A companion volume
This volume is the companion to a shorter book written for practising novelists, The Craft Behind the Story: A Systematic Guide to Structuring and Revising Fiction, which these pages call the guide. The two books divide the same subject in the same way. Each has eighteen chapters with the same numbers, titles and parts, from the purposes of a scene in Chapter 1 to the structural edit in Chapter 18, and each uses the same terms in the same senses, so that a chapter of one can be read beside the same chapter of the other.
The books differ in what they are for. The guide is written for use at the desk. Each of its chapters runs to about eleven thousand words, gives only the theory its method uses, and spends the rest on diagnostic tests, failure patterns and the revision of a draft. This volume gives the argument at its full length. It is for readers who want to know why a test asks what it asks, where a model comes from and where it stops working, and for teachers and students who want to work through the material in a course.
Neither book depends on the other. Every chapter here defines the terms it uses and can be read without the guide, and the guide can be read without this volume. A reader who has used a chapter of the guide will find the same claims and the same instruments in the chapter of the same number here, set out at greater length and with more evidence.
What this volume adds
The additions are of four kinds, and each answers a question the guide leaves for a reader who wants more than a working method.
The first is theory. Where the guide gives a strand of theory only once it has named the practical question it answers, this volume sets out the theory in its own right, with its sources, the objections it has met, and the evidence for the claims it makes about readers. The second is the catalogue. Where the guide describes four or five failure patterns in a chapter, this volume usually describes ten or more, each with its symptom, mechanism, remedy and exception, and closes the catalogue with a table that runs from symptom to mechanism. The third is close reading. Each of the twelve chapters on the full plan reads seven to nine published works closely, chiefly novels from the eighteenth century to the twentieth; the recent fiction, film and television that the guide reads are listed in each chapter’s sources, and several chapters return to them. The fourth is teaching material. Twelve chapters follow their unit into other forms, from the short story to the television series, and end with exercises, seminar questions and an assessment rubric, a marking scheme by which a teacher can grade the exercises.
What it leaves to the guide
The guide holds the material gathered across chapters: a consolidated glossary, an index that takes a reader’s complaint about a draft to the chapters that explain it, every chapter’s revision checklist in the order a structural edit uses them, a summary of the invented novel’s facts, and an appendix on the short story and the novella. This volume keeps a glossary, the sources and, in twelve chapters, a list of further reading inside each chapter instead, so that each chapter can be read on its own.
Some chapters here refer to a passage of the guide, usually to say that the guide reads a recent novel or gives the first draft of a household case that the chapter here extends. Such a reference names the guide’s chapter, meaning the chapter of the guide with the same number, and says which part of it is meant. Nothing in this volume needs the passage referred to in order to be followed.
Two kinds of chapter
The chapters follow one of two plans. Twelve chapters (1 to 7, 9, 10, 13, 14 and 16) are built on a common plan of sixteen sections, from an introduction that states the chapter’s problem to a coda that states the limits of its model. The other six (8, 11, 12, 15, 17 and 18) are each a single extended treatment, subtitled The Full Treatment, of about eight thousand words. Each extended treatment starts from the guide’s chapter on the same unit. It summarises that chapter’s taxonomy and failure patterns in a section each, then adds further types and failure patterns, sets out the diagnostic procedures in detail, gives further analyses and the household case in full, and states the limits of the model. These six are shorter than their counterparts in the guide, because the guide already gives their tests and their main analyses at the length of a working chapter; they are complete in their argument, but a reader who wants those tests set out on a page will find them there.
The next part, How the Chapters Are Built, describes both plans and the conventions that hold across the volume.