Chapter 1: How to Hook Your Reader
- Do we know whose story it is?
- Is something happening, beginning on the first page?
- Is there conflict in what’s happening?
- Is something at stake on the first page?
- Is there a sense of “all is not as it seems”?
- Can we glimpse enough of the “big picture” to have that all-important yardstick?
Chapter 2: How to Zero In on Your Point
- Do you know what the point of your story is?
- Do you know what your story says about human nature?
- Do the protagonist’s inner issue, the theme, and the plot work together to answer the story’s question?
- Do the plot and theme stick to the story question?
- Can you sum up what your story is about in a short paragraph?
Chapter 3: I’ll Feel What He’s Feeling
- Does your protagonist react to everything that happens and in a way that your reader will instantly understand?
- If you’re writing in the first person, is everything filtered through the narrator’s point of view?
- Have you left editorializing to the op-ed department?
- Do you use body language to tell us things we don’t already know?
Chapter 4: What Does Your Protagonist Really Want?
- Do you know what your protagonist wants?
- Do you know why your protagonist wants what he wants?
- Do you know what your protagonist’s external goal is?
- Do you know what your protagonist’s internal goal is?
- Does your protagonist’s goal force her to face a specific long-standing problem or fear?
Chapter 5: Digging Up Your Protagonist’s Inner Issue
- Do you know why your story begins when it does?
- Have you uncovered the roots of your protagonist’s specific fears and desires? Do you know what her inner issue is?
- Have you made your characters reveal their deepest, darkest secrets to you?
- When writing character bios, are you being specific enough?
- Do you know where your story is going?
Chapter 6: The Story Is In The Specifics
- Have you translated every “generic” into a “specific”?
- Have the specifics gone missing in any of the usual places?
- Can your reader see what, specifically, your metaphors correlate to in the “real world,” grasp their meaning and picture them, when reading at a clip?
- Do all the sensory details have an actual story reason to be there?
Chapter 7: Courting Conflict, the Agent of Change
- Have you made sure that the basis of future conflict is sprouting, beginning on page one?
- Have you established the “versus” so that the reader is aware of the specific rock and hard place the protagonist is wedged between?
- Does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change?
- Have you made sure that the story gains something by withholding specific facts for a big reveal later?
- Once the reveal is known, will everything that happened up to that point still make sense in light of this new information?
Chapter 8: Cause and Effect
- Does your story follow a cause-and-effect trajectory beginning on page one, so that each scene is triggered by the one that preceded it?
- Does everything in your story’s cause-and-effect trajectory revolve around the protagonist’s quest (the story question)?
- Are your story’s external events (the plot) spurred by the protagonist’s evolving internal cause-and-effect trajectory?
- When your protagonist makes a decision, is it always clear how she arrived at it, especially when she’s changing her mind about something?
- Does each scene follow the action, reaction, decision pattern?
- Can you answer the “And so?” to everything in the story?
Chapter 9: What Can Go Wrong, Must Go Wrong - And Then Some
- Has everything that can go wrong indeed gone wrong?
- Have you exposed your protagonist’s deepest secrets and most guarded flaws?
- Does your protagonist earn everything she gets, and pay for everything she loses?
- Does everything your protagonist does to make the situation better actually make it worse?
- Is the force of opposition personified, present, and active?
Chapter 10: The Road From Setup to Payoff
- Are there any inadvertent setups lurking in your story?
- Is there a clear series of events - a pattern - that begins with the setup and culminates in the payoff?
- Do the “dots” build?
- Is the payoff of each of your setups logistically possible?
Chapter 11: Meanwhile, Back at The Ranch
- Do all your subplots affect the protagonist, either externally or internally, as he struggles with the story question?
- When you leap into a subplot or flashback, can the reader sense why it was necessary at that very moment?
- When returning to the main storyline, will your reader see things with new eyes from that moment on?
- When the protagonist does something out of character, has it been foreshadowed?
- Have you given your reader enough information to understand what’s happening, so that nothing a character does or says leaves her wondering whether she missed something?