Hacking Literary Innovation · Appendix A

The Scoring Sheet

Fifteen rows, three classes, two cells on row 14. The sheet applies the book’s own rules as you fill it: isotopy at 0–3 strikes rows 5 and 9 VOID, a blank category voids rows 14 and 15, and row 10 is not yours to fill. Nothing above the seven lines is finished until they are written.

Title Draft Date Scored by Retailer category, exactly as the shelf names itIf this line is blank, rows 14 and 15 are unscorable and the sheet is void. Samples scored — three passages of 500 words, from the middle, chosen before they were read Dominant trope, and its class

#	Class	Row	Score	Tag / count	One-line justification

The seven lines below the sheet

What recurs, in one sentence, plus the feature its instances share.
Did you choose it or find it? and if found, the date you decided to keep it
The differentiation: row value class locked on
The second break, if any: row value class
The substitution sentence, required if row 14 is tagged W: the withdrawn convention was doing ___ for the reader, and ___ now performs it.
The subordination test, run on the break you are proudest of: repairing make disappear.
The anchored rows: all of them at or below the niche mean? and if no, which one you are spending on twice

The only metric

Two sheets, dated, on the same manuscript. If the pre-textual differentiation named on the first is unchanged and still held on the second, and the isotopy sentence has moved from a habit you found to a marker you chose, the method worked. Nothing else counts.

The scores are editorial judgments, not computations. Argue with any of them by naming a row and a number. Drafts are kept in this browser; “Copy as text” puts the whole sheet on the clipboard for a file or an email. The method behind every row is in Hacking Literary Innovation; the quick version is the Superaxis Scorecard.