9. Checklist and Exercises

Revision checklist

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.

Exercises

These five exercises are for your own draft. Each produces a page of writing or a table, and none of them needs a finished book.

Exercise 1: two sentences per scene. Take one chapter of your draft. For every scene in it, write the start-and-close sentences of the value shift, in the same grammatical form. Where you cannot write them, write instead what the scene is for, and decide whether that is a reason the book needs.

Exercise 2: the domain audit. For the same chapter, build the table described under “The domain audit” in The Mechanism: length, domain letters, and three or four words of annotation for each letter. Strike every letter you cannot annotate. Choose the longest single-letter scene and find its latent second domain without adding more than fifty words.

Exercise 3: three speeds. Choose a scene that is not working. Rewrite it as singulative summary of no more than three sentences, and again as an ellipsis (the scene before it ending, the scene after it beginning, with nothing between). Read all three versions in place, in the chapter, before deciding which stays.

Exercise 4: the object between them. Choose a scene in which two characters’ relation is meant to change. Remove every sentence that states the relation. Give them one object to pass, withhold or refuse, and let the change happen through it.

Exercise 5: the reverse outline. Write one line per scene for your whole draft, in the language of consequence, with lengths and domain letters. Read it straight through and mark redundant pairs, runs of six lines in which a domain goes dark, and the point at which the book’s first movement ends.

See also: the Reference checklist and studio work, with further exercises and seminar questions.