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.

Picture the third-person narrator as a small, emotionless, but intelligent creature sitting on the shoulder of the character who is experiencing the story.

Although there might be thousands of subtle differences in the narratives of the novels you’ve read, there are only three types that you need to be aware of. Actually there are four, but the last one is a voice you should never use: your own.

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.

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.

Poetry is the fount of all writing. Without a deep understanding of poetry and its practices, any power the writer might have is greatly diminished.

A novel is both a larger story and an accumulation of many smaller stories,

A character talking is an action too.

Emotions inform our responses to the physical world, and our language reflects those responses: