Appendix C — Master Checklist — Core · The Craft Behind the Story

Every chapter ends with a revision checklist, a set of questions to put to a draft once the chapter’s tests have been understood. This appendix gathers the eighteen checklists in one place and in one order, the order of the revision ladder set out in The Structural Edit (Chapter 18): first what the book promises, then how it is allocated and arranged, then its shape, then its joins, and its scenes and their materials last. A writer who works down the list in this order makes each decision after the decisions it rests on, so that a later repair does not undo an earlier one.

The questions are copied from the chapters without change, under each chapter’s own headings, and the chapter title above each set links to the chapter. Where a question uses a term, the chapter defines it, and the glossary gives it too. A question that cannot be answered is not a failure in itself: it usually means the decision it asks about has not yet been made, and the chapter says how to make it.

Before the edit: the order of the work

The structural edit’s own checklist comes first, because it governs the order in which the others are used: build the map, sort the notes by rung, and keep the record of what each repair reopens.

The Structural Edit (Chapter 18)

Before any repair

Have I built a book map from the draft, not from memory, with the change column filled for every scene?
Can I write the book’s promise and its governing question in two sentences, and do my first and last chapters answer to them?
Have I put every note and every failing test on an edit list, with the rung where it was felt?

The order

For each note, have I checked the rung above the one where it was felt, and recorded the rung of its cause?
Am I working downwards: the promise, then allocation and arrangement, then the shape, then the joins, then the scenes?
When work on a lower rung showed me a higher decision was wrong, did I stop and make that decision before going on?
Am I leaving the opening pages, the last page and the line edit until rungs 1 to 3 have settled?

Each repair

Have I changed the map before the text, and listed the tests the repair reopens?
Have I rerun those tests before making the next repair?
Does the repair answer at least as many notes as it reopens tests, and could I move or cut instead of adding?
For every addition I keep, have I found something of equal length to remove?

Stopping

Does a pass down the first three rungs now change nothing below them?
Is every failure I keep defended on the edit list in a sentence?
Has someone who has not read an earlier draft read this one, or have I left it long enough to read it cold? Do the new notes avoid clustering above rung 5?

Rung 1: the promise

The top rung asks what kind of book this is, what it promises and what it declines. The governing thematic question, which also belongs here, is checked with the arc under rung 3, and the contracts of the opening with the joins under rung 4, since their checklists are written for the pages.

Series and Genre (Chapter 17)

The genre declared

Where would a reader of my first chapter shelve the book, and does my last chapter belong on the same shelf?
What is the core promise of the genre my opening declares, and where do I keep it?
Does my jacket copy, or my pitch, promise anything the book declines?

Conventions kept, varied and declined

Have I listed every convention the book invokes, with the place it is first invoked?
For each declined convention, is there a sign inside the book within the first quarter, and a replacement promise that I keep?
Is every declined question kept in view to the end, so that the decline reads as design rather than forgetting?
Which convention do I vary, and is that where the book’s meaning lies?
Will a reader of my mode read any detail as a clue that I never meant to answer?

The volume

Can I write this volume’s question in a line, and is it closed inside the volume?
Is my last page spent on this volume’s ending, with any step on the series question after the close?

The series

What form have my first volumes declared, and does this one keep it?
What step does each volume take on the series question, and could a reader name it?
How long has each carried thread been dormant, counted in volumes and in the reader’s months?
Does my first chapter serve both a returning reader and a new one, with recap delivered as present consequence?
Is my hero’s criterion where the last volume left it, or does this volume show it moving?

Rung 2: allocation and arrangement

The second rung asks whose book it is, how many stories it tells, in what order of time, and whether anything stands before it.

The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13)

The architecture

Can I name the book’s architecture, and does the page-share confirm it?
Is the right to move between minds inside a scene established, and exercised consistently, or never used?

Each grant

Can I name two domains for each viewpoint character, one of them not access, with a passage as evidence?
Which cheaper instruments did each grant displace, and why were they rejected?
Did the reader know what this character wanted before the first grant?

Distinguishability

Could a reader assign an unheaded paragraph to its viewpoint character?
Do the vantages differ in what they notice, appraise, cannot know and call things, and not only in voice?

Timing

Is the book’s plurality declared before the reader’s first deep investment?
Is every grant after the opening movement bounded, or paid for by a payoff no report could deliver?
Does any vantage stop without the reader knowing it has stopped?

Those outside

For each named character without a viewpoint, who explains her motives, and does she have a repeated tag instead of a mind?
What would a reader conclude the book believes from the shape of the allocation alone?

