A writer’s checklist

Recently, I picked up a copy of Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, which makes the case that in fields involving many routine but complicated steps—aviation, surgery—error rates can be reduced and efficiency increased by means of a simple checklist. His argument is compelling: as the complexity of a procedure rises, we’re more likely to overlook the things we know by heart, which includes fiction as much as anything else. Since I’m currently working on a difficult rewrite, I thought it might be useful to put together a checklist of the principles I try to follow when revising a story, and particularly in cutting it, ticking off boxes as I looked over each chapter in turn. Here’s the checklist I’ve been using this week:

1. Eliminate redundancies. In a rough draft, you’ll often find that you’ve got two beats in a spot where one will do. This is often because you’ve spent the first pass feeling your way into a story, trying one thing and then another, repeating lines of dialogue or moments of introspection to hit upon just the right combination of words. Usually, one of these efforts will stand out as stronger than the rest. Cutting the vestigial attempts that survived into the current manuscript and keeping just the one essential beat you need to convey the idea will save valuable space, and the result will be more powerful by virtue of being more focused. (For a movie that occasionally keeps three moments when might have been more effective, see The Wolf of Wall Street.)

2. Cut the first and last paragraphs of every chapter. This is the Rambo rule that I’ve discussed here more than once, since I first encountered it in a book on writing by First Blood author David Morrell. In your first draft, you’ll often spend a lot of time ramping into a scene and then easing out of it again, and the middle section is what you want to preserve. Along with being aware of this in theory, I’ve found that it helps to actually cut the first and last paragraphs on the screen, even if you’re pretty sure that you’ll need them. If you decide to preserve them after all, it’s easy to click “Undo,” but sometimes you’ll find—when you see it in black and white—that the result works just fine on its own.

3. Open in medias res. Much of the ramping up I’ve mentioned above consists of setting the scene: if the characters wander into a park or museum, you naturally want to spend a paragraph on their surroundings. This kind of description has its place, but it rarely belongs at the beginning of a chapter, which ought to be concerned with the who rather than the where. On television, you’ll often see a device in which the first image after the commercial break is of a closeup of a character, pulling back only later to an establishing shot, and it’s a trick worth imitating. Open on dialogue and action, and once the scene is moving, you can insert some descriptive or transitional material to indicate where we are and how we got here.

4. Overlap elements of the narrative. My favorite example here is Exley’s wristwatch in the film version of L.A. Confidential, which cleverly combines three small character beats into a single scene by starting each one slightly before the previous one has finished. This has the effect of stitching together the components more tightly, and it also saves time. Most chapters in a novel can be reduced to a list of moments that occur in succession, and it’s helpful to look for places where the action can be compressed by placing the start of one moment slightly before the end of the one before.

5. Cut all transitional material. Like Kurosawa, I’m well aware that many books and movies spend all too much time getting characters into and out of rooms, walking from place to place, and generally moving from one location in the story to the next. Even with that knowledge, though, I find that my first drafts still include countless paragraphs about characters in elevators, cars, and doorways. Nearly all of this can be cut, and even if there’s material here that you want to preserve, you’ll find that it often sits more comfortably in the heart of the scene itself, once the characters have arrived at wherever it is they’re going.

6. Parcel out information. In his useful book The Eye is Quicker, which provided my quote of the day, the film editor and teacher Richard D. Pepperman points out that information in a movie can be delivered in three different ways: to the audience first, to the character first, or to the audience and character simultaneously. The first is good for suspense, the second for anticipation, the last for surprise, and each one has its merits. Novels, too, spend a lot of time delivering information to the reader, and it’s worth reviewing the units of each scene—plot points, character moments—to see if they can be delayed or telegraphed.

7. Look for asymmetry. When you’re writing a scene for the first time, it’s easy to be seduced by symmetrical structures: it’s nice to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and that little tripod can be invaluable when it comes to roughing out the events. From the reader’s perspective, however, it’s sometimes best to upset the balance: an individual scene can be mostly buildup, mostly climax, or mostly denouement, and that variation in rhythm lends interest to the narrative as a whole. If a chapter reads too neatly in itself, it won’t mesh well with its neighbors, so it helps to look for cuts that nudge it in one direction or the other.

Does a writer need a coach?

The physician and journalist Atul Gawande has a nice piece in this week’s New Yorker about coaching—what it is, why it works, and whether it’s useful in fields aside from professional sports. He concludes that, yes, it can be helpful even for those operating at a high level of expertise to get guidance from another expert, with the aim of sustaining and improving performance over time. Gawande draws on examples from a wide range of professions, including teaching, music (with some thoughts on the subject from Itzhak Perlman), and his own field, surgery, where he says that a single session with his chosen coach, a retired general surgeon, “gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.”

He also talks briefly about writing, a field in which most professional practitioners work constantly with coaches, of sorts, in the forms of editors and agents. Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Scribner’s, served as a coach for such authors as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, while in science fiction, John W. Campbell played an important coaching role for Isaac Asimov. The agent Scott Meredith performed a similar function for many of his clients. And many writers have had less formal, but equally important, mentors throughout their careers: Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And like coaches in other professions, their function is less to teach the basics of the craft than to shape and guide the work of others once a certain level of expertise has been reached.

I’ve certainly benefited from coaches of all kinds. I’ve had two literary agents, and while my first such partnership didn’t end particularly well, the process of taking a huge novel and stripping it down to its constituent parts was one of the most valuable, if painful, educations I’ve ever received. My current agent also put me through the paces for the early drafts of The Icon Thief, which was taken apart and reassembled in ways that allowed me to write the sequel, City of Exiles, in record time. I’ve also learned a lot from my editor, and from the many readers, formal and informal, who have offered me advice over the years. Some, like Stanley Schmidt at Analog, have done so in a professional capacity, while others have simply served as what Gawande calls “outside ears,” giving me valuable perspectives on work that I can no longer evaluate on my own.

Even relatively experienced authors, then, are constantly being coached, which may be why the best writers continue to make progress well into their forties and fifties, after professionals in most other fields have begun to peak. The hard part, it seems, isn’t so much finding a coach as knowing which ones to trust, and listening to tough advice even after you’ve grown confident in your own abilities. I’ve always said that if there’s one thing I know about writing, it’s structure—which didn’t prevent my first novel from being radically restructured, to its great benefit, on its way to publication. Writing is such a weird, absurd profession that you take help whenever you can get it. As Ed Macauley said, in reference to a different kind of game: “When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win.”