This Year You Write Your Novel

Of all writing, the discipline in poetry is the most demanding. You have to learn how to distill what you mean into the most economic and at the same time the most elegant and accurate language.

Overuse of metaphorical language will test a novel’s credibility.

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 draft of the novel may have been written in many different ways (e.g., typewritten, entered on a computer, scribbled in pencil), but now you need a printed version of the book (preferably double-spaced) and a pencil with a fresh eraser. You need a stack of blank paper that you will use to make notes, lists, internal schedules, and longer

In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.

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

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

The first-person narrative is a powerful but also very difficult narrative form. It is powerful because you are intimate with the emotions and internal processes of the very real human being telling you the story; it is difficult because the rendering of that character has to be pitch-perfect for the reader to believe in her.

A poet must be the master of simile, metaphor, and form, and of the precise use of vernacular and grammar, implication and innuendo.