Choosing Narrative Perspective
With my first novel, Burnt, I found sticking to the narrative perspective difficult. With practice it came more easily. I started writing my main character in third person (Harry picked up the stick) and then switched to first person (I picked up the stick). Unfortunately, I’d already written about a third of the novel so I had to go back and rewrite a lot. I was finding errors for ages. The only way to beat it was to edit and re-read it a bunch of times and make the corrections. From this experience, I recommend trying a few early scenes out in first or third person picking which one you will use for that character early in your writing and then stick to it.

The benefit of third person is you can switch between characters and the reader knows who is the character who is describing their Point of View (POV). If you are in first person then you can only have one narrator or the reader becomes confused – everyone is “I”. Third person is most common for novels because of this.

I wanted to include four characters perspectives in my novel so this was a problem. I overcame this difficulty by having my other POV characters written in third person. Each time I changed a POV character I started a new chapter.

The benefit of using first person was it was easier for me to write – it is the POV that memoirs are written in and I found it was easier for me to imagine I was my character and understand what she might say.

Tense
Usually, books are written in past tense ie. make sure all the words have -ed, was instead of is , etc. I’m sticking with what is usually done because anything else is likely harder and needs some more skill!

The tricky bit is when you are referring to things that happened prior to the scene you are writing now. Because you are already in past tense, the past becomes even further back. So you need to use had, had been etc. This is called Past Perfect tense. I don’t explain is nearly as well as Louise does more about past perfect tense.

There are a lot of tenses and if you are interested in exploring it more, check out understanding tenses in english.

Pacing
If I am bored writing it, then the reader will be bored reading it. Do you really need that scene? If not, cut it. If you do, how do you make it more interesting (different setting, character, shorter). Sometimes an important piece of information doesn’t need a whole scene you can drop it into a conversation between two characters instead of replaying it in real time. I struggle with having my characters reflect on the past, but they can also remember or think back to things that have happened instead of writing about every experience. This helps with pacing as you can ‘cut to the chase’ and leave out the detail. Also, shorter sentences increase the speed of reading and can get readers through the scene faster.

Suspense
• Raise the stakes – demonstrate what each character wants and make the reader wonder if they get it – this increases the suspense
• Create conflict or display conflict among the characters
• Increase the suspense by other means – cutting to a different character POV or a different time period and making the reader wait for the next bit

At one stage I read through and marked if each scene created suspense or resolved suspense and tried to make sure every time I created suspense it got resolved – often referred to as payback. If your book/story doesn’t have enough payback, it will be disappointing, especially at the end. Often you spend the first part of the novel creating a lot of suspense and the last part of the novel resolving it.

What the character wants (and if they get it or not) is also how you know you’ve got to the end of the book. If you have multiple characters, then there will be multiple character arcs that explore what each of the characters is after.