I'm about to embark on my rewrite from scratch of my WIP and this time, I've decided to do a running edit, rather than just blam through and do a shitty first draft (which is what I did the first time). So I'm going to try writing a scene or so and start off the next day with a quick polish of it, before moving on to writing the next bit of new material.

I've been trying to come up with a checklist of things to make sure I think about for each scene - such as that I've established POV, am thinking about all the senses, etc.

When I started writing the checklist, I decided to make two lists: one for things to think about when creating the scene, such as making sure I can imagine it vividly, physically acting out the scene for each of the main characters to capture gestures, considering how to pile more pressure on my characters, thinking up telling detail and so on - the creative stuff - and the (sort of) destructive, critical, nitpicky things I'd want to think about in "edit mode", such as checking I haven't used the same unusual word twice, that the sentences vary in length, etc.

Now I'm writing the lists, they seem very front-loaded on the creative, pre-writing bit and there's next to nothing on the nitpicky bit.

Does anyone else use a similar method? Is there a good nitpicking checklist somewhere? I had a good one marked in a book and I'm going through my shelves now and can't find it.

I would strongly recommend the chapter 'Triage: A Better Way of Revising Fiction' from Sol Stein's 'Solutions for Writers'. It is actually a summary of the whole book and deals most effectively with the two sides of the process that you have mentioned: the fundamentals and the detail. Obviously, reading the whole book is the best bet but, if you're looking for a check-list, this chapter does the job admirably (but not in the form of bullet-points). I found it extremely helpful.

Don't really have a checklist, although very often indeed, I'll pick up on something that's missing, and realise that other scenes need the same treatment.

Thanks, Chris - I've got Sol Stein's book and even though I read that chapter at the beginning of the year I'd completely forgotten about it.

I've read loads of good chapters on various things in lots of different books on writing now and always think that I'll remember which book had the good chapter on dialogue, which the good chapter on editing and so on, and I never do. Must start making another list!