By holding back essential information, we arouse the reader’s curiosity and keep them reading; this is the function of plot.

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

Narrative voice is a subtle thing. You have to decide what voice fits your task.

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

The third-person narrator benefits from different POVs but can portray only one of these at a time, and there is the further limit that this dispassionate POV cannot, most of the time, delve too deeply into any one character’s inner workings.

If your audience believes in the daily humdrum physical and emotional experiences of your characters, then your readers will believe in those characters’ reality and thus can be taken further.

A character is made up of many attributes: the way he talks; her age and education; his level of cleanliness; his bravery or cowardice; their love of life or sex or food.

Discovering knowledge from your well of unconscious information looks sloppy, but we must always remember that there are no straight lines in the chaos of our hidden minds.

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.