The patterns below are failures of revision rather than of the text: each describes an edit that does careful work in an order or a manner that undoes it. Each ends with a published work in which the same habit succeeds because the mechanism is absent or has been addressed. The full treatment has a longer catalogue, among them the endless edit, the edit by committee and the rearranged book.
The page-order edit
Symptom. The opening is the most revised part of the draft and the least like the book. Each pass slows as it goes, and the writer reaches the last chapters tired, with little time left and a list of changes that would require the opening to be revised again.
Mechanism. The page-order edit revises the draft in the order in which a reader meets it. Page order is the order of reading, not of dependence, so each page is revised against decisions further on that have not yet been checked, and the opening, which depends on almost everything after it, is revised first. When a later repair changes what the book promises or how it ends, the polished opening now promises an earlier draft. The method fails tests 1 (Map) and 6 (Opening last) of Diagnostic Tests.
Remedy. Build the map, sort the notes onto the ladder, and work downwards. Revise the opening pages after rungs 1 to 3 have settled, and the last page with them.
Exception. Lee Child’s Make Me (2015), begun from a single sentence and written forward in one draft, without a plan and, by Andy Martin’s account of watching it written, without going back. It succeeds because the series had settled most of the top of the ladder before the first sentence: the hero, his rule for choosing and the promise his readers bring are fixed across the series. A forward draft on those terms is an edit done in advance on the lower rungs only, and Worked Analyses reads it as such.
Premature polish
Symptom. The writer resists cuts that the map shows the book needs, defending scenes by their sentences. The draft’s best prose is in scenes whose change column is empty, and successive revisions are small.
Mechanism. Premature polish is line editing before the top rungs have settled. It costs twice. Polished pages are harder to cut than rough ones, because the work in them is visible and the writer is reluctant to waste it, so polish raises the price of every structural change made after it. And polish hides the absence of change: a scene whose sentences are good reads as finished, which is the problem The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4) diagnoses in the description that readers call beautiful and cannot say what it told them. Sommers’s students, who revised by substituting words, show the pattern at its simplest.
Remedy. No line edit until rungs 1 to 3 pass. Keep a file for cut passages, which lowers the price of cutting without changing the book. Judge each scene by its row in the map before reading its sentences.
Exception. Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, written by his account in Timequake (1997) as a basher’s are, one sentence at a time, each finished before the next. His books succeed because a basher’s polish is not premature: he does not move on until the sentence fits decisions above it that are already made, and when it cannot fit them, the sentence stops the book rather than the book accommodating the sentence.
The local repair
Symptom. The same note arrives on successive drafts in different words. Each repair answers its note, and the reader who made it is no happier.
Mechanism. The local repair mends a symptom where it was felt, when its cause lies on a higher rung. Readers report where a problem was felt, and a writer who mistakes that place for the cause repairs a page that was working: she adds incident to a sagging middle whose options have not narrowed, explains a reveal that the pages before it never made ambiguous, or gives a protagonist a paragraph of change because no decision in the book shows it. The symptom moves, or recurs in a new form, because the cause is untouched. The repair fails test 3 (Rung-up).
Remedy. The rung-up rule. Before mending any note, write on the edit list the rung where it was felt and the rung above, and run that rung’s test. Sort the list by the rung of the cause, not of the symptom.
Exception. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), whose original ending, in which Pip and a remarried Estella meet and part for good, Dickens replaced in June 1861 with a more hopeful one at Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s suggestion, changing only the last pages. The original was published by John Forster after Dickens’s death, and readers have argued over the two since. The local repair holds because the note concerned the ending’s own decision, on which nothing else in the book depended, so that its symptom and its cause were on the same rung. The Ending (Chapter 16) reads both endings.
The cascade
Symptom. Revision produces new contradictions. A character knows a fact before the scene in which she learns it, an object is in two places, a date is wrong by a month, and the copy-editor’s list of queries grows with each draft.
Mechanism. The cascade is the unrecorded consequence of a repair. A change to one unit alters a fact that other units depend on, and without a map that shows which rows use the fact, and an edit list that names the tests the change reopens, the consequence goes unchecked. Cascades are the commonest product of careful revision, because careful revision changes many units. The seventeen contradictions found when the household novel’s cases were first set side by side are cascades of this kind: who found the ledger, whether Dov knew of the illness, whether Nadia had touched the coat. The repair fails test 4 (Reopen).
Remedy. Change the map before the text. When a row changes, read down every column the change touches, list the tests reopened, and rerun them before the next repair.
Exception. Dr Watson’s wound, a Jezail bullet in the shoulder in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) and a wounded leg in The Sign of Four (1890). The Holmes stories succeeded with the contradiction, which readers have since treated as a puzzle to be explained. A cascade matters in proportion to what depends on the fact it changes, and nothing in either story depends on where the bullet went.
The edit by addition
Symptom. The draft grows with each revision. Notes are answered by a new scene, a paragraph of explanation or a line of reflection, and readers of the new draft report it slower than the old and its meaning more stated.
Mechanism. The edit by addition answers every note by adding, because addition disturbs nothing already written and is therefore cheap for the writer. The reader pays. Each addition is a new unit with its own joins, a new claim on the reader’s attention, and often a statement of something the book should show: the explanatory paragraph at the head of a chapter, the character’s reflection on how she has changed. It fails test 5 (Economy).
Remedy. For every repair, ask whether something could be moved or cut instead; for every addition that stays, find something of equal length to remove. A repair on a higher rung usually adds less than one on a lower rung, since it mends a cause rather than covering a symptom.
Exception. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), a long novel whose editor, Gerry Howard, first thought it would be a better and/or more salable book if 100 or even 200 pages could go, and came to think that it justified its length; Yanagihara held her ground. The book succeeds with its length because the length and the excess are its promise, decided on the first rung, rather than additions made in answer to notes.
See also: the full treatment, section 4, with the endless edit, the edit by committee and the rearranged book.