9. Checklist and Exercises

Revision checklist

Is it a plot at all?

• Can I state the thread’s goal, conflict and consequence in three sentences without mentioning the protagonist’s goal?
• Does it have at least two branching points, moments at which it could have gone another way?
• If it is a recurring character rather than a chain, have I said so and sized it accordingly?

What it supplies

• Can I name its domains, and does at least one supply what the main plot cannot by its nature?
• If it supplies only relief, have I looked for the second job it could do in the pages it already occupies?
• Can I complete the sentence because this thread exists, the reader understands that the main plot’s situation is qualified in this way, and name the two scenes between which that understanding is produced?

Convergence

• At what point would deleting the thread break the main plot’s logic rather than thin it?
• Is the convergence a consequence, and not a coincidence or a meeting?
• Was the object or fact that converges the threads planted before the reader knew to look at it?

Proportion and rhythm

• Have I counted every thread’s page-share, and does the distribution match the book I think I have written?
• What is each thread’s longest gap, and is the thread left mid-question when it is suspended?
• Does a thread that converges at the climax appear in the quarter of the book before it?
• Do the crossings fall where the material needs them, and not where a rotation demands them?

Rank

• Have I asked the promotion question, and recorded the answer rather than defended the plan?
• If the book has three or more co-equal chains, does it declare that early and let the relations carry its argument?

Exercises

1. The audit. For a finished draft, list every thread, including those you have not thought of as threads, with its goal, obstacle and consequence in a sentence each, and put any that lack one of the three on a separate list headed presence, not plot. For each thread record its page-share, its domains, its convergence point and its longest gap. Then look for a thread with one domain and more than 8 per cent of the book, a thread with no convergence point, and two threads serving the same domains.
2. The engine conversion. Take a recurring character who has no chain and give that character a goal with an object and a deadline, one obstacle and one reversal, using only scenes that already exist. Note how much new material the conversion cost.
3. The chart. Draw the book on one page, a row per chapter and a column per thread, with a mark wherever a thread is active. Redraw it as an alternating braid and then as blocks, and note what each arrangement does to the convergence.
4. The removal. Delete a thread on the chart, not in the prose, and write one sentence naming what is lost in the terms of the domains. Then ask whether a single scene elsewhere could supply it.
5. The clock. Find the subplot’s deadline, or give it one, and write the scene in which that deadline first changes what a main-plot character can do before she knows the deadline exists.

See also: the Reference checklist, with items on removal and hierarchy; the Reference studio work, with seminar questions.