9. Checklist and Exercises

Revision checklist

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?

Exercises for your own draft

1. The heading test. Write an eighteenth-century heading for every chapter of the draft: In which Elena obtains a key and no explanation. Chapters that resist the formula have no proposition.
2. The stopped reader. Finish a chapter, close the file and do something else for ten minutes; then, without looking, write what happened, what is unresolved, what you want next and how you feel. Do it for five chapters and compare the answers.
3. Three breaks. Take the chapter whose ending you like least and, without changing a sentence, make three versions by moving the break one beat earlier and one later. Judge only when all three exist.
4. The chapter-length audit. Make a table of chapter number, word count, ending type in one word, and price (free, moderate or expensive), and read it without the manuscript. Lengths within fifteen per cent of one another throughout mean a habit; a price column with no free entries means fatigue is certain; one with no expensive entries means the book has no structural pull. The audit takes about twenty minutes.
5. Six endings. Give one chapter six final paragraphs, one for each type, and write a paragraph on what each does to the chapter before it and the chapter after.

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