“Make sure your dialogue is sharp, and real. If it is not, beef it up until you hear the voices singing. Be sure those characters talk like real people.
Are you satisfied that you have properly dimensioned each character? If you have villains in your story make sure you have made them powerful and resourceful, not reduced to the idiot level. In real life, the bad guys are highly formidable and dangerous individuals. Real life is full of grim games played by grim people. So should your fictional world be, if that is the type of story you are presenting. Do not indulge in some juvenile misunderstanding of the forces that move and shake this world. Some people are dangerous, not because a gun is in their hand, but because something cold and deadly is in their hearts. So make sure you are presenting a credible world with the world of your novel.
The paradox of good fiction is that the fictional world must seem more understandable and coherent to the reader than the world in which he lives daily. So to connect with the readers, the writer had better be in complete charge of the world he creates at the keyboard. Pointless defiance of real world logic is available all the time on television. Don't expose your readers to anything but a setting of characters in a logical cause and effect world.”
