12. Studio Work

12.1 Practical exercises

Exercise 1 — The audit sheet. Produce the audit described at §5.5 for a complete draft: every cutaway, with page, reach, extent, register, domains and the open present-tense question. Do not revise anything. Write 300 words on what the sheet reveals that reading the manuscript did not.

Exercise 2 — The compression ladder. Take one dramatised flashback and write it at four lengths: the full version, one page, one paragraph, one sentence. Place each in the manuscript and read forward two pages. Record at which length something is first lost, and what it is.

Exercise 3 — Register substitution. Take one cutaway and rewrite it in three other registers from §6.4, at least one shorter and one longer than the original. Do not evaluate until all four exist. Write 400 words comparing what each buys and costs.

Exercise 4 — The spoken test. Convert a piece of backstory into something one character says aloud to another, for a reason, at a moment. If no character in the book has a motive to raise it, write 200 words on why the reader is being told.

Exercise 5 — The iterative drill. Write a paragraph of past material three times: once as a dramatised scene, once as summary, once in the iterative (every Sunday he would…). Identify which the material actually wanted, and what the iterative version made available that the other two did not.

Exercise 6 — Trigger inventory. List every cutaway in the draft and its trigger, using the table at §6.6. Count the categories. If more than half share one category — most often the place entered, or a photograph — rewrite three of them onto different triggers.

Exercise 7 — The relocation test. Take a cutaway that tests well and move it: thirty pages earlier, thirty pages later, and into the final chapter. Read all three in place. Write 300 words on what each placement makes the material mean, using the three-position table at §4.5.

Exercise 8 — The return rewrite. Take the first sentence after each of five cutaways in a draft. Rewrite each so that it performs a changed question rather than a re-anchoring. Compare the before and after with the cutaway itself unaltered.

Exercise 9 — Reconstruction. Write a 1,000-word passage in register 11: an event narrated by two people, neither of whom witnessed it, who disagree. The event must be reconstructible by the reader and must not be settled by the text. Then write 300 words on what the disagreement supplied that a single reliable account could not.

12.2 Seminar questions

1. Is the interest deficit a description of narrative, or of a market? §3.9 concedes that the model assumes the present-tense question is the primary source of engagement. Test the model against one novel written before 1900 and one written since 2000, and consider whether what it measures is the structure of narrative or the reading habits of a particular period.

2. Five domains or six? Argue for or against admitting the structural domain (§4.6) as a separate category rather than as texture or reader knowledge observed at book scale. Use Beloved or a contemporary braided-timeline novel as evidence.

3. Was Cervantes wrong to yield? “El curioso impertinente” was criticised as an irrelevant interpolation, and Cervantes largely abandoned the practice in Part II. Was that a gain in craft or a loss of a form? What does the answer imply about the requirement, at §6.6, that the present be changed on return?

4. Does the trauma model describe memory or a convention? §3.7 sets out Caruth’s account of belatedness and the critiques by Leys, LaCapra and Craps. Reading Beloved alongside the disagreement, consider whether the novel’s fragmented approach to 1855 is evidence about how traumatic memory works, or a set of literary conventions for representing it — and whether the distinction matters to a writer.

5. Is Proust’s madeleine a trigger? §6.6 requires cutaways in close narration to be motivated by something concrete in the present. Proust’s trigger is contingent, and the narrator cannot identify it. Is the workshop rule a description of good practice, a description of a convention, or a description of what close third-person narration in particular requires?

6. Whose conventions? The prohibitions in §8 are drawn from an Anglo-American workshop tradition. Examine the handling of the past in Season of Migration to the North, One Hundred Years of Solitude or a classical Arabic or Chinese narrative, and decide which of §8’s twelve patterns describe narrative and which describe a local literary culture.

12.3 Assessment rubric

For a submitted passage (1,500–2,500 words) containing at least one cutaway, with a 750-word critical commentary.