How do you visualize this scene taking place? Are your images consistent with this vision? Do your images ask you to alter your vision?
What are the minimum number of characters necessary to make this scene work?
What is at the center of the scene—actions, ideas, interior thoughts, or something else? Are they contributing to setting, plot, characterization, or something else? How? On the basis of the answers to these questions, what should be changed, dropped or enhanced?
How does writing style contribute to the scene? Are your figures of speech relevant and coherent? Are your word choices consistent with your overall design?
Character
What expressions and word choices in a specific character's dialogue are consistent with and develop that character?
Are your characters delineated not only by how they speak, but by their characteristic actions, habits, feelings, movements, and ways of thinking? Do characters help to develop each other by offering opinions about each other, behaving in specific ways toward each other, and talking to each other in specific ways?
How does each character look?
Do you sprinkle in details about your characters, for the most part, in phrases clauses and asides rather than standing back and telling and explaining your character?
Plot
What question animates the main plot? Is it brought to a climax?
As the book unfolds, what other questions are introduced to supplement the main one? How well do they work?
Setting
What are the benefits of the book's historical setting? the drawbacks? Is it the most effective one? Are the details and scenes described consistent with that moment in history?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of the novel's physical setting?
____________________________
J.P. Hansen Editing Service
What are the minimum number of characters necessary to make this scene work?
What is at the center of the scene—actions, ideas, interior thoughts, or something else? Are they contributing to setting, plot, characterization, or something else? How? On the basis of the answers to these questions, what should be changed, dropped or enhanced?
How does writing style contribute to the scene? Are your figures of speech relevant and coherent? Are your word choices consistent with your overall design?
Character
What expressions and word choices in a specific character's dialogue are consistent with and develop that character?
Are your characters delineated not only by how they speak, but by their characteristic actions, habits, feelings, movements, and ways of thinking? Do characters help to develop each other by offering opinions about each other, behaving in specific ways toward each other, and talking to each other in specific ways?
How does each character look?
Do you sprinkle in details about your characters, for the most part, in phrases clauses and asides rather than standing back and telling and explaining your character?
Plot
What question animates the main plot? Is it brought to a climax?
As the book unfolds, what other questions are introduced to supplement the main one? How well do they work?
Setting
What are the benefits of the book's historical setting? the drawbacks? Is it the most effective one? Are the details and scenes described consistent with that moment in history?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of the novel's physical setting?
____________________________
J.P. Hansen Editing Service
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