11. Revision Checklist

Run each scene in a draft against this list before deciding it stays as written. Each item corresponds to a test in §7 or a pattern in §8.

Engine

• I can state in one sentence what the viewpoint character wants in this scene, right now.
• Something is in the way, and getting past it costs something I can name.

Change

• I can write the two parallel sentences: what was true at the start, what is no longer true at the end.
• This is not a shift the reader has already been given elsewhere.

Domains

• I can name which domains — plot, character, theme, texture, relational — the scene actively serves, and annotate each with the specific change.
• The scene serves at least two, or I have a specific reason it needs only one.

Mode

• I have asked whether this material should be a scene at all, and tried it in at least one other mode (§6.4).
• Habitual material is told iteratively rather than dramatised as a single day.

Execution

• The scene begins at the first moment the want is in operation.
• It ends on the last moment the value moves, not on its explanation.

Book scale

• Removing this scene would cost the reader something identifiable, and would leave a later scene unearned.
• The scene is in the register — action or reflection — that this point in the book requires.