The Subplot (Chapter 14)

Is it a plot at all?

Can I state the thread’s goal, conflict and consequence in three sentences without mentioning the protagonist’s goal?
Does it have at least two branching points, moments at which it could have gone another way?
If it is a recurring character rather than a chain, have I said so and sized it accordingly?

What it supplies

Can I name its domains, and does at least one supply what the main plot cannot by its nature?
If it supplies only relief, have I looked for the second job it could do in the pages it already occupies?
Can I complete the sentence because this thread exists, the reader understands that the main plot’s situation is qualified in this way, and name the two scenes between which that understanding is produced?

Convergence

At what point would deleting the thread break the main plot’s logic rather than thin it?
Is the convergence a consequence, and not a coincidence or a meeting?
Was the object or fact that converges the threads planted before the reader knew to look at it?

Proportion and rhythm

Have I counted every thread’s page-share, and does the distribution match the book I think I have written?
What is each thread’s longest gap, and is the thread left mid-question when it is suspended?
Does a thread that converges at the climax appear in the quarter of the book before it?
Do the crossings fall where the material needs them, and not where a rotation demands them?

Rank

Have I asked the promotion question, and recorded the answer rather than defended the plan?
If the book has three or more co-equal chains, does it declare that early and let the relations carry its argument?

Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8)

The arrangement

Have I written the book in story order in a page, and listed what my order adds?
Which architecture does the book use, and do its parts serve that architecture’s work?
What frame does the reader build from the first pages, and is it the one I want?

The strands

Can I write each strand’s question in one line, and do the other strands leave it open?
Is every strand declared by its second instalment, within the first fifth of the book?
Does any recurring material from another time lack a question of its own, and should it be cut to cutaways?
Do my strands move at different rates, and where does a crossing show the difference?

The markers and switches

Does every instalment tell the reader its time within two sentences, using the strand’s own material first?
Are the markers strongest where the strands share a place, a cast or an object?
Is each strand left on an open question, and entered at a point that pays at once?
Is the rhythm of alternation regular, and is every break in it deliberate?

The meeting

Where do the strands meet, in time, by cause or by identity, and what does the meeting change?
If an object joins two times, does its condition or custody change between them?
Does the order withhold anything that a character would have told, and does the book give a reason?

The Prologue (Chapter 10)

Position

Can I complete “This must sit outside the main narrative because…” with an impossibility?
Have I tried absorbing the material into Chapter One, and relocating it in the main timeline, and listed what broke?
Would anything change if the prologue were headed Chapter One?

Distance

Which axis carries the load, and are the others costing more than they buy?
Does the main narrative close the distance on that axis, by the means the axis requires?
If the distance stays open, is that the book’s policy, its subject, or an oversight?

Domains

Which domains does the prologue serve, and which of them require exteriority?
If the authority domain is served, does the book honour the frame it installs?

Plants

Which specifics recur, and on which pages?
Does the first fragment return within the first quarter of the book?
Is the last sentence a held note, or a portentous half-line?

Contract

Do the prologue, pages 40 to 60 and the last chapter share pitch, pace, mode and scale?
Can a reader who skips the prologue follow the whole book while still losing something?

Rung 3: the shape

The third rung asks how the middle narrows, where the protagonist’s change is located and what it argues, when each fact is disclosed, and what the ending spends. Its four checklists are given in the order The Structural Edit (Chapter 18) recommends, since the ending depends on the other three.

The Middle (Chapter 11)

Boundaries and turns

Can I name the commitment that ends my beginning and the sequence that starts my ending, and say what share of the book lies between them?
Is there a turn near the centre, and can I say whether it changes the goal, the protagonist’s knowledge, their mode or their fortune?
Does the first half’s question get answered, or visibly carried, at the turn?

Sequences

Written as a value-shift log, does any sequence repeat its neighbour’s shift at the same stakes?
Could any two sequences of the middle change places without loss, and if so, what links them other than a constant?
If I delete the weakest sequence, does the ending lose anything I can name?

Forces

Does the opposing force act in every quarter of the middle, on the page or through a consequence?
Is there a clock, does the protagonist know it, and does it shorten?
Does at least one event narrow more than one line of action?

The reader

Is the protagonist’s option list shorter at the midpoint than after the beginning, and shorter again at the start of the ending?
Is the question a reader carries at 60 per cent different from the one at 40 per cent?
Is there any stretch longer than about a sixth of the book in which nothing closes?

