Any writer of fiction has to learn a very basic point: Your novel should evoke live pictures in the mind of the reader as they turn page after page of your work. This primarily means, in the first place, you as a writer should be able to visualize in your mind the series of pictures your words bring to life as you write, when you read what you have written. The more successful you are in bringing the description of your characters to make them lifelike and the more you are able to create a sense of cascading scenes the better your novel becomes.
This is the reason you have to select scenes which are worth “watching” or reading in an interesting novel. Only premium scenes that are interesting and worth experiencing should find their way in your work. This is the reason revision of what you have written becomes ever so more important.
Remember. when any reader of your work is expending out money and time, the expectations become very high. And since you are pitted against fierce competition when it comes to good fiction which is being produced, your task becomes even stiffer. In fact, the present day internet age has afforded a chance for more people to write so there are more writers now than ever before. This number keeps growing and with it the competition.
However, if you become too choosy and inhibited and do not write unless you have thought over each and every detail before you write then your writing process will be too tardy and get stalled. This is bound to demotivate any writer and I feel is the main reason for what is termed as “writer’s block.” The better method is to think out before you write and just go ahead without editing until you have a fair amount of writing done. Then you may revise and edit and re-edit.
Enough can never be said about editing and revising of your writing. In fact, the best of writers feel they end up spending more time editing than in writing any piece of fiction.
You can never get too emotionally involved with what you have written so that you feel there is no way you can eliminate it. In other words, at times you have to throw away huge chunks of material you worked so hard at and spent so much time with.
Just think about how much an uncut diamond needs to be pruned and primed and the surplus amount thrown away before a perfect end product can be created. Any gem before being perfected is simply a product of a secondary or alluvial deposit with gummy, opaque and rough exterior with hardly any sheen almost like an aggregate of washing soda crystals. It is the polishing which changes everything and creates the value. So it is with writing.