# The dangerous condition should appear to be mitigated at some point in the book but come back to haunt the characters.
# Avoid any long descriptions that slow down the pace. Practice keeping the pace of your novel brisk by allowing no paragraph to be more than five sentences. (You can relax this prohibition later in a few places if you find it absolutely necessary.)
# Start your book with something that grabs the reader's attention. Make your first sentence shine.

Looks like C3 is just there for window dressing. C1 gets all the action.

My daughter is a very good writer. Nothing published but with little effort she could be. Her last writing class the other students were always after her to "please, what happens next?" Her marks were all A's.

If I were C3, I would ambush C1 and kill him, then get both C2 and C4.

I have a really good idea for a novel, but I'm too lazy to write it.

You will get 4 weeks at NYT #1 for each dwarf you include in the story line. If a love triangle exists between dwarf and C1 plus C2, then all the better. Just do not kill off the dwarf. That's never funny!

Mousie, How do you eat an elephant?
A : One bite at a time.

I'll bet you could write a great novel, mousie. You should do it!

Thanks Willhelm. My stumbling block is the research needed. So much info, so little time! I might be able to include a dwarf, though.

".... once I had no published novels and roughly two hundred ideas about the art and craft of writing fiction....(but now)...Of course the writer can impose control, it's just a really shitty idea. ... Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however.... that is called "storytelling". Storytelling is as natural as breathing, plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration." Stephen King, Introduction to revised 2006 edition of 'Salem's Lot'.

Cool plots and comments, guys! Thanks