A genre’s promise passes through three stages in a book: it is made, the reader stakes attention on it, and the book keeps, varies or declines it. A series adds a fourth, carrying what is left to the next volume. The chapter’s two instruments record those stages, the promise inventory for a single book and the volume table for a series.
How a promise is made
A promise is made by semantic signs and confirmed by syntax. A body in the first chapter, a locked room, a stranger met in the rain are signs; the promise is not made until the book sets the syntax going, an investigator who sets out to learn who did it, two people whom something keeps apart. Signs without syntax make a mode, and the reader waits to learn which promise, if any, they belong to. Syntax without the familiar signs makes a variation, and the reader, recognising the relation, applies the promise in unfamiliar dress.
Some promises are made before the first page. Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1987; translated by Jane E. Lewin, 1997) named the paratext, everything that surrounds a text and presents it, the title, the cover, the jacket copy, the epigraph, the shelf. A writer controls little of it, and a publisher’s jacket may promise what the book does not. The practical rule is that the text must declare its own genre within its first chapters, strongly enough to correct a paratext that has made the wrong promise, because the paratext cannot be revised after the reader has bought it.
How a reader stakes, and when a decline is cheap
A reader stakes attention on a promise in proportion to the pages it organises. A question of fact posed on page one and left open is cheap to decline if the book shows at once that it will not answer it; the same question kept in front of the reader for three hundred pages, with clues and a suspect, is expensive, because she has read every page through it. The chapter’s working estimate, which it has not measured, is that a decline of a core promise should be legible within the first quarter of a book, and that a decline first made legible at the ending will be read as a failure by most readers who hold the promise.
A declared decline has three parts. The first is a sign, inside the book, that the question is being held open on purpose: a character who will not answer, a character who chooses not to ask, a narrator who says the answer is not coming, a frame that tells the end. The second is a replacement, a promise the book makes in place of the declined one and then keeps, usually a promise of significance in the sense of The Taxonomy. The third is visibility to the end: the declined question stays in view while the book closes its other questions around it, which is The Reveal’s condition (Chapter 15) for a declined reveal. A decline missing the first part is an undeclared decline, the chapter’s first failure pattern; one missing the second leaves the reader with a debt and nothing for it; one missing the third looks like forgetfulness.
The promise inventory
The promise inventory is a table of the conventions a book invokes. Each row gives the convention, the genre it comes from, where in the book it is first invoked (as a percentage of the text), whether the book keeps, varies or declines it, and where the keeping or the decline is shown. The inventory is drawn up from the manuscript, not from the writer’s intentions, and its most useful column is the last: a declined convention with no entry there is a broken promise waiting for a reader. Worked Analyses gives the household’s.
Variation is the third course, between keeping and declining. A book can keep the syntax and change the semantics, a romance set in a mortuary; keep the core promise and vary its obligatory scene, a declaration made by letter, years late; or keep the obligatory scene and change who performs it, an exposure made by the suspect. Variations cost the reader nothing if the core promise holds, and they are where a formula book’s distinction lies.
How a series carries its questions
A volume in a series carries two questions, and the reader must be able to tell them apart. The volume question is closed inside the volume, by its own climax; the series question advances by a step the reader can name. A volume whose last page is spent on its own question, left open to bring the reader back, is The Ending’s series hook (Chapter 16), and its cost is the cost of an unclosed ending: the reader judges a book she has not been given. A volume whose last page opens the series question a step further, after closing its own, is doing what a series promises.
Threads that run across volumes go dormant between them, and the dormancy is measured in the reader’s months as well as in pages. The Subplot (Chapter 14) set a thread’s dormancy limits within a book; across volumes a thread absent from one book has been absent for a year of the reader’s life. The second volume therefore needs a re-entry: an opening that serves a returning reader who remembers the shape and not the mechanics, and a new reader who remembers nothing. The Opening Pages (Chapter 9) gives the rule for it, recap delivered as present consequence rather than as summary.
A series hero’s criterion, in Arc and Theme’s sense (Chapter 12), must be where the last volume left it. In an episodic series it does not move, and the change happens to others; in a series with a running arc it moves a stage per volume, and each volume shows its stage. The order of volumes is a further choice. A prequel, a volume set before the others, is an analepsis at the scale of the series: its reader knows how its story ends, so it must run on a question the later volumes leave open, which is Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s strand question (Chapter 8) applied to a book.
The volume table
The volume table has a row per volume, written or planned, and seven columns: the volume question and where it closes; the series question and the step the volume takes on it; the threads carried in and out, with their dormancy in volumes; the hero’s criterion at the end; the re-entry device; the last page, closing or hooking; and the form the volume implies. A series whose table has an empty step column in two successive rows is stalled, and one whose last-page column says hooks where the volume question column says open is owing.
See also: the full treatment, section 5, with the procedures for drawing up both instruments, and section 3.4 on prequels and reading order.