The contract model describes how openings work under present conventions, and its tests catch real faults in drafts written for present readers. It is not a law of narrative. Bleak House fails at least three of the ten tests (the scene, zero-context and form tests in “Diagnostic Tests”) and its opening is part of what readers admire in it; Pride and Prejudice defaults on three contracts in its first sentence; Tristram Shandy spends volumes refusing to begin. The conventions behind the tests were shaped in part by the way manuscripts are filtered and books are browsed, and a writer who can say only that an opening would be rejected today has explained the market, not the book. The tests should therefore produce questions, and an opening that fails one has done nothing wrong until the writer has asked why the book might want the failure.
The model does settle one question of practice, and it concerns order. Every obligation an opening opens is defined by the book that follows. Whether a genre was promised accurately, whether a detail placed on page one is redeemed, and whether the form declared is the form used can be judged only against the finished whole. An opening written first is therefore a hypothesis about a book that does not yet exist, and the familiar advice to perfect the first pages before going on asks the writer to finish the hypothesis before the evidence is in. The order that follows is to draft the opening to begin, since a book needs somewhere to start; to revise it last, when the book can say what it owes; and, when the opening and the book disagree, to change the opening, because it is the smaller object and the one written in ignorance of the rest.
See also: the Reference coda.