Revision checklist
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?
Exercises
- The principle swap. Take a descriptive paragraph from your draft and write the same place three times, from three principles: what your viewpoint character is avoiding looking at, what has not been touched since a date that matters to the book, and what an expert in the place’s trade would notice. Keep the version that tells the reader most about the book you are writing, not the best-written one.
- One object instead of a room. Find a passage that establishes a room in more than six details. Replace it with one object in that room, described by its state and by the person who maintains it, if anyone, at the same length or less.
- The outside audit. Mark each detail in one paragraph with the domains it serves (plot, character, world, theme, texture, time), then give an unmarked copy to a reader and ask her to do the same. The details you credited with domains she did not find are the ones to revise.
- The negative detail. Describe a place in your novel only by what is missing from it, stopped in it or not done in it, in no more than eighty words. Then decide which one of those absences belongs in the finished passage.
- Plant and return. Choose an object that will matter at the end of your book. Write its three appearances in advance as three sentences: an unemphatic first appearance, a changed second, and a final appearance that is most changed and least explained. Check that the first could pass for world detail.
See also: the Reference checklist; the Reference studio work, with further exercises, seminar questions and an assessment rubric.