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Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, the Acts structure (generally three, but could be strengthened by turning it into five) is a proven method to organize those plot points in a way that makes the story more cohesive, and usually building up in tension.

Once you’ve settled on an ordered list of scenes, the following questions should allow you to revise it carefully, to ensure that all the scenes have earned their stay.

• Does the story start at the last possible moment?
• Imagine your first couple of scenes being the first ten minutes of a movie. Do you think you’d sit there bored and wondering who these people are and when the hell the story is going to kick in? How would those first couple of scenes suck the reader in?
• Look at the juxtaposition between individual scenes and consider reordering.
• Can you cut any scene? If you can remove it without risking the collapse of the whole story, throw it out.
• Does everything in your story’s cause-and-effect trajectory revolve around the protagonist’s quest (the story question)? If not, try to get rid of those scenes.
• Try to combine scenes so each one is packed, but make sure each scene accomplishes essentially one action.
• Go through every plot point other than the first, and ensure that each of them escalates from at least one previous plot point.
• Go through every plot point and ensure that they have real consequences, that they make at least one other scene that follows inevitable.
• Go through every plot point and ensure that they respect the context of the act they belong to. If the plot point belongs to the traditional second act (second, third, and fourth in a five-act structure), how does the plot point belong to a series of actions in which the character confronts and resists some type of death (physical, psychological, social), against some opposing force?
• Go through every significant disaster or plot point, and consider how you’ve set things up so that something else could have happened.
• If three crises hit close together, try to merge them into a single scene of supreme crisis. That would multiply the danger those characters face.
• Is there at least one “Holy crap!” scene?
• Put a check by every one of your scenes you consider to be “good.” Don’t lie either. Be honest with yourself. Don’t consider your structure done until at least half of those scenes are top notch.
• Pinpoint all the moments that challenged your protagonist and caused him to take action.
• Can every scene challenge the protagonist’s flaw? The action should somehow serve to pose them that fundamental dramatic question, ‘who am I?’ Are they going to be the old, flawed version of themselves, or are they going to become someone new?
• How does the plot constantly force your increasingly-reluctant protagonist to change?
• Do your scenes provide enough surprises to keep things unpredictable?
• How do you make the likelihood of a negative outcome for the story believable?
• Do the crises build from meaningful but not irreversible to life changing and irreversible?
• Consider whether the ending is premature. Does the hero have his big insight early, ending his development then, and making everything else anticlimatic?
• Does the hero achieve his desire too quickly?