Wuthering Heights, read as five moments
Wuthering Heights ends exactly where it started: back with Lockwood, the tenant who asked for this story in the first place. Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day (capture, the session, the turn to structure, revision, output), Wuthering Heights is the clearest case on this list of two of those moments folding into a single act.
Capture, of a story already finished
The novel opens with Lockwood, a newcomer, arriving at Thrushcross Grange and growing curious about his landlord, Heathcliff, and the strange history attached to Wuthering Heights nearby. He asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him what happened, and she does, at length. The book's first act of capture isn't a fresh idea seized on the spot. It's an outsider retrieving a story that's already over and asking, plainly, to be told it.
Lockwood, notably, is only renting Thrushcross Grange from Heathcliff. He has no stake in the history he's asking about beyond curiosity, and no claim on the story he's collecting. The person doing the capturing here has less at stake in the material than any of the people it's actually about, which is unusual: most captured ideas belong, at least at first, to the person who catches them.
The turn to structure
Told this way, the architecture is a frame within a frame: Lockwood's present enclosing Nelly's account of the past, which itself spans two generations, the elder Catherine and Heathcliff, then their children after them. Most novels hide their shape until a pivot forces it into view partway through. Here it's declared on the opening pages: this is a story being told to someone, about people mostly gone.
The session
Nearly all of the book's forward motion belongs to Nelly's extended telling: years of Heathcliff's absence and return, two marriages, a slow decline across both households. One long, sustained account does the work that other novels spread across many separate scenes.
Revision
No comparably documented revision history survives for this novel the way it does for some others here, and the diagnostic doesn't need to force one where the record is thin.
Output, as the same gesture as capture
The book closes by returning to Lockwood in the present, closing the frame he opened at the start. He wanted to know what happened at Wuthering Heights, and the telling itself delivers the manuscript in exactly the shape he asked for. Capture and output, usually the two moments furthest apart in a writing day, occur here as versions of the same act: a story requested, and a story handed over.
In most novels, capture happens early and privately, and output happens late and formally, with everything else stretched out between them. This one compresses the two into a single continuous transaction, the asking and the telling, and lets the session in the middle, Nelly's long account, carry nearly everything else the book needs to do. A stack of notes that never quite becomes a manuscript might need exactly this: a listener invented inside the story itself, someone who wants the whole thing told, so the notes have somewhere to go besides a separate outline.