This Year You Write Your Novel

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.

To keep your audience reading, you have to make them wonder—after each action, chapter, or scene—what happens next?

Our social moorings aren’t the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon.

Details are endless, and they will overwhelm your story unless you master them. Even the most interesting acts cannot bear the weight of too much detail.

The third-person narrator is the voice in which we naturally tell stories about things that happened to people other than ourselves.

There are many kinds and styles of narrative voices, and it is imperative that you decide which one you will use to tell your tale.

Always try to pare down the language of your novel. Is that word necessary? That sentence, that paragraph, that chapter? Most writers tend to overwrite. They either fall in love with their use of language or want to make sure that the reader understands everything.

All novels, short stories, and plays, and most poems, are about human transformation. The subject of the novel is the human spirit and psyche—how the characters interact in their relationships with other souls and with the world in general.

I almost always do the research for my books toward the end of the last draft. By that time I know the book is written and that my creative energies will not be sapped by needless fretting.