8. Worked Analyses

The three readings below are of structural edits that are documented, or of a book written without one; the fourth is a film restructured in the cutting room. Each locates the edit on the ladder: where the problem was felt, where its cause lay, and what the repair reopened. The household revision case follows.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925): a note on rung 5, a repair on rung 3

Maxwell Perkins read the typescript in November 1924 and wrote that the book was extraordinary and that its hero was its one weakness: Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. He suggested a repair on the lowest rung, phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches that would show Gatsby to be in some active way mysteriously engaged. Fitzgerald made a different repair, in the galley proofs. As Kenneth Eble described it, the revision brought the true story of Gatsby’s past out of Chapter VIII and placed it at the beginning of Chapter VI. The galley text before the revision was published in 2000 as Trimalchio, edited by James L. W. West III, so the two arrangements can be compared.

The note was felt on rung 5, as a quality of a character, and its prescription stayed there. Its cause lay on rung 3, in the schedule of disclosure. With the whole truth about James Gatz held for Chapter VIII, where it arrives with the catastrophe, the middle of the book gives the reader rumours and no knowledge, and a figure made only of rumours is dim. Moved to the opening of Chapter VI, the truth reaches the reader after the reunion with Daisy and before the party at which she fails to be won, so that the reader watches the rest of Gatsby’s performance knowing what it is made of. The pages after the move bear the double reading of The Reveal (Chapter 15) for longer, and the narrator gives his reason for the placement at once, as that chapter’s teller rule asks: He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents.

The repair fails test 5 (Economy) of Diagnostic Tests and is right. It answered one note and reopened three chapters, which Fitzgerald revised heavily in the galleys, because the note’s cause lay on a rung from which a move reaches everything below. Perkins was right about the symptom and wrong about the cure, which is the pattern of reader’s notes in How It Works.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005): the top rung found last

Ishiguro has described setting aside a novel about a group of students twice, in 1990 and again in 1995, before the book that became Never Let Me Go took shape in 2001, when, among other prompts, a radio broadcast about biotechnology suggested what the students were. He has written that at that point I suddenly felt I could see before me the entire story.

The account is evidence for the order of dependence at its starkest. The material of the lower rungs existed, a group of young people, a closed community, attachments among them, and it could not be made into a book in two attempts, because nothing above it said what it was for. Once the promise was decided, what the students are and therefore what question their lives answer, the decisions below it became determinate, which is what the entire story reports. The novel’s arrangement follows from that decision: Kathy H., a carer, tells the story looking back from near the end of her own term, and the disclosures about Hailsham’s purpose are made in plain sight, half-heard, as children hear things, because the question is not what the students will learn but what they will do with what they know. The inference about drafts is this chapter’s, not Ishiguro’s; what his account shows is that a rung-1 decision made last can make the rest of a book possible at once.

Lee Child, Make Me (2015): a book with no structural edit

Child began Make Me on 1 September 2014, with a first sentence and, by his own account of how he works, no plot: I try to come up with a good opening sentence … and go from there. Andy Martin, who watched the book written for Reacher Said Nothing (2015), describes a single draft, written forward. The novel sends Jack Reacher off a train at a town called Mother’s Rest, where he meets a private investigator looking for her missing partner, and builds a chain of discoveries each of which causes the next.

The book is not an exception to the ladder; it is the ladder with its top rungs settled outside the book. Reacher’s rule for choosing does not change from novel to novel, so the arc of Arc and Theme (Chapter 12) is decided for every volume, and the promise of the episodic series, set out in Series and Genre (Chapter 17), is fixed before the first sentence. What remains is the lower rungs and part of the shape, and for a book built as a causal chain those depend largely on what came before, not on what comes after: each link of Scene and Sequel’s chain (Chapter 2) is the consequence of the last. In such a book page order and the order of dependence nearly coincide. Where they part is at the ending, which depends on everything planted; a writer who does not know the end must make it out of what is already on the page, which is The Ending’s rule (Chapter 16) that an ending may spend only what the book has deposited, in its strictest form.

A screen reading: Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

The film was shot under the working title Anhedonia, and its first assembly ran about two hours and twenty minutes. It was built on the associations of its protagonist’s mind and included a murder-mystery strand, material that its editor, Ralph Rosenblum, thought some of the freest and funniest in it. In the cutting room Allen and Rosenblum found that the film’s centre was the romance between Alvy and Annie, and cut it to ninety-three minutes around that. The structural edit happened after the material existed, as upward discovery: the footage showed what the film was about, the top rung was decided, and the strands that did not serve it went, however good. The edit cut its best material on the evidence of the map, which is the reverse of premature polish.

The household revision case: an edit in page order

The situation. The household novel is drafted from the prologue to the coat, with the decisions of the earlier chapters’ revision cases in place, and three early readers and the agent have sent eleven notes (see The Problem).

Version A, the draft edit. The writer’s page-order pass: a sentence in the opening announcing Elena; a scene at about 45 per cent in which Nadia finds their mother in the flat with a clothes brush; a chapter in which Elena searches the flat; a paragraph at the head of Dov’s chapter explaining its date; the call to Nadia cut from the convergence; a paragraph of Elena’s reflection at the end; two warmths removed.

Diagnosis. Sorted onto the ladder, the notes look different. The edit list below gives each note’s rung as felt and the rung of its cause.

Four of Version A’s repairs fail the rung-up rule. The scene with the clothes brush mends a rung-5 note on rung 5 and breaks rung 1, since the mother’s silence is the book’s declined question and the scene gives her a scene. The search chapter mends a rung-3 note by adding a sequence that repeats the empty drawer at the same stakes. The paragraph at the head of Dov’s chapter answers a rung-2 cause with rung-5 explanation. Cutting the call removes the decision that locates Elena’s arc, so that the paragraph of reflection has to state it, and the two repairs together are a cascade and an edit by addition.

Version B, the revision. The same notes, worked downwards. On rung 1 the writer decides that the brushing belongs to what the book declines, as the locks do, and that it needs a sign. On rung 2 she moves the doorway to the first chapter break and heads Dov’s chapter 9 March. On rung 3 she checks the option list and the convergence, keeps both defended failures, and finds Elena’s decision present but summarised. On rung 4 she rereads the two breaks the moves touched. On rung 5 she writes the sign into the scene in the flat, where Elena has just said “I’d tell you”:

“Dov thinks I come up and brush it,” Nadia said.

“Don’t you?”

“No.” Nadia folded the tea towel into thirds and put it on the pile. Neither of them asked the next question.

She gives the convergence its decision in direct speech, and revises the opening pages last. Version B adds about sixty words where Version A added several thousand, and its two kept failures carry their defences: the stretch from the pen to Dov’s chapter is twelve per cent of the book, a wait before the climax held by the buyer’s deadline; and the convergence is crowded for the sisters and not for the reader, who learned two of its three facts earlier.

What the revision has not solved. The sign makes the person who brushes the coat inferable by elimination, since it is not Nadia and Dov thinks it is, and that points at the mother; an act is not an account and does not explain the locks, but it gives her a ritual, which may begin to explain her, and the alternative, cutting the weekly brushing from the coat’s first scene, would cost Nadia’s measure of the days between brushings. The two defences are the writer’s, made by someone who knows the book too well, and only a cold read can test them. The edit list was built from notes on an earlier draft, so Version B itself is unread. The plant audit across the whole book is not rerun here; it belongs to the ending. And the line edit remains, with the ledger’s three warmths.

See also: the full treatment, sections 6 and 7, with the Harry Potter series, The Martian, A Little Life and the remix of Arrested Development, and the household book map and edit list in full.