11. Revision Checklist

Run each cutaway against this list before deciding it stays as written. Each item derives from a test in §7 or a pattern in §8.

Before you begin

• I know whether my present timeline carries this book’s engine, or whether the past does — and I have applied the protocol accordingly (§7.0).

The decision to leave

• I can name, in a sentence, the present-tense question the reader was holding when this cutaway began.
• I can name the concrete trigger — object, sensation, phrase, question, place, silence, date, document, resemblance — or I can say why this narration does not need one.
• I have asked whether this cutaway would cost less, or pay more, thirty pages later or earlier.
• The cutaway does not land at the story’s single most costly present-tense moment unless the payoff matches, and unless the interruption is measured in sentences.

The register

• I have written out the one-sentence compressed version and read it in place.
• The material survives that check as a flashback rather than as backstory — or it has been demoted, or cut.
• If it is a flashback, the past scene has a want, a resistance and a change, as any scene must.
• I have attempted this material in at least one other register from §6.4, including one shorter than the version I have kept.
• Backstory delivered as summary is a fact to know, not a moment that needed to be felt.

Reach, extent and type

• I know how far back this goes and how much time it covers, and the two are proportionate to what it delivers.
• If the reach is long and the extent short, I have asked whether a nearer memory would make the same point.
• I know whether this analepsis is completing or repeating; if repeating, I can name in one sentence what this pass adds.
• If the same past period is visited more than twice, the visits converge on something rather than circling it.

The return

• The present is changed on return — in knowledge, understanding, question or action — and I can say which.
• The return sentence performs that change rather than merely re-anchoring the reader.
• Covered up, the sentence before the cutaway and the sentence after it do not read continuously.
• I have not added the sentence that explains what the cutaway meant.

Across the manuscript

• I have made the audit sheet (§5.5) and read it as a whole rather than cutaway by cutaway.
• The manuscript does not deliver its past in a single register.
• The reach column is not uniform; the book’s past is not all in one era by default.
• I know what proportion of the book is past material, and the book’s declared structure acknowledges it.
• No cutaway repeats what the reader could already infer without gaining something by the repetition.
• No dramatised past scene is more vivid than the present timeline it serves — unless that disproportion is the book’s argument.
• Nothing is marked as past by typography alone.