Each pattern below fails through a mechanism rather than a surface feature, and ends with a published work that commits it and succeeds, because where the mechanism is absent or answered the feature is harmless. The full treatment has a longer catalogue, among them the premature convergence, the frame left open, the over-labelled book and the strand that outgrows the book.
The arbitrary arrangement
Symptom. Early readers say the book is hard to follow, and then, asked what happens, give its events in chronological order without difficulty. Nobody can say what the order is for.
Mechanism. The arbitrary arrangement departs from story order for interest the departure does not produce: chapters are shuffled to open on drama, or a strand is added because the material seemed thin in sequence. It fails test 1 (Necessity), and usually test 7 (Convergence), since an arrangement with no purpose has no meeting to aim at. The cost is all on the reader’s side, the updates Zwaan measured at every shift of time, with nothing in return.
Remedy. Test 1 (Necessity). Write the book in story order in a page and list what the arrangement adds: a frame installed first, a suspense held across a switch, a meeting that changes meaning. If the list is empty, make the book chronological and keep only the cutaways the present needs. If one item is on it, rebuild the arrangement around that item.
Exception. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Most of its chapters are named for characters and move back and forth through the war so freely that the order can be reconstructed only with effort, and many readers take it as arbitrary. It succeeds because one event, the death of Snowden over Avignon, recurs in fragments, each a little fuller, until it is told whole near the end; the apparent scatter is a recurring approach to the thing Yossarian cannot face, and the novel’s circular logic is enacted by its order.
The lost reader
Symptom. Readers report confusion about when a scene is happening, sometimes for pages, and some of them misread a scene as belonging to the wrong time and carry the error forward.
Mechanism. The lost reader is a failure of orientation: instalments open without a marker the reader can read at once, or with markers that only a careful reader could decode, a minor character’s age, a car’s model. It fails test 3 (Orientation). Writers commit it most often by relying on the markers they know, which the reader does not yet have.
Remedy. Test 3 (Orientation). Put a marker in the first two sentences of every instalment, chosen in order of cheapness: the strand’s own viewpoint character, a tense or person reserved for the strand, a detail of period or wear, an object the reader has seen in that time, and only then a heading or a time-stamp. Make the markers stronger where the strands share a place or a cast.
Exception. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Its first section, narrated by Benjy, an intellectually disabled man for whom past and present are equally near, moves among more than a dozen times with only italics to warn of a change; Faulkner wished it could be printed in inks of different colours, and an edition of 2012 did so. Readers are lost, and the section succeeds because the reader’s loss is Benjy’s condition, and the later sections, each in a clearer order, supply what the reader needs to go back.
The explaining strand
Symptom. Readers skim one timeline, usually the past, and say they wanted to get back to the other. The skimmed strand is often well written.
Mechanism. The explaining strand is material from another time delivered in instalments whose only function is to account for the present: why a character is as she is, how a situation arose. It has no question of its own, since the present is its answer, so it fails test 2 (Strand question), and its entries fail test 6 (Switch), since the reader arrives with no question to carry. It sits at the threshold of a strand ruled on in The Taxonomy, recurring like a strand and working like a cutaway.
Remedy. Test 2 (Strand question). Either give the strand a question the present cannot answer, a choice in the past whose outcome the present does not show, or cut it to cutaways, each placed where the present needs it, which Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) treats.
Exception. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Its long flashbacks, told by five people who knew Kane, are explanation and nothing else: each accounts for the man whose death opens the film. It succeeds because the frame lends every instalment one question, what Rosebud meant, which none of the tellers can answer, and because the tellers disagree, so that each flashback revises the last.
The lockstep braid
Symptom. A competently built dual-timeline book reads as monotonous, though both strands have questions and the switches are well placed. Readers cannot say why.
Mechanism. The lockstep braid runs its strands at one rate, with instalments of one length and switches at one interval, so that the crossings produce no variation and neither strand makes the other’s pace visible. It fails test 5 (Rate), and usually test 4 (Interval), since a braid in lockstep has no closing interval either.
Remedy. Test 5 (Rate), with the strand table. Change a strand’s rate, so that one covers years while the other covers weeks, or vary the instalments’ length so that one strand accelerates towards the meeting; then find a crossing where the difference shows, a moment in the slow strand that the fast one has already paid for.
Exception. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998). It braids three single days, Virginia Woolf’s in 1923, Laura Brown’s in 1949 and Clarissa Vaughan’s at the end of the century, at one rate, in a regular rotation. It succeeds because the sameness of rate is its argument, a day in three lives made equal, and because its convergence, the disclosure that Laura is the mother of Clarissa’s friend Richard, changes what two strands meant.
The convergence by coincidence
Symptom. The strands meet, and readers feel the meeting was arranged: a shared name, a birthmark, a house that turns out to be the same house. It changes nothing they understood.
Mechanism. The convergence by coincidence joins strands by a link that carries no cause and no change of meaning. It fails test 7 (Convergence). Writers commit it when they have built two strands and need them to meet, and choose the cheapest link available.
Remedy. Test 7 (Convergence). Make the link causal, so that an act in one strand is found to have made the other’s situation, or make it an identity that changes meaning, a person or object whose presence in both recasts one of them. If an object carries the link, give it a changed condition or a change of hands, the condition of the bridging object in The Mechanism.
Exception. Cloud Atlas (2004). Several of its protagonists bear a comet-shaped birthmark, a link as arbitrary as any, and the novel succeeds because its working link is elsewhere: each narrator reads or watches the story before, so the strands meet by reading, and each reading changes what the earlier strand meant to the later.
See also: the full treatment, section 4, with the extended catalogue.