Details will devour your story unless you find the words that want saying.

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 first-person narrative can know only what the speaker knows. This tale is limited by the mind and senses, the situation and sophistication, the gender and education, of the narrator.

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.

The omniscient narrator is the most powerful and most difficult narrative form. The omniscient narrator knows all.

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.

Most of the details are pedestrian. Why, you might ask, would we want to make the experiences of our character ordinary? Because everyday experiences help the reader relate to the character, which sets up the reader’s acceptance of more extraordinary events that may unfold.

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

The first-person narrator is the doorway through which all the information of this story will pass; therefore the sense the reader has of this character must never be challenged.