Each pattern below fails through a mechanism rather than a surface feature. Each ends with a published work that uses the feature successfully because the mechanism is absent or offset by another effect. The full treatment has a longer catalogue, among them replacement, the drifting theme, the arc for everyone, the decorative motif and the untested steadfast arc.
The announced arc
Symptom. The change is reported rather than chosen. The character realises, understands at last or sees now, and the narration or the character supplies the content of the realisation. Readers say they were told the character had changed and did not feel it.
Mechanism. The announced arc substitutes knowledge for decision. A realisation is an event in the character’s mind, and the reader can verify it only by what the character then does differently; where nothing is done differently, the reader has the narration’s word and nothing to weigh it against. The motive is understandable: by the end of a draft the writer knows what the change means and wants to be sure the reader does. The household draft in The Problem is a clean instance.
Remedy. Tests 2 (Hinge) and 6 (Enactment). Delete the realisation and find the decision it stands in for, then place that decision under pressure and make it cost something the old rule valued. If the realisation must stay, put it after the decision, so that it names what the reader has already seen.
Exception. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Nick Carraway tells the reader on the first page that he is “inclined to reserve all judgments”, and tells the reader on the last pages that he has decided to go back West, in a passage that is largely statement. The book works because Nick’s arc is the telling itself: the retrospective narrator who judges every person in the story is the change, and the reader watches it happen in the voice rather than in a scene.
The free hinge
Symptom. The character chooses by a new rule at a moment when the old rule has nothing left to defend. The obstacle has died, the rival has withdrawn, the money has arrived, and the change is made at no cost.
Mechanism. The free hinge moves the price from the character to the plot. A decision is legible as a change only if the old rule would have forbidden it, and if circumstances have already removed what the old rule protected, the character is choosing between options that cost the same. The reader may feel satisfaction at the outcome but has seen no one choose it.
Remedy. Test 3 (Price). Find what the old rule values, and make the hinge give it up. If the plot must clear the way, let it do so after the decision, not before.
Exception. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Jane’s return to Rochester comes after the plot has removed every cost: his wife is dead in the fire that destroyed Thornfield, he is blinded and maimed, and Jane has an inheritance of her own. The return has struck readers as convenient since publication. The book holds because its priced decision came earlier and was paid in full, when Jane left Thornfield with nothing rather than stay as Rochester’s mistress, and the return reads as the reward for a choice the reader watched her make.
The scheduled arc
Symptom. Readers predict the change from the first chapters, and the book delivers it on time. The flaw appears to exist in order to be corrected, and the climax restages an early scene with the roles reversed.
Mechanism. The scheduled arc meets Forster’s condition that a change convince and fails his condition that it surprise. Arc models that begin with a named wound or lie make the schedule easy to build and hard to hide, because the writer has planned the change before the character has made any decisions, and the reader detects a plan sooner than a person.
Remedy. Tests 1 (Criterion) and 4 (Seed). Keep the destination and complicate the route: let the hinge cost something the opening did not promise, place the seed in a character the reader does not suspect, or let the aftermath show that the change did not cure everything.
Exception. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003), a long-running bestseller. Its first chapter gives the arc away: a telephone call from Rahim Khan, an old family friend, ends with “There is a way to be good again.” Amir’s betrayal of his friend Hassan in Kabul is answered decades later by his return to rescue Hassan’s son, a beating by the man who once assaulted Hassan, and a slingshot that repeats a threat from the first part, and the last page returns Hassan’s devoted phrase, for you, a thousand times over. The design is visible to any reader. The book works because the price is heavy and the aftermath does not cure: the boy Amir rescues stays withdrawn and nearly silent through the last chapters.
The revoked arc
Symptom. After the hinge, the character goes back to choosing by the old rule, because the plot needs them to.
Mechanism. The revoked arc breaks the enactment condition. The hinge has told the reader that the old rule no longer governs, and every later decision made on it either contradicts the hinge or empties it. Revocation usually comes from structure rather than character: a set piece planned before the arc was understood, or a comic or action climax that requires the old behaviour.
Remedy. Test 6 (Enactment). Rewrite the later decisions on the new rule, or move the hinge after them.
Exception. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Huck decides in chapter 31 that he will go to hell rather than give Jim up, and in chapters 33 to 43 at the Phelps farm he defers to Tom Sawyer, who turns Jim’s escape into a game and has known all along that Jim was freed by Miss Watson’s will. Leo Marx argued in 1953 that this part, often called the Evasion, jeopardises the significance of the whole novel. The book has survived the argument, and some readers defend the Evasion as Twain’s satire of a freedom granted on paper; the arc’s force is great enough that its revocation reads, to them, as part of what the book shows.
The sermon
Symptom. Every character’s choices answer the book’s question in the same way, or the characters who answer it differently exist to be defeated. Readers report being lectured, and the narration or a favoured character states the answer.
Mechanism. The sermon removes variation, the second carrier in The Taxonomy, and leaves the theme to statement. Without a serious opposing answer the book has nothing to test its answer against, so the reader’s assent is asked for rather than won.
Remedy. Tests 7 (Question) and 8 (Answers). Give the strongest opposing answer to a character the book respects, let it succeed at least once, and make rejecting it cost the protagonist something.
Exception. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), serialised from 1851, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Stowe breaks into the story to deliver homilies on slavery, and closes the book by addressing her readers directly. The book sets out to persuade, and by the measure of its sales and of the argument it provoked it succeeded; its sermon works because the scenes it rests on made its readers feel the cost of the answer it rejected.
See also: the full treatment, for the extended catalogue; The Ending (Chapter 16), for the explained ending, the sermon’s form at the last page.