This Year You Write Your Novel

The awareness of details comes into the novel via the experiences and emotional responses of your characters. Using this as your rule of thumb, you can cut out most extraneous facets in any scene.

The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character.

In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.

Details are endless, and they will overwhelm your story unless you master them. Even the most interesting acts cannot bear the weight of too much detail.

Of course you will have to have many simple informative sentences about the characters’ feelings throughout the text, but you must question every time you use flat descriptive language to describe an emotion, impression, or realization.

The accomplished writer achieves this level of realism by using language that is active and metaphorical, economically emotional yet also pedestrian.

Now read your book from first page to last. If you find that you must make pencil markings, correct spelling, add missing words, retool sentences. . . be my guest.

The third-person narrator is the voice in which we naturally tell stories about things that happened to people other than ourselves.

All novels have similar elements. They have a beginning, middle, and end. They have characters who change and a story that engages; they have a plot that pushes the story forward and a sound that insinuates a world.