So, we have a treatment for our novel - a one-page-per-chapter breakdown - and an act structure, synopsis and logline. Now comes the part where we start looking at all these things, deciding what isn't working and - more importantly - why.

Note that there's no mention of how to fix things yet. Hold off on that until you've found all the structural things that you think need fixing, otherwise you'll constantly be rebalancing your fixes and your original work while you find new problems. So - for now, we're just isolating the cracks in the plot.

It starts out with pulling together a lot of the things we've just been creating:

• Make graphs out of those rating systems so you can see the rise and fall (and progressive build, if you used a cumulative system like I suggested) of themes, character arcs, tension, interest and anything else it occured to you to write.
• Create a table (or another format, if it makes more sense for you) of plot and character information across each chapter so you can easily access one 'strand' of a story at a time. (This is why excel spreadsheets are awesome - you can code it to pull all those together for you).
• Take your logline, print it out, and tape it to the wall or somewhere easily accessable. This is now the Divine Commandment of your novel; everything must bow to it. 

Now, where you start is up to you. Personally, I'd recommend character motivations and arcs as a good place, because if your characters aren't convincing, not much else in your novel will be. But if you're writing a horror or mystery, the control of the plot and information might be far more important. 

It's much the same process (and regardless of which order you work, you should make sure you do them both.). Start with the first page of the treatment and look for chapters, scenes or sections where:

•  the chapter isn't supporting the logline - remember, the logline is the key of the novel, everything must build to that in some way (though not always in a direct way, and sometimes by providing a 'counterpoint' - that is, a contradiction to it)
• the plot or whatever's happening just doesn't make sense, is unconvincing or cliched
•  the character's development stagnates, moves sideways, or goes backwards
• the character's motivation is forced or unconvincing, or insufficient for their actions
• the character is being reactive rather than proactive (this is alright for a scene or two, maybe, but if it's a whole chapter, you're in trouble. Anne Mini has an excellent series of posts about this on Author! Author!)

This is threatening to turn into a list of 'What You Can Do Wrong With Your Novel", which couldn't be covered in a whole book, and would prove monumentally tedious. This is something that, unfortunately, you rather have to learn as you go, and it helps enormously to have a second pair of eyes on not only the manuscript, but your treatment (it's often easier for untrained eyes to pull out problems from a treatment, where they don't have the momentum of prose concealing problems).

In short, you want to look for places that the novel is either contradicting itself (as in, it's not supporting its own storyline - the logline), sagging, cutting corners or just plain not making sense. Be ruthless. If you feel something is the slightest bit dodgy, mark it with a pen, even if you're not sure why it's dodgy. You can come back to it later when you've worked it out.

Important note - we're completely ignoring pacing, here, and anything other than plot and character connections. While it's a good idea to mark bits that are unnecessary to the plot, don't worry about whether something is dramatic enough, or whether too many things are happening at once - that's later. What you want to get sorted out right now is what is happening and why. There's no point working on when and how fast until you have all the what and why nailed.

When you start finding issues, you'll need to note them down in a way that'll make it easier for you to see what's going on - or rather, what's going wrong. It depends how you work: I like to set up a table, with rows per chapter, and columns for each character, theme, the general or overall plot, adherence to the logline and anything else I want to look at. I'm a very visual person, as you might have guessed with all the tables and charts and whatnot. But as I've said before - what you record and analyse is wholly personal, and should be based on your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and the book in question. You might find mindmaps, lists, or summaries are more your style. Just remember to leave some room for the pacing, themes, drama, tension, etc that we'll be doing next - it's much better to have everything together.

And remember - we don't need solutions just yet. We just want to find the problems and - if possible - work out why they're there. If you can't - if all you're getting is that this bit isn't quite right - don't worry. For one thing, you don't have the whole picture; it might be an issue of pacing, or that you have a big dramatic scene over something not all that important, and we'll discover that next time; for another, it often takes an outsider or a week's worth of subconscious mulling to see what's really wrong.

This whole process takes practise, like all aspects of writing.

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