on Fiction University:

When I was in middle school, I was writing a story in my journal, a document my Language Arts teacher would look at weekly. I can still remember reading her red-inked constructive criticism in the margin – “I hear a lot, but I don’t see very much.” At the time, and to a lesser degree, still, I tend to write my first drafts heavy in dialogue. (Maybe I should have been a playwright instead of a novelist!)

So as I grew as a writer, in order to get a novel worthy of a reader, I had to learn how to take that first draft that was very dialogue heavy and figure out how to bring more depth to it. And with that, I learned how to layer in elements to bring that necessary depth to the manuscript. I’m going to share five ways to do that with you today.