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.

How to use it. A promise is entered in the same edit that plants it — not later, not in a sweep, or it will not be entered at all. paid_in stays empty until the payment exists on the page. Before a book ships, every row is PAID, REFUSED, or CUT. REFUSED is a legitimate and often superior outcome — Talosapien deliberately refuses to resolve the asteroid’s intent — but a refusal must be declared here, so that a later revision pass does not “fix” it into a resolution. An undeclared refusal is indistinguishable from a forgotten promise, and readers can tell the difference even when the author cannot.

kind values: question · gun (an object/skill/fact planted for later use) · threat · wound (a backstory injury that must cost something) · rule (a world rule the plot must obey) · refrain (a repeated figure, which must develop, not merely recur) · intention (a character states a plan).

weight: how loudly the book promised. loud promises MUST be paid or explicitly refused; quiet ones may be left as texture. Mismatched weight is the usual defect — a loud promise paid quietly reads as an anticlimax, a quiet promise paid loudly reads as contrivance.

Open

Paid

Refused (deliberate — do not “fix”)

Audit questions (run at the end of every wave)

1. Unpaid loud promises. Any loud row still OPEN after its expected payoff chapter has been drafted is a defect, not a plan.
2. Payment distance. A promise planted and paid inside the same chapter was not a promise; it was a scene. Note it and consider moving the payment later.
3. The reader’s live question. For every chapter, at least one row must be OPEN and known to the reader. A chapter with no open promise touching it is where readers stop. Cross-check against the blind-reader reports: if readers cannot name a question they are holding, the ledger is lying.
4. Refrain development. Every refrain row must show what changed on each recurrence. A refrain that recurs unchanged is a tic wearing a refrain’s clothes — see desk/method/06-idiolect-ledger.md.
5. Double payment. A promise paid twice weakens both payments. Keep the stronger.
6. Silent cuts. If a chapter is cut or rewritten, re-check every row that planted in it.