The Structural Edit

The Order of Revision: The Full Treatment

The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition), Reference — Chapter 18. Part IV: Beyond the Book and Into Practice.

This chapter is new in the second edition, so its Reference layer is this single file rather than a corrected original. It extends the reader’s version in Core, The Structural Edit, and can be read without it: the definitions it relies on are restated in section 1. Illustrative passages are quoted briefly for the purposes of criticism and study, and full citations appear in section 10. The analyses disclose the endings of the works they discuss.

Contents

1. Scope and working definitions
2. The theory at length: revision research; editorial practice; scene maps; the situation model; readers’ notes; swoopers and bashers; the evidence and its limits
3. The extended catalogue: every chapter’s instruments on the ladder; kinds of structural edit; where the order bends; the ruling on formal closure
4. The extended catalogue of failure patterns
5. The diagnostic procedures, with the book map and the edit list
6. Further analyses: the Harry Potter series, The Martian, A Little Life, the remix of Arrested Development
7. The household case in full
8. The limits of the model
9. Glossary of the chapter’s terms
10. Sources

1. Scope and working definitions

A structural edit is the revision of a complete draft at the level of the decisions that span more than one scene: what the book promises and asks, whose it is and how its times and threads are arranged, the shape of the whole, and the joins between its units. It is distinguished from the line edit, which revises sentences and paragraphs inside a scene whose job is taken as given, and from the copy-edit, which checks correctness and the continuity of facts. Susan Bell’s terms for the writer’s own versions of the first two are the macro-edit and the micro-edit.

The chapter uses two instruments. The book map is a table with one row per scene of a draft and columns for its position, story time, place, viewpoint, goal and decision, thread, change, what the reader learns, what it deposits, and any promise it invokes. The revision ladder is the order in which a book’s decisions are checked and repaired, in five rungs: the promise; allocation and arrangement; the shape; the joins; the scene and its materials. The ladder records an order of dependence: one decision depends on another when changing the second can make the first wrong and changing the first cannot make the second wrong.

Four rules govern its use. Repair runs down the ladder, finishing each rung before the next. Diagnosis runs up it, by the rung-up rule: before repairing a failure, check the rung above for its cause, and treat a failure found in several places on one rung, or recurring after repair, as caused above. Upward discovery, the finding on a lower rung that a higher decision is wrong, sends the writer up to make that decision before coming down again. And the edit ends by the stopping rule: a pass down the first three rungs changes nothing below them, every kept failure is defended in a sentence, and a cold read produces notes that do not cluster above rung 5.

The edit list records each note and failure with the rung where it was felt, the rung of its cause, the repair, the reopened tests (the lower tests that the repair can make wrong for the units it touches) and a status: mended, kept and defended, or passed to the line edit. The economy of the repair sets the notes a repair answers against the tests it reopens and the words it adds.

The chapter adds no test of the text. It orders the tests of the other chapters and adds seven tests of the edit. The line edit and copy-edit, and the working relation between a writer and an editor, are outside its scope except where section 8 touches them.

2. The theory at length

2.1 Revision research

Nancy Sommers’s study of 1980 compared twenty first-year university students with twenty experienced adult writers revising their own essays. The students treated revision as rewording; Sommers called their approach a thesaurus philosophy, and found that their changes were overwhelmingly lexical, substitutions and deletions of words and phrases. The experienced writers described revision as finding the form or shape of their argument. They added and deleted at every scale and reordered, worked recursively between the whole and its parts, and expected the whole to change. The study concerns essays and what writers did, not what made their texts better, and its students were novices in a genre they had been taught to treat as correct or incorrect. Its value here is the contrast it draws between two ideas of revision, one local and one global, and its finding that the global idea belonged to the writers with more experience.

