Write your novel by letting a movie unroll in your head. Describe what you see. Move into the image. Feel what the characters are feeling, think what they're thinking, and write that down.
Diana Gabaldon, author of the wonderful Voyager novels, has often described how she writes her books scene by scene, then glues the scenes together:
She describes the process she uses on her Web site.
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I started my first novel--for practice, I never meant to show it to anybody--with no outline, no plot, no characters, even; all I had was a time and place, and a vague notion that there should be a man in a kilt .
I just started in where I could sort of see something happening, and wrote. The next day I wrote some more. Then I couldn't see any more happening there, so I wrote something else I could see. I kept this, and as I wrote tons of these little pieces, I got a sort of feel for the overall shape of the story, and could start to stick the pieces together and move them around.
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