The eight tests are for revision, and they need the two documents of The Mechanism: an order chart and a strand table for the book as it stands. Test 1 (Necessity) asks whether the arrangement should exist, tests 2 to 5 (Strand question, Orientation, Interval and Rate) read the strands, and tests 6 to 8 (Switch, Convergence and Withholding) the switches and the meeting. Record a sentence for each, not a verdict.
Test 1 — Necessity
If the book were retold in story order in a page of summary, what would it lose?
Failure. The arbitrary arrangement: order chosen for interest it does not produce.
Exception. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), whose disorder is its subject and its comedy.
Test 2 — Strand question
Can each strand’s question be written in a line, and do the other strands’ pages leave it open?
Failure. The explaining strand: a past told in instalments to account for the present.
Exception. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), whose flashbacks share the frame’s one question.
Test 3 — Orientation
Within its first two sentences, does each instalment tell the reader which time she is in?
Failure. The lost reader.
Exception. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), whose first section makes disorientation the condition of its narrator.
Test 4 — Interval
Does the reader know how far apart the strands stand, and does the distance change or hold for a reason?
Failure. A braid with no clock: strands whose relation the reader cannot estimate.
Exception. Cloud Atlas (2004), whose intervals of decades and centuries matter only as an order of succession.
Test 5 — Rate
Do the strands move at different rates, and does a crossing show the difference?
Failure. The lockstep braid.
Exception. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), three single days at one rate, where the sameness is the point.
Test 6 — Switch
Is each strand left on an open question and entered at a point that pays at once?
Failure. A strand the reader skims.
Exception. Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), whose short investigation chapters are tolerated as a clock.
Test 7 — Convergence
Where the strands meet, does the meeting change what at least one of them meant?
Failure. The convergence by coincidence.
Exception. Dunkirk (2017), whose crossings change little in meaning and much in feeling, as counterpoint.
Test 8 — Withholding
Does the arrangement withhold anything, and is there a reason in the book besides the order?
Failure. An order used to keep a secret that a character would have told.
Exception. Memento (2000), whose withholding is the hero’s amnesia.
Reading the results together
Failures cluster, and the cluster locates the repair. Tests 1 (Necessity) and 7 (Convergence) failing together describe an arrangement that neither needs its order nor uses its meeting: retell the book in story order and see whether anything is lost, since a book that loses nothing should be chronological, with cutaways where they serve. Test 2 (Strand question) failing for one strand while test 6 (Switch) fails at its entries is the commonest pattern in a braided draft, the strand readers skim because it only explains; the repair is to give it a question the present does not answer, or to cut it to cutaways placed where the present needs them.
Test 3 (Orientation) failing alone is the cheapest failure to mend, with markers chosen from the strand’s own material before headings are added. Tests 4 (Interval) and 5 (Rate) failing together mean the strands have no clock between them; decide whether the braid converges in time, and if so let the earlier strand run faster. Test 8 (Withholding) failing is a reveal problem as much as an arrangement problem, and The Reveal’s tests (Chapter 15) for a withholder apply: an order of telling may delay a truth, but a reader will forgive the delay only if something in the book, not the writer’s table of contents, explains it.
A clean pass on all eight, with readers who still find the book hard going, usually means the switches are too frequent for the book’s markers; lengthen the instalments before adding headings.
See also: the full treatment, section 5, with the procedure for each test and the household’s order chart and strand table.