7 litmus tests to make your manuscript 20x stronger

Make a list, check it twice

Good morning, my author friends! Is everyone hanging in there? Since I’m always letting my radical candor hang out, I’ll be honest: With my new book, The Last Ferry Out, coming out in less than a month, I’m terrified no one will buy it amid the chaos and, you know…my career will be over. But as I’m always telling y’all, the only thing I can do is keep writing, so with that in mind, I’m soldiering on.

I recently turned in a screenplay, my first, and the process of writing it taught me so much about storytelling. Scripts are pared-down and spare, and putting one together feels, as one friend put it, more like playing with Legos than sculpting with clay. The rules of storytelling are condensed in a screenplay, compressed like a diamond, which made it easy to go scene-by-scene with a checklist, in a way I don’t with a 100,000-word manuscript.

Does every scene “work”? Does it work hard?

Do checkcircles feel less aggressive than checkboxes? (Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya)

By the time I submitted my revision, I’d picked up many tools I’ll apply to fiction-writing, too. Here are seven specific, clear-cut, and simple (though not easy!) questions you can ask yourself while writing or looking back over your novel.