Arc and Theme (Chapter 12)

The arc

Can I write my protagonist’s rule for choosing as a short imperative, at the first large decision and at the last?
If the rule is the same at both, is that the book’s design (a steadfast or refused arc), and is the rule put under real pressure?
Is there a stretch of a quarter of the book or more in which my protagonist makes no decision?

The hinge

Can I name the decision at which the rule changes, and is it on the page, in scene, made by an act?
What does that decision give up that the old rule valued, and has the reader watched that cost grow?
Where is the new rule before the hinge: in another character, or in a moment my protagonist set aside?
After the hinge, does any decision go back to the old rule because the plot needed it?

The confirmation

Is the new rule confirmed by a situation the book has shown before, answered differently?
What about my protagonist is visibly unchanged at the end?
Have I deleted every sentence in which the character, or the narration, explains the change?

The theme

Can I put my book’s theme as a question, and not only as a topic or a thesis?
Does each major character’s rule answer that question, and do at least two answers differ?
Does the opposing answer succeed at least once, or cost my protagonist something to reject?
Who states the theme, where, and would the ending still argue it if the statement were cut?

The Reveal (Chapter 15)

The preparation

Have I listed every passage that bears on my largest reveal, with a first and a second reading for each?
Is there a passage that only the second reading explains, or that the reveal makes false on the narration’s own authority?
Are the clues spread through the book, and is at least one early clue strong enough to be pointed to afterwards?
Have I cut every if she had known and every phrase that announces a secret?

The withholding

What keeps the truth from the reader: a character who does not know, a teller with a motive, or the order of telling?
If a character who knows is followed by the narration, where is her attention instead, and does the book show it?
If the reveal falsifies anything, is it inside a teller’s account, and does the reveal name the teller and the reason?

The timing

Does the reader learn each withheld fact with the characters, ahead of them or after, and did I choose that?
For a reveal before the end, what question replaces the one it answers, and is the second half built on it?
Does any scene give the reader two new disclosures at once?
If the book declines to reveal something, is the question kept visibly open to the end?

The arrival

Is the truth received by a character, in scene, in an act?
Does someone act differently because of it, or does the ending mean something it would not otherwise?
Does the disclosure come from inside the book’s causal system, by a character’s choice?
Is the explanation after the recognition, short, and as far as possible left to the reader?

The Ending (Chapter 16)

The whole book

Can I trace every element the ending rests on to an earlier planting, with chapter and page?
Does anything new and load-bearing arrive for the first time in the ending? New material is allowed; new load is not.
When I reread five earlier scenes with the ending in mind, do they read as intended? Where they do not, have I decided whether the scene or the ending is wrong?
Does the ending answer a pressure the middle built, and not only a question it asked?

Climax and aftermath

Can I point to where the climax ends and the aftermath begins, and say what the aftermath does that the climax could not?
Does the aftermath end within a page of the last decision anyone takes?
Is each thread’s resolution proportional to the space it took?

Domains

Which domains does the ending deliver, which does it gesture at, and which does it refuse, and does each delivered domain have a passage a reader could point to?
Does at least one carrier serve more than one domain, and is there some material that means nothing?
If the book declared a frame, a pattern or an apparatus, does the ending close or modify it?

Questions and ambiguity

Is every question the book raised answered or visibly declined, and none merely dropped?
Can I state any deliberate ambiguity in one sentence, and say what resolving it would cost?
Has the book ended rather than stopped, and can I name the device that tells the reader so?

The last page

Do the last page and three passages from the middle belong to the same book?
Does anyone, character or narrator, explain what the book meant?
Does the final paragraph do work the paragraph before it does not, and do I know why the last word is the one it is?

Rung 4: the joins

The fourth rung asks how each unit meets the next: where the chapters break, how gaps are crossed, how the past is entered and left, and what the opening pages promise. The opening comes last, after every decision it must promise has been made.

The Chapter Break (Chapter 6)

Use the checklist on one chapter ending at a time, after reading the last paragraph and stopping. Each item is a question to answer in a sentence.

The chapter

What did this chapter propose near its start, in one sentence a reader would use?
Does the ending resolve, escalate, hold open, recast or exchange it, and which?
Is there an internal seam that would make a better ending than the present one?

The ending

What type of ending does the last sentence create, and was it chosen?
If it is a cliffhanger, has the book already given the reader a reason to care about the danger?
If it is a pivot, could the reveal come later, at the very end, and what are the pages after it doing?
If it is a question close, can the question be stated without the word somehow?

