The Narrative Composition Protocol (NCP) — Version 0.1

 

The Narrative Composition Protocol (NCP) — Version 0.1

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

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Object

A work of narrative fiction constructed to carry the commitments at the pre-argumentative layer — depicting a world in which they hold, without asserting them.

Relation to the NPA

The Narrative Presupposition Audit (NPA) audits what a work depicts. The NCP composes one. The instruments are designed to close: Step 7 is an NPA run on the protocol’s own output, and a work that cannot pass its own audit has failed.

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Step 0 — Commitment Slate

Declared before any drafting. State for each of C1 through C6 which of the following the work will do:

• Carry — depicted as holding, never argued.
• Leave Non-Operative — honestly out of scope for this work.
• Assign divergently — held in a form the corpus excludes, by a named character.

Then name the load-bearing commitment: the one the plot’s central problem is built to test. A work that carries all six equally carries none of them with force.

Standing ruling on C4. Foundationalism cannot be plotted. A novel can show a standard held steady while a character moves; it cannot dramatize a regress terminating. C4 is declared Non-Operative by default, and any attempt to carry it is recorded as invention rather than depiction.

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Step 1 — The Detachable Wrong

Design the hinge: a wrong from which every ordinary source of moral weight has been removed. Specify all five as absent —

• no nameable injury;
• no consequence;
• no witness but the observing character;
• no reproach from the injured party;
• no awareness in the wrongdoer that anything was done.

If the reader can locate the wrongness in the harm, the work has not carried C6; it has carried consequentialism with good manners.

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Step 2 — Evidence Ledger

Before drafting the protagonist’s error, list every particular she possesses that bears on it. The correction must be assembled entirely from this list. No fact may arrive from outside to produce it.

The error is then written as a failure to weigh, not a failure to know — the particulars passing unnoticed because unsuspected.

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Step 3 — Origination Register

For every character who will plead that a thing could not be helped, fix in advance three dated acts, each easy to have left undone, each performed with visible care. The plea and the register appear on the same page or within sight of each other.

The plea may take any of three forms: necessity, minimization, or a false reason. All three should not be used by the same character.

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Step 4 — Resolution Routing

Name, before drafting, the agency that resolves the material plot — and it must not be the protagonist. Preferably it should not know she exists.

Her own attempts are then written as: one declined, one actively harmful, and the harmful one diagnosed in her hearing or her own reflection as the wish to stop feeling uncomfortable rather than the wish to do good.

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Step 5 — Register Separation

Keep a standing list of the work’s social vocabulary — respectable, ridiculous, contemptible, and their kin — separate from its moral vocabulary. At least once the protagonist must mistake the first for the second, and the mistake must be corrected without commentary.

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Step 6 — Composition

Constraints operating throughout:

• No character states a commitment as doctrine. Positions are acted. The counter-commitment carrier especially must be charming, half-right, and never lecture.
• The corrector is corrected. Any character who supplies true judgment must be shown revising on evidence, openly, at cost.
• No cancellation. Reconciliation grants a place at the table with the record intact. Forgiveness that erases the fact contradicts C6 at the moment the book most wants to affirm it.
• No reward. Where the form supplies one — marriage, restored fortune — it must be explicitly severed from desert inside the fiction.
• Overcorrection guard. The recovery audit conducted under shame must be caught producing its own false judgment in the opposite direction, and stopped.

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Step 7 — NPA Run on Own Output

Run the completed work through the NPA under its own Step 0 selection rule, fixed before the run. Compare the findings against the Step 0 slate. A commitment declared Carry that returns Non-Operative was declared, not built.

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Named Failure Modes

• THESIS SPEECH — a character voices a commitment as doctrine. The work leaves the pre-argumentative layer and becomes a tract.
• REWARDED VIRTUE — moral improvement produces the material outcome.
• CANCELLED WRONG — reconciliation erases the fact.
• IMPORTED EVIDENCE — the correction arrives from outside the Step 2 ledger.
• STRAW CARRIER — the counter-commitment held by someone unattractive or stupid.
• SOCIAL SUBSTITUTION — social judgment passed off as moral.
• SAINT MANUFACTURE — the wronged party elevated to compensate.
• UNCORRECTED CORRECTOR — a character who is only ever right.
• PLOTTED FOUNDATION — C4 forced into dramatization.

Ordinary Language Standard

Corpus coinages glossed in plain words at first use in every run. The fiction itself carries none of the vocabulary.

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Open Items

Step 7 has never been executed. Marlden was written before the protocol existed, so the protocol is derived from one work rather than tested on any. The honest first use is an NPA run on Marlden, to determine whether the book from which the protocol was extracted passes it.

The name requires checking against NCA v1.0, already on the ratified instrument list, before it is fixed.

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Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.