Questions to Ask While Revising
21 March 2016
Joanne Merriam, Upper Rubber Boot Books1
Grammar, Syntax, Usage:
- Is the grammar, punctuation, and spelling correct?
- Does wrong or non-standard syntax serve the purpose of the work?
- Does the diction [ornateness/simplicity] fit the meaning?
- Is there music? Is the music serving the work?
Serving the Reader:
- Is it true?
- Is it ethical?
- Does it go deep enough?
- Is it based on cultures I don’t belong to or don’t have a deep knowledge of? If so, have I run it past people who do belong to those cultures, and/or done extensive research to avoid misrepresentation and mistakes?
- Are there places that would be confusing to an outside reader or where I’ve assumed non-general knowledge or mind-reading?
Serving the Story:
- Is it predictable? Are there clichés in words, images, ideas, or plot? (Strange Horizons lists cliché plots: http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml; Teresa Nielsen Hayden lists dreadful phrases: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007425.html.)
- Can I strengthen the story by changing my world-building assumptions? (Charles Stross’ list: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/a-world-building-puzzler.html.)
- Are the transitions serving the work? Is every scene serving the work? Are the ideas and rhetorical gestures in the right order?
- Is it in the right voice [first person/second person/third person]?
- What does it actually say on the page (as opposed to in my mind)? Is it saying what it wants to say? Is it confused?
- Would saying less be stronger?
- Does it follow its own deepest impulses, rather than my initial idea?
- Do I know more than I did when I started writing it? Did I discover anything?
- Do characters follow their own goals and impulses, or have I forced them to act against their own character to fit the plot? Do they talk, act, and think authentically?
- Is there anything that doesn’t belong?
- Do any digressions serve the work?
- Is it self-satisfied/smug?
- Does it allow strangeness? Is the strangeness it allows accessible?
- Should it go out into the world or is it the seed for another story (or poem)?
1 Also includes questions from a talk given by poet Jane Hirshfield at Vanderbilt University, and from a workshop given by poet Sue MacLeod at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. Feel welcome to reproduce or excerpt this list, provided attribution and this notice are included.