11. Revision Checklist

Run each viewpoint character, and each individual grant, against this list before deciding the architecture stays as written. Each item corresponds to a test in §7 or a pattern in §8.

The architecture

• I can name this book’s viewpoint architecture from §6.3, and it is the one I intended.
• I have written two hundred words on what the book would gain and lose in the two neighbouring architectures.
• The number of vantages is proportionate to the page count available to develop each.
• The book’s viewpoint pattern is declared before the reader has invested deeply in a single thread.

Each grant

• I can state what this vantage provides that no existing vantage could deliver.
• I can name at least two domains it serves, and at least one of them is not access.
• I have named the cheaper instruments I rejected — report, inference, reassignment, document, ellipsis — and why.
• This character had a legible want, on the page, before the grant was made.
• I can state where the grant begins, how much of the book it holds, and whether it ends.
• I can defend, for each vantage, why the book needs their perception and not merely their information.

Distinguishability

• Two hundred words swapped between any two vantages would not survive the transplant.
• The vantages differ in what they notice, not only in what happens to them.
• The vantages differ in what they are willing to appraise, and in the words they use to appraise it.
• The vantages differ in what they call people, places and acts.
• Each vantage has a knowledge boundary I could state in one sentence.

Proportion and rhythm

• I have run a page-share audit and the distribution is the one the book’s argument requires.
• No vantage disappears for a stretch long enough that the reader re-enters as if to a stranger.
• The interval between returns varies with each thread’s state rather than by rule.
• Where I cut away at a tense moment, the destination is a vantage the reader is glad to reach.

Execution

• No scene changes whose head we are in unless the book’s architecture has established that right and exercises it consistently.
• No vantage reports what it could not know, except where a frame or a retrospective position licenses it.
• No vantage persists past the ontological boundary the book has set, unless the crossing is a declared premise.
• No vantage exists chiefly to be extinguished.

Consequence

• I have listed every named character with no vantage, and can say why each is outside.
• No character has been reduced to a repeated identifying tag that I mistook for characterisation.
• I know what argument my distribution of interiority makes, and it is the argument I intend to make.