“She would have taken the train” describes a possible journey, not necessarily a journey made. Fiction can spend considerable time in alternatives, and a reading note can accidentally turn those alternatives into events.
Find a passage involving a wish, an abandoned plan or a conditional statement. Divide your notes into what the narrative says happened and what someone imagines could have happened. Add the person responsible for the imagined version.
An invented example: a character pictures accepting a distant job, furnishing a new room and meeting unfamiliar colleagues, then declines the offer. The room may be vivid on the page without belonging to the story’s completed sequence of events.
That imagined detail can still matter. Ask what the choice reveals about the character’s expectations, fears or understanding of the available options. Do not treat one imagined possibility as the only alternative the fictional world allowed.
Return later to see whether an element of the unchosen future reappears. A place name or an object might acquire a different significance after the decision.
For discussion, try the question “What future was the reader invited to rehearse?” It preserves the importance of the passage while keeping an imagined life distinct from the one the narrative actually follows.
Editorial illustration from this site’s image library; not documentary evidence of the example or object discussed.
