This Year You Write Your Novel

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

In the novel there has to be movement in the personality structure of the main character or characters. This is to say that, in part, the purpose of the novel is to map out the events in the protagonist’s life that cause her to change. This change and the events that flow from it are why we read and write books.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.