Linda Flower, John R. Hayes, Linda Carey, Karen Schriver and James Stratman (1986) proposed a working model of revision as a sequence of detecting a problem, diagnosing it, and choosing a strategy, among which they distinguished revising a passage from rewriting it from its gist. The model’s use here is its separation of detection from diagnosis: a problem detected but not diagnosed tends to be mended where it was noticed, and only a problem whose kind is named can be met by a strategy that reaches further. The specific claims sometimes drawn from the paper, that writers detect problems in their own texts poorly because they read their intentions into the text, and that experts diagnose more and revise more globally, are its usual summary and should be checked against the article before they are relied on; this chapter uses the first as a working assumption.

2.2 Editorial practice

The publishing sequence of structural (or developmental) edit, line edit and copy-edit is an institutional form of the order of dependence: the copy-editor is not asked to correct a chapter the author may cut. The best-documented single instance of a structural note in American publishing is Maxwell Perkins’s letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald of 20 November 1924 on the typescript of The Great Gatsby. It praises the design, objects that Gatsby is somewhat vague, and proposes little touches to suggest his business; Fitzgerald’s repair, moving the history of James Gatz from Chapter VIII to the opening of Chapter VI in the galleys, is read in Core 18’s worked analyses. Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit (2007) uses the Gatsby papers as its opening case and builds its advice on the distinction between the macro-edit, which reads a draft whole for its structure and proportions, and the micro-edit, which works at the level of the line, and places the first before the second.

2.3 Scene maps

Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid (2015) asks a writer to build a spreadsheet with a row per scene and columns for, among others, the scene number, word count, story event, value shift, polarity shift, turning point, point of view, period of time, duration, location, and the characters on and off stage, and to state the whole book on a single page, the Foolscap Global Story Grid, divided into the beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff. The reverse outline, written after a draft as a summary of what each unit does, is the same instrument in composition teaching. The book map differs from both in the columns it adds so that this book’s other instruments can be read from it: the decision, the thread, what the reader and each character learn, the deposits, and the promise.

2.4 The situation model and the map

The event-indexing model of Rolf Zwaan, Mark Langston and Arthur Graesser (1995) holds that readers build a model of a narrative’s situation indexed on five dimensions, time, space, protagonist, causality and intentionality, and update it when any dimension changes. Breaks in continuity slow reading, and events that share indices are more closely linked in memory. Chapters 5 and 8 use the model to price transitions and to explain orientation across times. Here it justifies the map’s first columns: if a reader’s grasp of a book is built on those dimensions, a writer revising the book needs them in front of her for every scene, since a structural change is a change in what the reader can index.

2.5 Readers’ notes

Neil Gaiman’s rule for writers, published in 2010, holds that readers who say something is wrong are almost always right and readers who say how to fix it are almost always wrong, and that fixing it is the writer’s job. It is advice, not research, but it agrees with the separation of detection and diagnosis in section 2.1, and it is borne out by the Perkins letter, whose diagnosis of a symptom was accepted and whose prescription was not. The edit list records a note’s place, which is evidence, separately from its cause, which is the writer’s inference.

2.6 Swoopers and bashers

Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake (1997) distinguishes swoopers, who write a story quickly and then go over it again, from bashers, who go one sentence at a time and finish each before the next; he called himself a basher. The ladder is an order of decisions, not of work, and applies to both, since a basher decides what a book is and where a sentence stands in it before he finishes the sentence, and stops when he cannot.

2.7 The evidence and its limits

The empirical work behind the chapter concerns essays (Sommers; Flower and Hayes) and the comprehension of short narratives (Zwaan and colleagues), not novels or the revision of novels, and the editorial sources are accounts and advice. The order of dependence is therefore an argument from the structure of the earlier chapters’ models rather than a finding. It also inherits their period: it assumes a novel built of scenes driven by wants and decisions, whose shape can be read from their sequence. A book whose unit is the voice or the pattern still has an order of dependence, but its rungs hold different decisions, and its sentences may sit higher than this chapter puts them.

3. The extended catalogue

3.1 Every chapter’s instruments on the ladder

The table places each chapter’s principal instruments on the rung whose decisions they test. Several chapters have work on two rungs; the second is given where it matters. It is the ladder written out for this book, and a writer can run down it as a revision order.

