The sixteen sections
Twelve chapters share one plan, so that a reader who has used one can find her way in any other. Each opens with front matter: the chapter’s contents, an abstract, its learning outcomes, its key terms, and a table headed How to Use This Chapter that suggests a route through it for each kind of reader. The chapter proper then runs in sixteen numbered sections, and a reference such as §8.3 always means a section of the chapter in which it appears.
The first section, the introduction, opens on the problem the chapter addresses and states its claim. The second fixes definitions and boundaries: it separates the unit from its neighbours and says what the chapter leaves to other chapters. The third gives the theory, explaining why the unit works as the chapter says it does, with the theorists and the evidence. The fourth sets out the taxonomy, usually the domains of purpose the unit can serve or the kinds it comes in. The fifth treats multiplicity, the way one unit can do several jobs with the same material, or the principle that governs the unit’s proportions. The sixth gives the mechanism peculiar to the chapter’s unit, such as the two channels of a dialogue exchange or the registers in which a novel can enter the past.
The method follows. Section 7 sets out the diagnostic method: ten tests, each framed as a question a writer can answer from a draft without outside help, with a protocol for reading the results together. A test that fails does not prove a fault. It locates a place where the book does something the model does not expect, and the writer must then decide whether the book has a reason. Section 8 is the catalogue of failure patterns, each described by its symptom, its mechanism, its remedy and an exception, a published work that commits the failure and succeeds; the exceptions are there to show what a reason looks like. Section 9 gives the worked analyses, close readings of published works followed by the household revision case.
The last sections serve study and use. Section 10 follows the unit across forms and ends with a concordance that maps each of the chapter’s concepts to the work that best displays it. Section 11 is the revision checklist. Section 12, Studio Work, holds the exercises, the seminar questions and the assessment rubric. Sections 13 to 15 are the chapter’s glossary, its sources and its further reading, and section 16, the coda, ends on the chapter’s argument and on what its model cannot do.
The extended treatments
The six extended treatments share a plan of their own, in ten numbered sections (nine in Chapter 11, which has no separate glossary). Section 1 gives the scope of the chapter and restates the working definitions it relies on, so that it can be read without the guide. Section 2 gives the theory at length. Section 3 is the extended catalogue of the unit’s types, which summarises the types the guide’s chapter names and adds further ones, usually with a summary table and the chapter’s rulings on proposals made by earlier chapters. Section 4 does the same for failure patterns. Section 5 sets out the diagnostic procedures, the working documents a writer needs before the tests can be run. Section 6 gives further analyses of published works, section 7 the household case in full, and section 8 the limits of the model. The glossary and the sources close the chapter. A reference such as “section 3.6” in one of these chapters means a section of the chapter itself.
Conventions
A few conventions hold across the volume, and knowing them saves a reader from misreading a term or an example.
Terminology. Each technical term has one sense in this volume and is explained where it is first used. Where one word could name two ideas, the book gives each idea its own name. A beat is the smallest unit of change in a scene (Chapter 1) or one of six named functions of the scene and sequel (Chapter 2); the action set between turns of dialogue is an action beat (Chapter 3). Compression is the fitting of page-space to the weight of what happened (Chapter 2); the effect of restricting the space given to a character is character compression (Chapter 13). The hinge is the point at which a character’s grounds for choosing change (Chapters 2 and 12); a chapter ending whose last sentence changes the meaning of the chapter it closes is a recasting close, and a character with business in two plots is a crossing character. A sequel is always the reflective half of Swain’s scene–sequel pair, and a follow-up volume is a series instalment.
Proposals and rulings. Most chapters propose one category beyond the established ones, a sixth domain of an ending, say, or a seventh beat, and argue for it against the strongest objection. A proposal is then judged by a later chapter that meets the same problem at a larger scale, which adopts it, rejects it or adopts it with a condition, and the ruling is recorded in both chapters. A note in italics at the end of a proposal gives the ruling and says where it is argued.
Examples. The illustrative works are chosen for what they demonstrate and because they are likely to stay in print and in discussion. Genre and commercial fiction are treated as forms with their own disciplines, described in the same terms as any other. A reader who does not know a work can follow the argument from the chapter’s description, which never depends on having read the book. The analyses disclose the endings of the works they discuss.
Translation. Some of the novels read closely are translations. The volume’s rule for them is that structural claims survive translation and texture claims do not. What happens, in what order, who knows what and when, where a chapter ends: these are the same in any competent translation, and the chapters make such claims freely. The rhythm of a sentence or the connotation of a word belongs to the translator’s language, so a claim about it is a claim about one translation, and the chapters name the translator wherever they make one.
Period. The conventions described are those of the novel in English and in the European traditions most read in it, chiefly from the eighteenth century to the present. Where a convention belongs to a period, such as the Victorian ending that settles every fate or the serial’s chapter that ends on a danger, the chapter says so. A writer working in another tradition should treat the models as one tradition’s account of the novel, not as the form’s.
Evidence and quotation. Claims about readers rest on published research, which the chapters cite, or are marked as conjecture. Quotation from works in copyright is brief, usually a phrase or a sentence, and longer passages are described. The volume’s English is British.