Revision checklist
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?
Exercises for your own draft
- The transition inventory. List every join in the manuscript: each blank line, chapter break and part break. For each record the technique, the dimensions changed, the word position of the anchor, the size and kind of the ellipsis, and whether the join does a second job. Record first and read afterwards. One technique in more than two out of every three rows is the metronome; anchors routinely beyond thirty words mean the reader is repairing frames throughout the book; no second jobs anywhere means inert connective tissue, and second jobs everywhere means significance fatigue.
- The cold read. Give a reader five joins with the preceding scene covered, and ask her to mark the word at which she knew where she was. Compare her marks with yours.
- Delete downward. Take the three slowest scene openings and delete from the gap one sentence at a time until something is lost. Note what the lost sentence was doing that the earlier ones were not.
- Three anchors. Rewrite the first two sentences of one weak join three times, each with a different anchor type, and judge only when all three exist.
- Aim the departure. For the join that has resisted most rewrites at its arrival, rewrite only the launching line, then delete whatever after the gap it has made unnecessary.
See also: the Reference checklist; the Reference studio work, with further exercises, seminar questions and an assessment rubric.