The eleven parts of a chapter
Every chapter is built on the same plan, so that a reader who has used one can find her way in any other. It opens with a page headed In brief, which states the chapter’s claim and its tools in about a hundred and fifty words and says when to use them, followed by what a reader can do after the chapter, its key terms and its contents. The chapter proper then runs in ten parts.
The Problem opens on a draft that fails, usually a draft of the invented novel described in The Household Novel, sometimes a published book, and states the chapter’s claim. Definitions fixes the unit and separates it from its neighbours, and says what the chapter leaves to other chapters. How It Works gives only the theory the method uses, and each strand of it opens with the practical question it answers before it names the theorist who answered it. The Taxonomy sets out the kinds of the unit or the domains of its work. The Mechanism explains how the unit does what it does, and how one unit can do several things at once. Diagnostic Tests puts the chapter’s tests on a page, each with the question it asks, what a failure usually means and one exception. Failure Patterns describes four or five recurrent failures, each as a symptom, a mechanism, a remedy and an exception: a published work that commits the failure and succeeds. Worked Analyses reads three or four published books closely, usually with one film or television case, and ends with the household revision case, in which a draft is diagnosed and revised and the revision’s remaining weaknesses are named. Checklist and Exercises gives the revision checklist and exercises for a writer’s own draft. The Coda ends on the chapter’s argument, and usually on what its model cannot do.
The tests are the working centre of each chapter. Their number follows the material, from seven to ten, and each is framed as a question a writer can answer from a draft without outside help. A test that fails does not prove a fault. It locates a place where the book does something the model does not expect, and the writer must then decide whether the book has a reason; the exception attached to each test, and the exception attached to each failure pattern, are there to show what a reason looks like.
Two layers
The book has two layers. Core, which this Introduction opens, is the reader’s edition: eighteen chapters of about eleven thousand words each, written for use at the desk. Reference holds the full text behind each chapter. For the twelve chapters revised from the first edition, Reference is that edition’s full chapter, corrected, renumbered and brought into line with this one, with its longer theory, its complete catalogue of failure patterns, further close readings, the unit across forms, a glossary, sources, further reading, and exercises, seminar questions and an assessment rubric for teachers. For the six chapters new to this edition, Reference holds a single Full Treatment of up to eight thousand words, with the extended catalogue, further analyses, the household case in full, a glossary and the sources.
Core links into Reference wherever a reader may want the full catalogue, the evidence or the longer argument, and the See also line at the end of each part says where. Reference never depends on Core: each Reference chapter can be read on its own.
Conventions
A few conventions hold across the book, and knowing them saves a reader from misreading a term or an example.
Terminology. Each technical term has one sense in this book and is explained where it is first used. Where two chapters of the first edition used one word for two ideas, this edition gave each idea its own name. A beat is the smallest unit of change in a scene (The Purposes of a Scene, Chapter 1) or one of six named functions of the scene and sequel (Scene and Sequel, Chapter 2); the action set between turns of dialogue is an action beat (The Dialogue Exchange, Chapter 3). Compression is the fitting of page-space to the weight of what happened (Scene and Sequel, Chapter 2); the effect of restricting the space given to a character is character compression (The Viewpoint Shift, Chapter 13). The hinge is the point at which a character’s grounds for choosing change (Scene and Sequel, Chapter 2; Arc and Theme, Chapter 12); a chapter ending whose last sentence changes the meaning of the chapter it closes is a recasting close, and a character with business in two plots is a crossing character. A sequel is always the reflective half of Swain’s scene–sequel pair, and a follow-up volume is a series instalment. The glossary gives every term with links to the places it is defined.
Proposals and rulings. Most chapters propose one category beyond the established ones, a sixth domain of an ending, say, or a seventh kind of transition, and argue for it against the strongest objection. A proposal survives only if a later chapter, meeting the same problem at a larger scale, adopts or rejects it, and the ruling is recorded in both chapters’ taxonomies. The proposals are therefore not decorations; each is a claim the book tests on itself.
Examples. Each chapter reads classic novels alongside recent ones: across its Core and Reference text, at least four novels published since 2000, of which at least two are commercial or genre fiction, and at least two films or television series. Genre and commercial fiction are treated as forms with their own disciplines, which the chapters describe in the same terms as any other. The examples were chosen because they are likely to stay in print and in discussion, and a reader who does not know one can follow the argument from the chapter’s description, which never depends on having read the book.
Translation. Some of the novels read closely are translations. The book’s rule for them is that structural claims survive translation and texture claims do not. What happens, in what order, who knows what and when, where a chapter ends: these are the same in any competent translation, and the chapters make such claims freely. The rhythm of a sentence, the connotation of a word or the effect of a particular phrasing belong to the translator’s language, so a claim about them is a claim about one translation, and the chapters name the translator wherever they make one.
Period. The conventions the chapters describe are those of the novel in English and in the European traditions most read in it, chiefly from the eighteenth century to the present. Where a convention belongs to a period, such as the Victorian ending that settles every fate or the serial’s chapter that ends on a danger, the chapter says so. A writer working in another tradition should treat the models as one tradition’s account of the novel, not as the form’s.
Evidence and quotation. Claims about readers rest on published research, which the chapters cite, or are marked as conjecture. Quotation from works in copyright is brief, usually a phrase or a sentence, and longer passages are described. The book’s English is British.
See also: The Book’s Argument, on the ideas the chapters share; Reading Routes, on where to begin.