11. Revision Checklist

Run a draft opening against this list before deciding it is doing its job. Each item corresponds to a test in §7 or a pattern in §8.

Contracts

• I can point to the exact words where each contract — voice, genre, character, world, stakes, form — is opened, within the first two pages.
• Any contract deliberately deferred is a choice I can defend, and is covered by a surplus elsewhere.
• What the opening promises in tone, scale and pace is what pages 30–40 deliver.

Scene and momentum

• I can complete: “In these pages, ___ is trying to , and is in the way.”
• Something changes, or someone wants something, within the first page.
• The opening answers “why now” — there is a hairline crack, however small.

Voice

• This paragraph could not be moved into another book without anyone noticing.
• The narrative distance is fixed and consistent, and I know where on the scale it sits.
• The reader knows whether to read this narrator at face value.

Selection and density

• Several details carry more than one function; the page is selected, not merely compressed.
• Some sentences are doing only one thing, so that the load-bearing ones can be felt.
• Read aloud, no paragraph strains the breath or the comprehension.

Promises

• Every detail in a privileged position is one I am willing to be held to.
• No more than two characters are named.
• Nothing is withheld coyly; where information is held back, the gap is in the character, not in me.

Frame and form

• Speech and action are anchored to a body, a place and a time within the first three exchanges.
• If the book uses multiple viewpoints, apparatus or a non-linear structure, the reader learns this in the first chapter.
• The opening makes sense to someone who has not read the title, the cover or the jacket copy.

Deletion

• I have tried deleting the first three paragraphs and the opening did not improve.