4. The Taxonomy

The revision ladder has five rungs. Each holds a set of decisions, the instruments from earlier chapters that test them, and the symptoms readers report when they fail. The rungs are ordered by dependence: a decision on a rung can make decisions on the rungs below it wrong, and cannot make those above it wrong. The order is a claim about novels of the kind this book models, and The Mechanism says where it bends.

Rung 1: the promise

The first rung holds the promise: what kind of book this is, what question its choices answer, and what it declines to answer. Its decisions are the genre and its core promise, kept, varied or declined, from Series and Genre (Chapter 17); whether the book is a standalone or a volume of a series, from the same chapter; the governing thematic question and the answer each major character gives it, from Arc and Theme’s answer map (Chapter 12); and the contracts the opening will make, from The Opening Pages (Chapter 9), taken here as decisions about what the book owes rather than as pages. The instruments are the promise inventory and the answer map. A writer should be able to state the rung in two sentences: what the reader is promised, and what question the book’s choices answer.

A change on this rung reopens everything below it, which is why it is checked first and changed reluctantly. It fails in symptoms that readers seldom locate: an ending that was “not what the book promised”, a book that “didn’t know what it wanted to be”, and, less obviously, a middle that sags because nothing in the book’s question makes one outcome more urgent than another.

Rung 2: allocation and arrangement

The second rung holds allocation and arrangement: whose book it is, how many stories it tells, in what order of time, and in what form. Its decisions are the viewpoint grant of The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) (which minds, for how much of the book, from when); the threads and their convergence of The Subplot (Chapter 14); the arrangement of times of Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8), with its order chart and strand table; whether the book has a prologue, by The Prologue’s double test (Chapter 10); and the book’s form, the person and tense of its narration, its divisions, and any frame, apparatus or repeated pattern it declares. The instruments are the admission test, the convergence test, the order chart, the strand table and the form audit described at the end of this file.

A change on this rung moves whole stretches of the book, so it reopens every rung below for the units it moves. Its symptoms are the reader who could not tell the viewpoints apart, who preferred the subplot, who skimmed one timeline or did not know when she was, or who took the prologue for a different book.

Rung 3: the shape

The third rung holds the shape of the whole: where the protagonist’s change is located, how the middle narrows, when each fact is disclosed, and what the ending spends. Its decisions are the arc, located by Arc and Theme’s criterion log (Chapter 12) at the decision where the character’s rule for choosing changes; the middle, narrowed according to The Middle’s option list (Chapter 11) and checked for repetition by its value-shift log; the schedule of reveals, set by The Reveal’s disclosure map (Chapter 15) and tested by its double-reading table; and the ending, audited by The Ending’s plant audit (Chapter 16) and its last-decision rule. These four are one rung because they depend on one another sideways: moving a reveal changes what the middle narrows, and moving the arc’s decision changes what the ending must pay. They are checked together, in the order middle, arc, reveal, ending, since the ending depends on all three.

A change on this rung reopens the joins and scenes near the decisions it moves. Its symptoms are the classic reports on a draft: the middle drags, the protagonist does not change or changes from nowhere, the twist was guessed or felt like a cheat, the ending fell flat or was too tidy.

Rung 4: the joins

The fourth rung holds the joins, the places where one unit of the book meets the next: chapter breaks, by The Chapter Break’s statement (Chapter 6) of what each chapter proposes and how its ending prices stopping; transitions across gaps, by The Transition’s count (Chapter 5) of what changes; cutaways into the past, by Backstory and Flashback’s compression check (Chapter 7) and its rules for the trigger and the way back; and the opening pages, by The Opening Pages’s contracts (Chapter 9) as written. The opening is treated as a join because it joins the reader to the book, and it is revised last of the joins, after every decision it must promise has been made.

A change on this rung reopens the openings and closings of the scenes on either side. Its symptoms are local but global in effect: a book that readers call relentless or slow when no scene is at fault, a reader who stalls after scene breaks, flashbacks skimmed, a first chapter put down.

Rung 5: the scene and its materials

The last rung holds the scene and its materials: what each scene changes, by The Purposes of a Scene’s two-sentence statement (Chapter 1) and its five registers; how scene and sequel link, by Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2); what each exchange of dialogue does, by The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3); and which details are named, by The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4). The line edit follows this rung. A change here reopens nothing above it, which is the reason the sentences come last: they can be revised without disturbing any other decision, and every other decision can disturb them.

The ladder in one table

The table gathers the five rungs with their instruments and the symptoms that most often bring a writer to each. It is a summary of the paragraphs above, not a substitute for the chapters it names.

Read across a row, the table says where to look; read down a column, it shows how much of the book each rung governs, which is the reason for the order. The symptoms column is a first guess, since a symptom felt on one rung is often caused on a higher one.

Proposals from earlier chapters

The Ending (Chapter 16) proposed a sixth domain of the ending, formal closure: the completion, modification or disruption of a book’s structural pattern rather than its story, such as the returned frame or the apparatus that follows the narrative. It adopted the domain for diagnosis, conceding the objection that formal closure is a means by which the other domains are served rather than something the reader receives, and left this chapter to adopt or reject it when it audits the form of a whole book, with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Appendix and the last episode of Six Feet Under as test cases.

This chapter rejects formal closure as a domain of the ending and adopts it at the scale of the book as the form audit, a test on rung 2: for every formal pattern a book declares, its person and tense, its divisions, any frame, apparatus or repeated shape, the audit asks whether the pattern is completed, modified for a reason the book shows, or removed from the place where it was declared. Both test cases pass the audit, and both show why the domain belongs there. In the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four a footnote declares the apparatus: For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix. The Appendix discharges it, and its past tense, written from a time in which Newspeak is history, is received by the reader as a hope the story denied, a thematic and emotional payment. Six Feet Under opened nearly every episode on a death, and its last episode, which opens instead on a birth, ends on a montage of the principal characters’ deaths decades ahead; the pattern is completed and modified at its last instance, and what the viewer receives is the series’ theme, each life shown whole. In both, the formal pattern is the carrier and the payment lies in another domain, so the objection holds at the ending. The Ending’s defence (Chapter 16), that formal closure has distinct carriers, failures and remedies, holds for the audit: a frame opened and never closed is a decision on rung 2 that the ending has failed to discharge, and the remedy is as often to remove the frame from the opening as to close it at the end.

See also: the full treatment, section 3, with every chapter’s instruments and tests placed on the ladder and the ruling on formal closure in full.