The order down the table is the order of revision within the ladder. On rung 3 it is middle, arc, reveal, ending, as Core 18 explains: the four are interdependent, and the ending depends on all three.

3.2 Kinds of structural edit

Structural edits differ in their occasion, and the occasion decides where on the ladder the edit starts.

The edit of a discovery draft. A draft written to find the book usually has no settled rung 1. The edit begins by building the map and writing the two sentences of the promise test; it may then end in a rewrite rather than a revision, since a discovery draft’s lower rungs were written against no decision.

The edit on notes. A draft with a settled promise and a set of readers’ notes begins with the edit list, sorted by the rung of each cause. This is the case of Core 18’s household revision.

The edit to a constraint. A book that must lose a fifth of its length, or meet a publisher’s limit, begins on rung 2 or 3, where cuts are largest and cheapest: a thread, a strand or a viewpoint removed saves more words, and reopens fewer tests per word, than trimming every scene. A cut of a fifth made on rung 5 alone is premature polish under another name.

The editor’s letter. A professional editor’s structural letter is a set of notes that have usually been diagnosed already; the writer’s work is to place each on the ladder, check the editor’s diagnosis by the rung-up rule, and decide which to accept. Perkins’s letter is the model of a letter whose diagnosis was right and whose prescription was not taken.

The late edit. An edit in proof can still be structural, as Fitzgerald’s was, but each reopened test is more expensive, because the joins and sentences around the change have been finished.

The edit across a series. A decision on rung 3 can move between volumes before they are published, as section 6.1 shows. After publication it cannot; a later volume can only reread an earlier one, which is Chapter 17’s subject.

3.3 Where the order bends

The order bends in three places. On rung 3 the decisions depend on one another sideways, so they are checked as a group, and a change to one reopens the others before anything below. Upward discovery, described in section 1, sends the writer up the ladder whenever lower work shows a higher decision wrong; it is the normal state of an early edit and a warning sign in a late one, where it means that a top rung was settled by default rather than by decision. And some writers fix one low-rung element first and build the book to it: a last line, an image, a scene known before anything else. The ladder accommodates this by treating such an element as part of the promise. A last line decided before the book is a decision on rung 1 about what the book will answer, and the rest of the edit must make it true.

3.4 The ruling on formal closure

Chapter 16 proposed formal closure as a sixth domain of the ending, the completion, modification or disruption of the book’s structural pattern rather than its story, and adopted it for diagnosis, conceding that it sits at a different level of description from the other five, being a means by which they are served. It left this chapter to adopt or reject it, with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Appendix and the last episode of Six Feet Under as test cases.

The ruling. Formal closure is rejected as a domain of the ending and adopted at the scale of the book as the form audit, a test on rung 2. For each formal pattern a book declares, its person and tense, its divisions and headings, any frame, apparatus or repeated shape, the audit asks whether the pattern is completed, modified for a reason the book shows, or removed from where it was declared.

The first test case. In Part One, chapter 1 of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is glossed in a footnote: Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix. The pattern is declared at the opening and discharged after the narrative, and the Appendix’s past tense, written from a time in which Newspeak is history, is a modification at the last instance. What the reader receives from it lies in the thematic and emotional domains: a vantage from which the regime is over, against the story’s He loved Big Brother.

The second test case. Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–05) opened nearly every episode on a death. Its last episode, “Everyone’s Waiting” (2005), opens instead on a birth and ends on a montage, as Claire drives east, of the principal characters’ deaths over the following decades. The pattern is modified at its first scene and completed at its last, and what the viewer receives is the series’ theme, each life seen whole, and its feeling.

The reasons. In both cases the formal pattern carries and the payment is made in another domain, so the objection Chapter 16 conceded holds at the ending: formal closure is a means. Its defence, that the domain has distinct carriers, failures (the frame opened and never closed, the epistolary form abandoned midway) and remedies, holds for the audit, and the audit is where a structural edit needs it: the form is a decision on rung 2 that the ending discharges, and its failure is often mended at the opening, by removing a declared pattern the book does not need, rather than at the end. The ruling is recorded in Core 16 (The Taxonomy) and Reference 16 (section 4).

