Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (Teach Yourself: Writing)

Decide in advance how many ‘plot coupons’ (to use Nick Lowe’s brilliant coinage) your character must collect before s/he is able to ‘cash in’ the story’s conclusion. Identify what the coupons are, and have your character collect them.

Set a tight deadline, with suitably dire consequences if your protagonist does not meet it. Then find a reason in the story to halve the deadline. Then halve it again.

Readers read for characters and the things that happen to them. Writers, often, write to realize their plot, and use characters to make the plot happen. Revision is when you can shift your emphasis from the latter to the former.

Make your new POV instantly intriguing and relevant.

In a regular novel of 90,000 words or so, you’ll have space for perhaps seven or eight really key scenes:

It can be a good idea to make a map of your novel, listing every scene and adding a brief description of what happens in it. You need to pay particular attention to two things: the structural arrangement of events and the logic of POV.

I recommend keeping a file open into which you dispose all those sentences and passages that you cut from your draft.

In good dialogue, each character has their own distinct idiolect and sound

How to arrive at the perfect point of comparison?

When you write a fight scene, pay attention to the actual costs, both physical and mental