Wuthering Heights, read as five moments
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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 case on this list where capture and output belong to the same man, Lockwood, with months and a condensed retelling between them.
Capture, of a story still unfinished
The novel opens with the diary of Lockwood, a newcomer, recording two visits to Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord, Heathcliff. Snowed in there, he finds Catherine Earnshaw's name scratched on a window ledge and her childhood diary, scrawled in the margins of her books. Only in chapter IV, back at Thrushcross Grange, does he ask the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to sit with him and talk, 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 reading what Catherine wrote as a child, then asking, plainly, to be told the rest. And the story isn't over when he asks, in 1801: Heathcliff is alive. He dies while Lockwood is away, and Nelly tells him the end on a later visit, with Cathy and Hareton to be married on New Year's Day.
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.
Emily Brontë's own capture, as her sister recorded it, was Lockwood's gesture. Charlotte wrote that what Emily gathered of the real came from listening to "the secret annals of every rude vicinage", material from which she wrought Heathcliff, Earnshaw and Catherine. Each of the three sisters wrote a prose tale, hoping the three might be published together.
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 set up in chapter IV, once the first three chapters of Lockwood's own diary are behind us and he asks Nelly to sit with him at supper: from there, 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: Heathcliff's three years' absence and return, four marriages (Hindley's, Catherine's to Edgar, Isabella's to Heathcliff, Cathy's to Linton) with a fifth still to come, a slow decline across both households. One long, sustained account does the work that other novels spread across many separate scenes.
Revision
The revision on record is not Emily's own. While the tales were being written, the sisters, once or twice a week, each "read to the others what she had written"; when a listener to the manuscript shuddered, Charlotte says, "Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant". After Emily's death, Charlotte wrote on 29 September 1850 that she wished "to revise the proofs" and "to modify the orthography of the old servant Joseph's speeches"; her 1850 edition corrected punctuation and spelling and diluted Joseph's Yorkshire dialect.
Output, in Lockwood's hand
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 asked Nelly to "continue minutely"; the written record is his own, "in her own words, only a little condensed".
Capture and output, usually the two moments furthest apart in a writing day, stay apart here too: Lockwood asks for the story in the winter of 1801 and hears it at different sittings, and he hears the end only in September 1802, when he unexpectedly passes near Gimmerton again.
In most novels, capture happens early and privately, and output happens late and formally, with everything else stretched out between them. This one keeps that order, the asking at one end and Lockwood's condensed writing-down at the other, 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.