Alle responds to: "How do you tie together plot points to make the novel cohesive?"
Alle's answer: islands of fiction.
I know that it's important to establish key events in your story that drive the plot forward, but what do you do for all the stuff in between? Like, what's the best way to tie them all together? I know it's important to have some filler, but how much is too much and how do I make it so that it still relevant and I'm not just stalling?
Alle sez:
No piece of writing should contain any filler. None: zero, zip.
The following may sound precious: each paragraph, clause, word, needs to be there. Otherwise, the prose is bloated and boring.
Elmore Leonard’s now-famous 10 rules for writing fiction includes: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
Starting my second novel, Crazy Medicine, I had no overarching plot to follow. I had a story, though. I wrote the parts of the story that I knew, thinking of them as islands of fiction. After writing a bunch of them, I began to see how the novel was going to hop from one island to the next.
In understanding what was missing, I put in only those words.
Then I cut a lot of those words.
The result was the trimming of a massive, wide-reaching story spanning continents and cultures into 74,000 tight words. On that front, I might have news soon …