4. The extended catalogue of failure patterns

4.1 The five patterns of the Core chapter

Core 18 describes five failures of revision, each with a published exception: the page-order edit, which revises in the order of reading rather than of dependence (Lee Child’s Make Me); premature polish, line editing before the top rungs settle (Vonnegut’s novels, written as a basher’s); the local repair, which mends a symptom where it was felt when its cause lies above (the second ending of Great Expectations); the cascade, the unrecorded consequence of a repair (Watson’s wound); and the edit by addition, which answers every note by adding (A Little Life, whose length is its promise). The patterns below are less common or appear only in later drafts.

4.2 The endless edit

Symptom. Each round of revision answers the last round’s notes and produces new ones of the same size; the writer has revised for years, and early readers prefer an early draft. Mechanism. The edit has no stopping rule, so it continues on the lowest rung, where there is always more to do, and each pass moves the book further from the conviction of its first draft without settling anything above. Remedy. The stopping rule, with a cold read; and a check of rung 1, since an edit that cannot stop has often never decided what the book is for. Exception. A book whose long revision is a search for its top rung, which is upward discovery at the scale of years; Ishiguro’s two abandoned attempts at the novel that became Never Let Me Go are a version of it, ended by a decision rather than by more revision.

4.3 The edit by committee

Symptom. The draft has been revised to answer every reader, and readers now find it reasonable and inert. Mechanism. Notes from several readers are averaged rather than diagnosed: each prescription is partly adopted, so that the book moves towards no reader’s book and away from its own. Remedy. Record notes for their symptoms only, look for symptoms that cluster at one place or one rung, and discard prescriptions. Exception. A genre whose readers’ expectations are the book’s promise, where a panel of such readers is a test of rung 1; Chapter 17’s promise inventory is the instrument, and the committee is useful on that rung and no other.

4.4 The rearranged book

Symptom. A draft has been reordered, often more than once, and readers find each version as hard to follow as the last. Mechanism. Rearrangement is a decision on rung 2 made without a reason on rung 1; it changes what the reader can index without giving the order a job that chronology could not do, which is Chapter 8’s necessity test. Remedy. Write the question each strand asks before moving any of them; if none can be written, try chronology. Exception. A rearrangement made to discover what the order is for, which is upward discovery on rung 2; the remix of Arrested Development in section 6.4 is a public version of the experiment.

5. The diagnostic procedures

5.1 Building the book map

Build the map from the draft, in order, one row per scene; a scene for this purpose is a unit without a gap in time or place, so a chapter of three scenes has three rows. Record the position as the percentage of the text at which the scene begins, which a word processor’s word count gives. Fill the change column with Chapter 1’s two sentences compressed into one, what was true when it opened that is not true when it closes; leave it empty rather than invent a change, since an empty cell is a finding. Fill the decision column only when a character decides something, and the learns column only when the reader or a character comes to know a fact the plot uses. Record deposits as the element and its row number in the plant audit if one exists. The map of a three-hundred-page draft has about ninety rows and takes a day.

5.2 Keeping the edit list

Give each note a row as it arrives, with its source and the place it was felt, before thinking about it. Record the rung of the symptom from the table in Core 18’s diagnostic tests, run the test of the rung above, and record the rung of the cause. Sort by cause. Work from the top, and for each repair write the reopened tests before making it. Close a row only as mended, kept and defended in a sentence, or passed to the line edit.

