9. Checklist and Exercises

Revision checklist

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.

Exercises

1. The want sentence. Choose the longest exchange in your draft. Above it, write what each speaker wants from the other before it ends, one sentence each, with a verb aimed at the other person. If one sentence will not come, rewrite the exchange until it does, or summarise it.

2. Four mechanisms. Take the most direct line in one exchange and rewrite it four times: as an evasion, a changed subject, a too-precise reply and a delayed agreement. Keep the version that tells you something about the speaker you had not decided.

3. The transcript test. Strip every tag and action beat from two pages of dialogue, and give the bare lines to a reader who does not know the book. Ask her to mark where the speaker changes and to describe each speaker in two adjectives.

4. The domain audit. Beside each turn of one exchange, write the letters of the domains it serves: P, C, R, Th, Tx, S. Most turns carrying P alone means a briefing; R never appearing means status is fixed; S never appearing means everyone says what they think; one turn carrying most of the letters is the exchange’s spine.

5. Find the plain line. List the three places in your book where a character says plainly what she means about what matters most to her. If there are more than three, choose the one the book is building towards and restore the gap in the others.

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