The price

Is stopping here free, moderate or expensive, and what did the two previous breaks charge?
What does the next chapter have to spend on orientation because of where this one was cut?

The manuscript

Read down the ending types of eleven consecutive chapters: is there more than one gear?
Plotted in order, do the chapter lengths make a tempo curve, and does it match the book’s movement?
Do the Part boundaries fall where the book changes, and does the heading scheme run from the first chapter?

The Transition (Chapter 5)

Use the checklist on one join at a time. Read it cold when a reader has stalled there or you suspect a problem. Each item is a question to answer in a sentence.

The gap

How many of these change across it: time, space, protagonist, causality and intentionality?
What happens inside it, and will the reader later need any of it?
Does the mark on the page claim the right size of gap, and would the join survive the mark being lost?

The departure

Does the last sentence before the gap name a place, a person, an object or an intention the arrival can pick up?
If the departure simply stops, could two words aim it?

The arrival

At what word can a cold reader say when, where and whose vantage?
If the anchor is late, is the uncertainty the character’s, is it bounded, and is something else supplied meanwhile?
At what word does the new unit’s own business begin, and what before it could the reader have inferred?
Is the reader oriented twice, or reminded of what she has just read?

Technique

Which of the six techniques is this, and was it chosen?
If it is a time-stamp, is it definite where the interval matters and event-relative where an event is available?
At a handoff, does the text say whether this comes after the last unit or alongside it?

Second jobs

Is there an object, an echo or a tense already available that would carry the crossing and mean something?
Is this one of the joins that should only orient?

The manuscript

Does one technique account for more than two out of every three joins?
Do the joins cluster, several in a few pages and then none for forty?

Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7)

Use the checklist on one cutaway at a time, after reading the page before it, the cutaway and the page after. Each item is a question to answer in a sentence.

The decision

What present question was open when the narrative left, and how hard was the reader pressing on it?
Had the book already made the reader want this past, or does the cutaway arrive unasked?
Would it cost less, and recolour more, thirty pages earlier or later?

The register

Written out as one sentence and read in place, does the cutaway lose anything the later pages need?
Has the material been tried as a clause, and as an iterative sentence, before being given a scene?
If it is a scene, does someone in it want something, meet resistance and end changed?

The crossing

What in the present triggers the departure, and is the narration close enough to need one?
Which of the four changes has the present undergone by the return: knowledge, understanding, question or action?
Is there a sentence stating the cutaway’s significance that could be deleted?

The manuscript

On one sheet, what are the reach, extent, register and domains of every cutaway, and what pattern do they make?
How much of the book is in the past, and does its declared structure say so?
If there is a second timeline, is it declared by its second or third instance, and does each strand progress?

The Opening Pages (Chapter 9)

Use the checklist on a finished draft of the first chapter, after reading the opening and then pages 30 to 40. Each item is a question to answer in a sentence.

The scene

Who is trying to do what in these pages, and what is in the way?
How many words pass before the first verb of intention or change?
What small deviation tells the reader that today is not like the others?

The contracts

Which words open each of the six contracts, and is each deferred contract deferred by choice?
Is any information delivered that no character would say, to anyone, for any reason?
Does the narration withhold anything the viewpoint character plainly knows, and is that gap in her or in the author?

The page

Which detail carries the most contracts, and could the page be built outward from it?
Read aloud, where does the breath fail, and which sentences are rests?
Which details are placed in the first two pages, and which of them are redeemed later?

The book

Do pages 30 to 40 belong to the same book as the opening, in tone, pace and stakes?
If the book uses several viewpoints, timelines or documents, on what page does the reader first learn that it does?
If read without its title, cover or blurb, does the opening still say what kind of book it is?

Rung 5: the scene and its materials

The last rung asks what each scene changes, how scene and sequel link, what each exchange does and which details are named. The line edit follows.

The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1)

Run each scene of a finished draft against this list before deciding that it stays as written. Each item corresponds to one of the diagnostic tests or failure patterns; an unticked item is a question to answer, not a verdict.

Engine

I can state in one sentence what the viewpoint character wants in this scene, right now.
Something is in the way, and getting past it costs something I can name.
If the want is granted at once, the granting is itself the problem.

Change

I can write the two parallel sentences: what was true at the start, and what is no longer true at the close.
The value moved is one the book has already made the reader care about.
The reader has not already been given this shift elsewhere.

Domains

I can name each domain the scene serves (plot, character, theme, texture, relational) and annotate it with the specific change.
The scene serves at least two, or I can say why it should serve one (a rest, or a normal a later scene needs).
The relational change, if any, happens in the room, not in a sentence that states it.