5.3 The seven tests

Test 1, map. Count the rows with an empty change column; a draft with more than one in ten has scenes the shape does not use, or a map built from memory. Test 2, promise. Write the two sentences without the draft open; then read the first and last chapters and list every place where either answers to another promise. Test 3, rung-up. For each row of the edit list, check that the rung of the cause is recorded and that the test of the rung above was run. Test 4, reopen. For each repair, list the reopened tests and the rows they touch, and confirm each was rerun. Test 5, economy. For each repair, count the notes answered, the tests reopened and the words added; flag any edit in which additions outweigh cuts and moves. Test 6, opening last. Compare the dates of the last revision of the opening pages and the last page with the date on which rungs 1 to 3 were last changed. Test 7, stop. Sort the cold read’s notes by rung; if they cluster above rung 5, the edit is not finished, and if they do not, every remaining row on the edit list must carry its defence.

6. Further analyses

6.1 The Harry Potter series: a disclosure moved between volumes

On her website in June 2004, announcing the title of the sixth volume, J. K. Rowling wrote that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had once, in the long distant past, been a possible title for the second, Chamber of Secrets, and she has said that the information it would have disclosed belonged later in the story. She has not said in detail what the information was. The move is a decision on rung 3 at the scale of a series, made before the second volume was published: the plant stayed in volume 2 and the disclosure went to volume 6. The published sixth volume’s account of Voldemort’s past, and its reading of Tom Riddle’s diary from the second volume as one of his Horcruxes, are consistent with such a move; the connection is this chapter’s inference. Its economy is high. Nothing in the second volume had to be reopened, because the disclosure had never been made, and the diary acquired the second reading of Chapter 15 four volumes later.

6.2 The Martian (Andy Weir, 2011): a page-order composition in public

Weir published The Martian a chapter at a time, free, on his website, then at readers’ request as a self-published Kindle edition in 2011; Crown bought the rights in 2013 and published a revised text in February 2014 in which, among other edits, scientific errors were corrected. The book’s opening was in readers’ hands before its ending was written, which is a failure of test 6 that the book survives. It survives for the reason Make Me does: its top rungs were fixed by its premise, a stranded man and the promise that the threat will be met, and its shape is a chain of problems, each solved and each causing the next, in which later links depend on earlier ones far more than earlier on later. The corrections of the Crown edition were on rung 5 and reopened nothing above.

6.3 A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara, 2015): a note kept and defended

In an exchange published in Slate in March 2015, Yanagihara’s editor, Gerry Howard, said that he had at first thought the novel would be a better and/or more salable book if 100 or even 200 pages could go, and that too much suffering was being piled on its protagonist, Jude; he came to think that the book justified its length. Yanagihara held her ground: Everything in this book is a little exaggerated: the horror, of course, but also the love. On the ladder, both notes are on rung 1, about what the book promises, and the writer’s answer is a defence on the same rung. The case shows the stopping rule’s second condition met in public: a failure a cold reader reported, kept, with its defence written down.

6.4 Arrested Development, season 4 (Netflix, 2013) and its remix (2018)

The fourth season was released as fifteen episodes, each centred on one member of the family and covering overlapping stretches of the same period, so that events seen from one side in one episode were explained from another in a later one. In May 2018 Netflix released Season 4 Remix: Fateful Consequences, the same material recut into twenty-two shorter episodes in roughly chronological order, with new narration. The remix is a natural experiment on rung 2: the same footage in two arrangements, which lets a viewer run Chapter 8’s necessity test directly by asking what the first order did that chronology does not. It also shows the reopened tests of a rung-2 edit made visible: the new order needed new joins, and the narration that supplies them is a rung-4 repair forced by the move.

7. The household case in full

7.1 The draft edit

Core 18 (The Problem) gives the eleven notes and the writer’s page-order pass, Version A: a sentence in the opening announcing Elena’s share of the book; a scene at about 45 per cent in which Nadia finds the mother in the flat with a clothes brush and leaves without a word; a chapter in which Elena searches the flat; a paragraph at the head of Dov’s chapter giving its date and its distance from the present; the call to Nadia cut from the convergence and Nadia brought to the shop by chance; a paragraph of Elena’s reflection on the last pages; two of the ledger’s three warmths removed. All of Version A is draft-only.

7.2 The book map

The map below sets out the household novel’s main units in the canon’s book order; positions are those the earlier chapters’ cases fix or propose, and a dash marks one not fixed. The full map has a row per scene.

