12. Studio Work

12.1 Practical exercises

Exercise 1 — The page-share audit. Run §5.5 on a completed draft, or on a published multi-viewpoint novel. Produce the table and the section strip. Write 300 words on what the distribution reveals that you did not know, including which character the book is actually about.

Exercise 2 — Architecture substitution. Identify your draft’s architecture from §6.3. Name the two neighbours. Rewrite one chapter in the strongest neighbour, then write 400 words comparing what each version buys and costs. Do not judge until both exist.

Exercise 3 — The swap test. Take two hundred words from two of your viewpoint characters. Exchange their contents, altering only the proper nouns required for grammatical sense. Give both to a reader who knows the draft and record, verbatim, what they say.

Exercise 4 — The boundary rewrite. Take one viewpoint chapter and mark every sentence reporting something the focaliser could not know (test 8). Replace each with an inference, a misreading or a wrong guess. Do not add compensating information elsewhere. Assess whether the chapter is worse.

Exercise 5 — Four levels of differentiation. Write the same three-hundred-word scene twice, from two different characters, changing nothing except (a) what is noticed, (b) the vocabulary of appraisal, (c) what each cannot know, and (d) what each calls the people and objects present. Do not change the prose rhythm or the dialect. §5.3.

Exercise 6 — The bounded grant. Identify one off-stage decision in your draft that is currently delivered by report. Write it as a single self-contained chapter from the vantage of the person who made it, at no more than 2,000 words, shaped so that the reader does not expect a return. Then decide whether the book is better with it.

Exercise 7 — The compression audit. List every named character in your draft who has no vantage. For each, record the five items at §7.1, no. 10. Write 500 words on the argument your distribution makes, whether or not you intended to make it.

Exercise 8 — Head-hopping, historically. Take a scene of two to three pages from Middlemarch, Anna Karenina or War and Peace in which the narration moves among minds. Rewrite it in a strict single limited third. Then write 500 words on what is lost, and on whether any of it could be recovered by other means.

Exercise 9 — The refused grant. Take the character in your draft you most want to explain and remove all interiority from them for the whole book, so that they are known only by behaviour, speech and other people’s inferences. Rewrite two of their scenes accordingly. Assess whether they have become weaker or more powerful, and say why.

12.2 Seminar questions

1. Is “head-hopping” a defect or a convention? §3.5 and §8.1 argue that the prohibition dates from the codification of Jamesian practice and describes a local literary culture rather than a property of narrative. Test the claim against a scene from Middlemarch and a contemporary multi-viewpoint novel. If it is a convention, what obligations does a writer have towards it?

2. Five domains or six? Argue for or against admitting the epistemological domain (§4.6) as a separate category rather than as contrast plus unreliability. Use The Sound and the Fury, Dracula or The Golden Notebook as evidence, and address the objection that the sixth domain describes an effect rather than a purpose.

3. The husband’s share in Wide Sargasso Sea. A novel written to give Bertha Mason the vantage Jane Eyre denied her allocates its largest share to the man who takes it away. Is this a concession to the source text, a structural flaw, or the book’s sharpest argument? Critics disagree, and the disagreement is not resolvable by appeal to the text alone.

4. Do the two plots of Anna Karenina converge? Tolstoy insisted on the novel’s unity; readers have argued about it since 1878. Frame the question as one about allocation rather than plot: does the shifting page share between the two hubs constitute a structure, or merely an alternation?

5. Is the empathy budget a description or an ideology? §16 argues that the metaphor is borrowed from economics and naturalises scarcity. Examine a novel that spends recklessly — War and Peace, As I Lay Dying, The Grapes of Wrath — and consider whether the model can accommodate it or must treat it as an exception.

6. Who is entitled to a vantage? Woloch’s claim (§3.3) is that the distribution of interiority is a political fact. Consider the two positions staged at §9.5: Spivak’s reading of Wide Sargasso Sea as a critique of imperial subject-formation, and the Caribbean critical objection that a white creole figure cannot stand for the Caribbean. Is “who gets a viewpoint” a question internal to craft, external to it, or a case where the distinction fails?

12.3 Assessment rubric

For a submitted multi-viewpoint sequence (2,500–3,500 words: at least two vantages, one of which must be a bounded grant) with a 1,000-word critical commentary.