This Year You Write Your Novel

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.

Most writers are not entirely intuitive or structured. Most of us have parts of both in our approach to fiction.

It is possible to use only one POV to tell your story. Why, you ask, would I use the third-person narrative for only one voice? Why wouldn’t I just use the first-person narrative instead? There might be many valid reasons for this decision.

The structured writer may break down the whole novel into brief numbered descriptions of each story, chapter, or section.

The metaphor is the strongest imagistic intimation in the writer’s bag of tricks.

If you can include the physical reactions to the emotional situations that your characters find themselves in, you will be bringing your readers closer to the experience of the novel.

A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints.

This form of narration can utilize the POVs of one, two, three, or more characters, but there has to be a reason for each narrative to exist.

First- and third-person narrative voices bring with them limitations on what the characters in the novel can say and know.

As in life, your characters develop mainly because of their dealings with one another. The complex and dynamic interplay of relationships throughout the course of the novel is what makes change possible.