Can I name the book’s architecture, and does the page-share confirm it?
Is the right to move between minds inside a scene established, and exercised consistently, or never used?
Each grant
Can I name two domains for each viewpoint character, one of them not access, with a passage as evidence?
Which cheaper instruments did each grant displace, and why were they rejected?
Did the reader know what this character wanted before the first grant?
Distinguishability
Could a reader assign an unheaded paragraph to its viewpoint character?
Do the vantages differ in what they notice, appraise, cannot know and call things, and not only in voice?
Timing
Is the book’s plurality declared before the reader’s first deep investment?
Is every grant after the opening movement bounded, or paid for by a payoff no report could deliver?
Does any vantage stop without the reader knowing it has stopped?
Those outside
For each named character without a viewpoint, who explains her motives, and does she have a repeated tag instead of a mind?
What would a reader conclude the book believes from the shape of the allocation alone?
Exercises
The page-share audit. List every viewpoint character with her word count as a percentage of the book, her number of sections, the page of her first and last section, and her longest gap. Draw the sections in book order as a strip of initials, so the pattern shows as a shape, and write beside each name the domains her grant serves. Then repeat the exercise for the named characters with no viewpoint, recording their scenes, who explains them, and their tags.
The two sentences. For each viewpoint character, complete This vantage gives the reader … that no existing vantage could deliver and The cheaper instruments I rejected are …, and I rejected them because …. Any character for whom the second sentence will not complete is a candidate for conversion.
The swap. Take two hundred words from each of two viewpoint characters, exchange them with only the names changed, and give both to a reader who knows the book. Where the passages survive, rewrite one of them at the four cheap places: what she notices, what she appraises, what she cannot know, what she calls things.
The substitution. Name your architecture and its two neighbours, write two hundred words on what the book would gain and lose in each, and rewrite one chapter in the stronger.
The bounded chapter. Choose the character whose silence your book depends on, and write the one chapter that would grant her a viewpoint, at the point of greatest prior curiosity. Then decide, in a sentence, whether the book keeps it, and what the decision says about whose experience the book treats as fully real.