The eight tests are for revision, and they need two documents to work on: the protagonist’s criterion log, defined in The Mechanism, with the five to eight largest decisions and the rule behind each, and the answer map, which writes the book’s question and each major character’s answer to it. Tests 1 to 6 (Criterion, Hinge, Price, Seed, Constant and Enactment) read the arc, and tests 7 (Question) and 8 (Answers) the theme. Record a sentence for each, not a verdict.
Test 1 — Criterion
Is the rule behind the last large decision different from the rule behind the first, and if not, does the book mean it to be the same?
Failure. No arc, in a book that wanted one.
Exception. The Remains of the Day (1989), whose rule holds at the last decision and whose recognition is the arc.
Test 2 — Hinge
At which decision does the rule change, and is that decision on the page, made by an act?
Failure. Change by drift or by report: the announced arc.
Exception. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), in which Lydgate declines by small accommodations and no single turn.
Test 3 — Price
What does the decision at the hinge cost under the old rule, and has the reader seen that cost grow?
Failure. The free hinge.
Exception. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), where Scrooge’s change costs only money he has, and the price is paid in what the ghosts make him see.
Test 4 — Seed
Where is the new rule in the book before the hinge, held by another character or glimpsed and set aside?
Failure. A change from nowhere, which the reader credits to the author.
Exception. As You Like It, in which Duke Frederick is converted offstage by “an old religious man” and the comedy’s contract is reconciliation.
Test 5 — Constant
What about the character is visibly unchanged at the end?
Failure. Replacement: a different person, not a developed one.
Exception. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), a change of sex and of centuries whose subject is how much a self can lose and remain one.
Test 6 — Enactment
Is the new rule confirmed after the hinge by a situation the book has shown before, answered differently?
Failure. A change confirmed only by statement.
Exception. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose change comes in a dying man’s last hours and cannot be repeated.
Test 7 — Question
Can the theme be put as a question to which two or more of the book’s decisions give different answers?
Failure. A topic, which gives the reader nothing to weigh, or a thesis, which gives nothing to decide.
Exception. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), a fable whose theme is a proposition and whose form exists to demonstrate it.
Test 8 — Answers
On the answer map, does the opposition hold an answer the book lets succeed, or makes costly to defeat?
Failure. The sermon: one answer, and figures to illustrate it.
Exception. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), an allegory in which every figure is an answer and only one is allowed.
Reading the results together
Failures cluster, and the cluster says more than any single result. Test 1 (Criterion) passing while test 2 (Hinge) fails means the character ends somewhere new without having chosen to: find the decision the book skipped and write it in scene. Tests 3 (Price) and 4 (Seed) failing together mean the change belongs to the author rather than the character, and the remedy is to give the new rule to another character early, as a seed, and to make the old rule cost something visible near the middle. Test 5 (Constant) failing while test 1 (Criterion) passes means replacement, and the repair is usually small: keep the character’s want, or a habit of attention, unaltered into the decision made for a new reason. Test 7 (Question) passing while test 8 (Answers) fails describes a book with a real question and only one answer in it, which readers experience as being lectured, and the remedy is to strengthen the opposition’s answer until it costs the protagonist something to reject it. Test 1 (Criterion) failing while test 8 (Answers) passes usually describes a steadfast arc, and the question is then whether the protagonist’s rule has been put under real pressure.
The hardest result is a clean pass on every test and readers who still do not believe the change. The usual cause is the hinge’s position rather than its content: it has been placed in summary, or at a low point of pressure, or a chapter away from the climax that should test it. Move it into scene, and into the climax’s pressure, before rewriting anything else.
See also: the full treatment, with the procedure for each test and a worked criterion log for each of the household’s three siblings.