and beyond about two-fifths the book is a retrospective novel whose present should be designed as a frame rather than serving as an unwilling host.
Reading the results together
Failures cluster, and the cluster points to the first move. Test 2 (Register) alone means compressing to the sentence you wrote. Tests 1 (Momentum) and 4 (Trigger) together mean the cutaway arrives on the writer’s schedule: run test 8 (Placement) and find a place where a present question already exists. Test 3 (Removal) alone means cutting, not adding a function. Test 5 (Return) alone means rewriting the return for a changed question. Test 6 (Reach and extent) alone means finding a nearer memory. Test 7 (Chronology) alone is usually fixed by one date. Test 9 (Completing or repeating) failing as repetition means naming the difference or cutting the pass. Test 10 (Proportion) means changing the structure, not the proportions. Tests 1 (Momentum), 3 (Removal) and 5 (Return) together mean the material belongs to another book.
Test 8 (Placement) carries a warning. When a cutaway fails, writers revise the cutaway, because it is the object in front of them. In the cases this protocol catches, by this book’s estimate from drafts read rather than from a count, the material is more often sound and its position wrong, and moving four hundred words is a smaller operation than rewriting them, with a larger effect.
See also: the Reference protocol, with each test’s procedure and a table of combined failures; the Reference failure catalogue.