Five Minutes to Success: Master the Craft of Writing

It doesn’t matter. Whether you labor over every semicolon now, slowing down the creative flow of the story and miring yourself in minutiae, or whether you just barf it onto the page and fix it later, I will never know. As long as you edit properly, it doesn’t matter one bit how awful your first draft was.

The rule of good writing is to never tell the reader anything they don't need to know until the moment they need to know it.

In skilled hands, a novel can have more than one narrator (for example, in a story with two main characters, one could be the first-person narrator and the other could be seen in third person limited), but this can get tricky. If this is your first novel, you might be better off choosing one and sticking with it.

The second procrastination demon that I find rears its ugly head often is believing “I will get to writing today after I finish the list of A, B, and C things.” If today is a Writing Day, then writing should be A on your list.

Pacing (how fast or slow the story is revealed) requires a bit of mastery to avoid the midbook drag. It keeps the reader turning pages using rhythm, sense of time, and word choice. It requires deciding where plot points have to occur and what leads up to the next major conflict.

It’s more effective to show your main characters in action making decisions based on their goals and motivations. Never tell your readers what they need to know until they need to know it.

You really think you’re going to get anything of quality written after the kids come home from school? No. I have four little kids, and trust me, my writing ends when that bus arrives. But guess what, if today was supposed to be a writing day, then make tomorrow the day to do laundry, vacuum, and get your oil changed. Those household tasks aren’t g

Sidekicks have a critical role: they get your MC out of their head and give them someone to talk to so that they can explain choices and issues. Your MC will spend enough time alone, thinking, but for variety, you need the sidekicks in their life. These are the people who know the MC intimately enough to let them know when they’re making a mistake

Those things make your character three dimensional and realistic.