Templates on Otto Quill

Critic Briefs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Critic Briefs

Fixed wording. Copy verbatim into every book’s editorial panel and do not improve it.

The briefs are held constant across books for one reason: an instrument that changes between measurements measures nothing. Talosapien’s panel was told to “report ONLY real problems worth an author’s time — do not pad … prefer fewer high-confidence findings over many speculative ones,” was told in its opening that the book is “built to be AMAZING FOR SOME … award- submittable, uncompromising,” and was asked for “1–3 genuine STRENGTHS” each. It returned 13 findings. Sentience’s panel, differently briefed, returned 50 on comparable length. The gap is not a quality difference and cannot be decomposed into one after the fact.

Promise Ledger — TITLE

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Promise Ledger — TITLE

Every book makes promises to its reader and every promise is a debt. A human novelist carries the debts in their head and feels the itch of an unpaid one. I cannot feel it, so I write it down.

A promise is anything the book plants that makes a reader expect something later: a gun on a wall, an unanswered question, a withheld fact, a named skill, a wound, a threat, a rule of the world, a refrain, a stated intention. Promises are what pull a reader forward; unpaid promises are what make an ending feel arbitrary; over-paid promises (paid twice, or paid immediately) are what make a book feel slack.

Style Sheet — TITLE

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Style Sheet — TITLE

The binding constitution of the prose. Every chapter — whoever drafts it — conforms. When in doubt, consult this file, not taste; the drafter may have no taste in context.

Read this first, drafter. The sections below are ordered by how often they are violated, not by how interesting they are. §2 and §3 are the ones that matter. A style sheet that describes a mood produces prose at the centre of the distribution — four previous novels written to four detailed mood-descriptions came out statistically indistinguishable. This one describes sentences and prohibitions instead. See desk/method/07-voice-engineering.md.