A Systematic Guide to Structuring and Revising Fiction
Second Edition. Introduction.
This book is for novelists who have a draft, or a plan for one, and want to know why parts of it do not work. It treats a novel as a structure of units, from the smallest that can stand alone, the scene, through the joins between scenes, to the architecture of the whole book and its relations with the books around it, and it gives each unit a chapter. Every chapter says what its unit is for, sets out the ways in which it can do its work, and turns that account into tests a writer can run on a draft, failures a writer can recognise, and a checklist for revision. The Introduction says what the book argues, how its chapters are built, what the invented novel that runs through them is, and how to find the chapter a particular problem needs.
Contents
The book has four parts and six appendices. The list gives each chapter with the question it answers, which is also its subtitle.
Part I: The Scene and Its Materials
- The Purposes of a Scene
What a scene is for, and how to tell whether it is doing it - Scene and Sequel
How one unit of a novel produces the next - The Dialogue Exchange
What a passage of talk must do, and how to test it - The Descriptive Detail
Which true thing to name, and how to test the choice
Part II: The Joins
- The Transition
How to carry a reader across a gap, and how much to spend doing it - The Chapter Break
Where to cut, and what the reader holds if she stops there - Backstory and Flashback
When to leave the present, in what register, and what to bring back - Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture
Which time the reader is in, and why it is that one
Part III: The Architecture of the Whole
- The Opening Pages
What the first pages of the main narrative owe the reader, and how to tell whether they pay it - The Prologue
What a separated opening must prove, and how to tell whether it has - The Middle
Where a book’s possibilities are narrowed - Arc and Theme
Who changes, and what the change argues - The Viewpoint Shift
Who is granted a mind, how many, and when - The Subplot
What a second story costs, and what it must supply - The Reveal
What the reader learns late, and what it must change - The Ending
What the last pages may spend, and what they owe
Part IV: Beyond the Book and Into Practice
- Series and Genre
Promises the reader brings to a book, and promises she carries out of it - The Structural Edit
In what order to revise a whole book, and when to stop
The appendices gather what the chapters leave in eighteen places. Appendix A is the consolidated glossary of the book’s terms. Appendix B is the symptom index, which starts from what a reader reported and leads to the chapter, test or failure pattern that explains it. Appendix C is the master checklist, every chapter’s revision checklist in the order in which a structural edit uses them. Appendix D summarises the invented novel that runs through the book, with every element traced to the chapter that plants it and the chapter that pays it. Appendix E says what each chapter’s instruments become in the short story and the novella. Appendix F is the test index, every chapter’s diagnostic tests with the question each asks, for comparing tests across the book.
This Introduction
The Introduction has five parts. This page is the first, and the other four are these.
- The Book’s Argument
What the book claims, how its four parts divide the novel, and the ideas the chapters share - How the Chapters Work
The eleven parts of a chapter, the two layers of the book, and its conventions - The Household Novel
The invented novel that every chapter revises - Reading Routes
Where to start with a draft, a plan, a course or a single problem
A writer with a problem in hand can go straight to the last part, which says where to start; the first three can be read afterwards, or not at all, since every chapter is written to be read on its own.