Annotated and grouped by what each source is good for. Starred items are the recommended first three.
15.1 On plot as a dynamic
- ★ Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot (1984). The indispensable modern book on why plots move readers rather than merely organising events. The chapters “Reading for the Plot” and “Freud’s Masterplot” are the ones that bear on this chapter, and they supply what no craft manual can: an account of desire rather than of mechanism.
- Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose (1925; Eng. 1990). For retardation, stepped construction and the argument that impediment is the substance of narrative rather than an obstacle to it.
- Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978). For the suspense / curiosity distinction, which tells a writer which kind of deferral they are performing.
- Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending (1967). For why chains want termini. Read alongside Chapter 16 (The Ending).
15.2 On the structuralist description
- ★ Barthes, Roland. S/Z (1970). The proairetic and hermeneutic codes, demonstrated at exhausting length on a single Balzac novella. Read the methodological sections and sample the analysis.
- Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale (1928). Short, dry, and startlingly modern. The definition of a function is the best available explanation of what a “beat” is.
- Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose (1977). For the equilibrium schema and for the argument that narrative grammar is a grammar in the full sense.
- Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse (1978). For kernels and satellites — the precise vocabulary for which events open alternatives and which elaborate.
15.3 On motive and form
- Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement (1931) and A Grammar of Motives (1945). The “psychology of form” is three pages and worth a term’s study; the pentad is the best available instrument for diagnosing thin motivation.
- Aristotle. Poetics. Chapters 6–11 and 13–14. An hour’s reading, and the origin of nearly everything in §3.1.
15.4 Cognitive work
- Zwaan and Radvansky (1998). The clearest statement of the dimensions readers track, including causality and intentionality.
- Trabasso and van den Broek (1985); Graesser, Singer and Trabasso (1994). For the empirical basis of the claim that causally connected events are better recalled, and for the finding that readers infer backwards more readily than forwards — the strongest single result in this chapter’s evidence base.
15.5 The craft literature, read critically
- ★ Swain, Dwight V. Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965). The source. Read it as a historical document of a commercial practice as well as an instrument: the idiom is dated, the confidence is total, and the model is sound. Note the motivation-reaction unit, which most secondary accounts omit.
- Bickham, Jack M. Scene & Structure (1993). The transmission text, and clearer than Swain on the mechanics of the join. Also the point at which the model begins to harden into doctrine.
- McKee, Robert. Story (1997). For the value shift (Chapter 1’s term) and for a screen-derived account of the same architecture. Use the vocabulary; discount the prescription.
- Yorke, John. Into the Woods (2013). The most intelligent recent synthesis of the structural tradition, and unusually honest about where its own model is a convention.
- Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927). For the king-and-queen formulation, and for a definition of plot as causality that predates every manual in this list.
15.6 Within this textbook
- Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) — the value shift, the five domains and the principle of multiplicity, on which §§4–5 depend.
- Chapter 3 (The Dialogue Exchange) — the doorway exchange from which §9.9’s pair descends; subtext as a carrier of resistance.
- Chapter 4 (The Descriptive Detail) — the compressed disaster is nearly always carried by an object.
- Chapter 5 (The Transition) — how the gap between two units is crossed once the chain is sound.
- Chapter 6 (The Chapter Break) — where the gap is placed, and the deferred decision as a break technique.
- Chapter 14 (The Subplot) — the attention tax, and what a second chain must earn.
- Chapter 16 (The Ending) — what “earned” means, and why it is largely a function of a traceable chain.