When beginning your narrative consider doing the following:
- Capture the reader's interest immediately with a hightly dramatic scene, simultaneously introducing one or more human characters.
- Use language that is emotional (this involves the five senses) and helps the reader sympathize or at least relate to the introduced character.
- Use language and structure that allows the reader to fill in many of the scenes with their imagination - sometimes this is called writing the gutter. The gutter here being the spaces in between scenes, like the spaces you see between comic book drawings. Writing your narrative with a mind to how it would look as a comic book is a good way to write the gutter and forces you to only write the important parts, leaving out distracting details.
- With regard to style; consider the rule of threes when describing nouns and actions; read your sentence aloud to hear the rhythm and to pick up any undesired, irregular beats; write your sentence from a three part perspective, add diction depth by changing generic nouns and verbs into more descriptive or illuminating words.
- Instead of using single adverbs try changing them to adverbial phrases but don't overdue things and perhaps keep it limited to three or less adverbs or adverbial phrases since more makes the reader work extra hard to keep the main noun or action in mind - unless of course your goal is to create suspense by lengthening a highly stressful an emotional scene.
- Write in the active voice and always try to stick to just showing the reader what is happening and not telling them whats happening. This means you show a man helping a young child into a bus while avoiding your authorial narrative which involves telling why he is helping or what he is thinking.
- Consider your description of the setting as it relates to the character but don't over write it.