Mode

I have asked whether this material should be a scene at all.
I have tried it in at least one other mode (summary, ellipsis, iterative, reported) and know what that version loses.
Habitual material is told iteratively, not dramatised as a single day.

Execution

The scene begins at the first moment the want is in operation.
It ends on the last moment the value moves, not on its explanation.
Information in it arrives under pressure, from someone reluctant to give it.

Book scale

Removing the scene would cost the reader something identifiable, or leave a later scene unearned.
Its line in the reverse outline is written in the language of consequence.
It is in the register (action or reflection) that this point in the book requires.

Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2)

Run each scene–sequel pair of a finished draft against this list. Each item corresponds to one of the diagnostic tests or failure patterns; an unticked item is a question to answer, not a verdict.

Goal and resistance

I can state what the viewpoint character wants at the start of the unit, with a verb of pursuit and an object.
I can point to the decision that produced the goal.
Each obstacle tells the character, and the reader, something new.

Disaster

The unit ends in a sentence I can write with but or worse.
I can name what the character paid, and in what currency.
The disaster arises from the action, not from outside it.

Sequel

The reaction is carried by the body and the attention, or a retrospective narrator’s naming is doing work.
I can state both costs of the dilemma in one sentence each, and a sympathetic reader could choose either.
The decision names a place, an object or a person, and closes some door.
Any decision withheld across a break is paid, visibly, later.

Chain

Written as bare events, each of three links would not have happened without the one before.
My three-connective outline has no run of three and thens, and contains at least one but.

Weight

The space each sequel gets follows the weight of the disaster it answers.
The book’s largest sequel follows its largest disaster.

Arc

I can name the decision at which the protagonist chooses on grounds they did not hold before.
Where a beat is missing, the absence is deliberate and the reader can cross it.

The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3)

Run each exchange of a finished draft against this list. Each item corresponds to one of the diagnostic tests or failure patterns; an unticked item is a question to answer, not a verdict.

Engine

I can say in one sentence each what both speakers want from each other before the exchange ends.
Something is different at the last line: a fact passed, a point conceded, a form of address changed.
The exchange starts at the first turn I could not cut and ends at the last.

Cost and status

Every fact that passes costs the speaker something, or sits in narration instead.
I can name the currency of status, and some of it changed hands or was contested and held.
Any relational change happens in an act (a name, a correction, a position, an exit granted or refused), not in a statement about it.

Two channels

Each speaker keeps something back, and I know what it is.
The reader can work out what each evasion is evading.
The gap closes plainly no more than once or twice in the book, and late.
Some turns do only one thing, so that the oblique ones register.

Voices

With every tag and action beat stripped, I can tell who is speaking from the speech alone.
The principals differ in sentence length, in their relation to questions and in their default way of not saying things.
Dialect lives in syntax, idiom and vocabulary rather than in respelling.

Apparatus and room

Most tags are said or asked, and fewer than half the turns carry one once the speakers are established.
Each action beat does something besides identify the speaker.
I know who else is in the room, and what their silence is doing.

The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4)

Use the checklist on one descriptive passage at a time, after a reader has flagged it or you have begun to suspect it. Each item is a question to answer in a sentence.

Selection

Can you complete these details, and not others, because … with something other than “they were there”?
Does the passage lose anything if its details are shuffled?
Is each detail specific to this place, or only to its kind?

Perceiver

Whose attention chose each detail, and what does the choice show about her?
Would she, wanting what she wants, in her present state, notice this?
Is any detail something nobody present could have registered?

Domains and density

Which domain is the passage’s principle of selection?
Does any detail carry plot, a relation or a date as well as texture?
Is there at least one ordinary detail, and one that simply exists?

Implication

Can you write a second sentence saying what each key detail implies, distinct from what it shows?
Is any implication so loud that the object has left the room?
Does any figure of speech have an owner in the scene?

Time and return

Does the passage say what has happened to the place, through aspect, wear or maintenance?
Where else does each charged object appear, and what has changed each time?
Is the first appearance of a planned motif unemphatic?

Count and senses

How many details are offered, and how many do you want kept?
How many modifiers stand on a single noun?
Which single non-visual detail would carry most?

The checklists are written for a draft that exists. A writer planning a book can use the first three rungs as a plan, answering each question with the decision she intends, and come back to the last two when there are pages to revise.

The Craft Behind the Story — Appendix C, Master Checklist. Introduction · Glossary