The change column shows that no character decides anything in the stretch from about 66 to 78 per cent, where one reader felt the middle sag.

7.3 The edit list in full

The seven structural notes are given in Core 18 (Worked Analyses). The four notes on sentences were each checked by the rung-up rule before being passed to the line edit. That the prologue’s last sentence tells too much was checked against the plant audit on rung 3, where the fragment In case is planted and the rest of the line is left to Chapter 7, and passed with the plant kept. That Elena’s sequel in the truck is long was checked against the chapter around the drawer on rung 4, which needs the sequel and the drawer in one chapter, and passed. That Dov is curt in the doorway was checked against the grant on rung 2, which keeps him outside until his chapter, and passed with the curtness kept. That Nadia’s counting is overdone was checked against the shape on rung 3, where her counting is the constant against which her change is legible, and passed with the instruction to thin the lists and keep the habit. Including the note on the ledger’s warmth, five notes went to the line edit.

7.4 The revision in rung order

On rung 1 the writer decides that the weekly brushing of the coat belongs to what the book declines, as the locks do. Under the mystery mode the book invokes, an unexplained act repeated weekly is read as a clue, and Chapter 17‘s declared decline requires a sign. On rung 2 she moves the doorway to the first chapter break, with Nadia in the flat inside the first chapter, and heads Dov’s chapter 9 March; the form audit checks that this, the only dated heading, is a declared exception, since no other heading is a date. On rung 3 she runs the option list across the stretch from the pen to Dov’s chapter, finds it held by the buyer’s deadline and Dov’s chapter to come, and keeps it; she checks the convergence against the disclosure map, finds that the reader learned the signing at about 58 per cent and the looser hand at about 78, and keeps the crowding as the sisters’, not the reader’s; and she finds Elena’s decision present in the convergence but summarised. On rung 4 she rereads the two breaks the rung-2 moves touched. On rung 5 she writes the two lines of the sign, gives Elena’s decision its moment in direct speech, and revises the opening pages last.

7.5 What the revision settles, and what it does not

The revision answers four notes with about sixty added words and two moves, and leaves two failures with defences and five notes for the line edit. It proposes for the author to confirm (canon C26) that the brushing of the coat is declined with a sign at about 54 per cent: Nadia says that Dov thinks she brushes it, says that she does not, and neither sister asks the next question. Its costs are recorded in Core 18. The sign makes the brusher inferable by elimination and so points at the mother, giving her an act without an account, which may begin to explain her; the alternative is to cut the weekly brushing from the coat’s first scene, at the cost of Nadia’s measure of the days between brushings (canon C16). The defences of the two kept failures are the writer’s and await a cold read. The revision itself is unread; the plant audit across the book belongs to the ending; and the line edit remains.

8. The limits of the model

The ladder is a model of dependence in one kind of novel, and three limits follow. First, it says nothing about the top rung’s content: what a book should promise and ask is not a structural fact, and no test decides it. Second, it treats a book as one writer’s decisions. An edited book is also an editor’s, and the history of editing includes edits that changed what a book meant, which raises a question about whose decisions the ladder records that this chapter does not answer. Third, it is slow. A writer with a deadline may reasonably revise on the rungs she can reach; the ladder then says which repairs will hold and which are provisional, which is a smaller service but a real one.

9. Glossary of the chapter’s terms

The definitions below are for the consolidated glossary.

Allocation and arrangement. Rung 2 of the revision ladder: the viewpoint grant, the threads, the order of times, the prologue and the book’s form.

Book map. A table with one row per scene of a draft and columns for position, story time, place, viewpoint, goal and decision, thread, change, what is learned, deposits and promises, from which the other chapters’ instruments are read.

Cascade. The failure in which a repair changes a fact that other units depend on and the consequence goes unchecked.

Cold read. A reading of a revised draft by a reader who has not read an earlier one, or by the writer after an interval long enough to have forgotten what she meant.

