This Year You Write Your Novel

descriptions and condensation Any simple act or situation in life is comprised of hundreds of actions and circumstances.

In your meticulous rewrite, one problem you will be looking for is flatness in the prose.

One final note about dialogue: a novel is not a play. Don’t house your entire story in conversations. Don’t try to contain the whole plot in dialogue. As with metaphor, overuse of dialogue can bewilder and distance your reader from the experience of the 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.

There are many different ways to get people to speak in novels. They can have conversations, write and read letters, and leave messages on answering machines; someone can tell one person something that someone else has said; one character can overhear someone else’s conversation.

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.

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.

It’s always best to give the reader one emotional state at a time to deal with.

My only ritual for writing is that I do it every morning. I wake up and get to work.

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