Revision checklist
Use the checklist on one cutaway at a time, after reading the page before it, the cutaway and the page after. Each item is a question to answer in a sentence.
The decision
- What present question was open when the narrative left, and how hard was the reader pressing on it?
- Had the book already made the reader want this past, or does the cutaway arrive unasked?
- Would it cost less, and recolour more, thirty pages earlier or later?
The register
- Written out as one sentence and read in place, does the cutaway lose anything the later pages need?
- Has the material been tried as a clause, and as an iterative sentence, before being given a scene?
- If it is a scene, does someone in it want something, meet resistance and end changed?
The crossing
- What in the present triggers the departure, and is the narration close enough to need one?
- Which of the four changes has the present undergone by the return: knowledge, understanding, question or action?
- Is there a sentence stating the cutaway’s significance that could be deleted?
The manuscript
- On one sheet, what are the reach, extent, register and domains of every cutaway, and what pattern do they make?
- How much of the book is in the past, and does its declared structure say so?
- If there is a second timeline, is it declared by its second or third instance, and does each strand progress?
Exercises for your own draft
- The cutaway audit. List every cutaway in the manuscript in order, with its page, reach, extent, register, domains served and the present question open when it began, writing none where there was none. Do not assess any single entry; read the sheet. Most entries serving one domain means the book is using cutaways to deliver information; many entries reading none means they arrive on the writer’s schedule; a cluster in the first quarter means the past is being spent before the reader wants it. The cutaway audit takes about an hour.
- One sentence. Take the flashback you are least sure of, write its one-sentence compression, and paste the sentence into the manuscript in its place. Read on for two pages, leave it a day, and read again before deciding.
- Four registers. Rewrite one failing cutaway as a clause of implication, an iterative sentence and something a character says aloud to another character, and judge only when all four versions exist.
- Three placements. For one dramatised cutaway, name three other places it could go. For each, write the present question it would interrupt there and the detail it would recolour that it cannot recolour now.
- The return sentence. For five cutaways, cover the cutaway and read the sentence before it against the sentence after. Where they read continuously, rewrite the sentence after so that the character comes back with a question she did not have.