Copy-edit. The check of a text’s correctness and of the continuity of its facts.

Economy of the repair. The notes a repair answers set against the tests it reopens and the words it adds.

Edit by addition. The failure in which every note is answered by adding material, so that the draft grows, slows and states what it should show.

Edit by committee. The failure in which several readers’ prescriptions are partly adopted, so that the book moves towards no reader’s book and away from its own.

Edit list. The record of each note and failing test: where it was felt, the rung of the symptom and of the cause, the repair, the tests reopened and the status (mended; kept and defended; passed to the line edit).

Endless edit. The failure of an edit with no stopping rule, which continues on the lowest rung and moves the book away from its first conviction.

Form audit. The test on rung 2 that asks of every formal pattern a book declares whether it is completed, modified for a reason the book shows, or removed from where it was declared; formal closure as adopted at the scale of the book.

Joins. Rung 4 of the revision ladder: chapter breaks, transitions, cutaways and the opening pages.

Line edit. The revision of sentences and paragraphs inside a scene whose job is taken as given.

Local repair. The failure in which a symptom is mended where it was felt when its cause lies on a higher rung.

Macro-edit; micro-edit. Susan Bell’s terms for a writer’s reading of a draft whole, for structure and proportion, and her revision of it line by line.

Order of dependence. The relation in which one decision depends on another when changing the second can make the first wrong and changing the first cannot make the second wrong.

Page-order edit. The failure of revising a draft in the order of reading rather than of dependence.

Premature polish. The failure of line editing before the top rungs have settled.

Promise, the. Rung 1 of the revision ladder: the kind of book, its governing question, what it declines, and whether it stands alone.

Rearranged book. The failure of reordering a draft without a reason on rung 1.

Reopened tests. The tests on lower rungs that a repair can make wrong for the units it touches.

Revision ladder. The order in which a book’s decisions are checked and repaired, in five rungs, from the promise to the scene and its materials.

Rung. A level of the revision ladder.

Rung-up rule. Before repairing a failure, check the rung above for its cause; treat a failure found in several places on one rung, or recurring after repair, as caused above.

Scene and its materials, the. Rung 5 of the revision ladder: scenes, sequels, exchanges and details, followed by the line edit.

Shape, the. Rung 3 of the revision ladder: the arc, the middle, the schedule of reveals and the ending, checked together.

Stopping rule. An edit is finished when a pass down the first three rungs changes nothing below them, every kept failure is defended, and a cold read produces notes that do not cluster above rung 5.

Structural edit. The revision of a complete draft at the level of the decisions that span more than one scene.

Upward discovery. The finding, while working on a lower rung, that a higher decision is wrong; it sends the writer up the ladder before work continues.

10. Sources

Allen, Woody, director, Annie Hall (United Artists, 1977); edited by Ralph Rosenblum. Details of the first assembly from Turner Classic Movies, “Behind the Camera: Annie Hall”.

Arrested Development, season 4 (Netflix, 2013); Season 4 Remix: Fateful Consequences (Netflix, 3 May 2018).

Bell, Susan, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

Child, Lee, Make Me (London: Bantam Press, 2015).

Coyne, Shawn, The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know (New York: Black Irish Entertainment, 2015).

Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (1860–61); the original ending first published in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74).

Doyle, Arthur Conan, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890).

Eble, Kenneth E., “The Craft of Revision: The Great Gatsby”, American Literature 36 (1964), 315–26.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1925); Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby, ed. James L. W. West III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Flower, Linda, John R. Hayes, Linda Carey, Karen Schriver and James Stratman, “Detection, Diagnosis, and the Strategies of Revision”, College Composition and Communication 37, no. 1 (1986), 16–55. The findings summarised in section 2.1 beyond the model itself are to be checked against the article.

Gaiman, Neil, rules in “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction”, The Guardian, 20 February 2010.

Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber, 2005); his reflection on the novel twenty years on, Literary Hub.

Martin, Andy, Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me (London: Bantam Press, 2015).

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