The best answer is simply to experiment. This will help you discover how best to put pen to paper. I obviously can't cover all fiction writing techniques, but I can give you an overview, a place to start. Alter and adapt these techniques to suit you own style. Then get started and create that novel that's sitting inside you.
General Fiction Writing Techniques
Novels aren't the only type of fiction, though they are my favorite. You might be writing short stories or even flash fiction, and many techniques transpose from one type of fiction to another. Some techniques will fit best with a specific genre, others can be used for any fiction genre at all.
If you're writing science fiction, fantasy, or historical fiction, you might want to try time-stretching. This technique is simply writing as if you're years away from the action. Perhaps your story is happening hundreds of years in the future or the past. Look at most fiction and you'll see that you're fairly close to the action. Being more removed can change it up a bit and make your story stand out. Think about it for a little while, put yourself in the right mindset, and this technique becomes more than a little interesting. But a word of caution: don't just jump into this technique. Use it sparingly at first, perhaps just in flashbacks or in a prologue or epilogue. Once you've got a handle on it, expand its use. It can be tricky to master time-stretching, so practice until you've got it.
Need something a little more generic? How about descriptive writing? And I don't mean the kind of descriptive writing you learned in high school. I mean descriptive writing that draws the audience into your world. The sensory descriptions that make your words pop off the page and surround the reader. Engage the five senses, but don't bore the reader. Don't go on and on about the lustrous sheen of the marble. Say it once, say it well, and move on. But if you treat every scene as a new opportunity to surround the reader with the environment you've created, you'll soon have a beautifully crafted work of fiction on your hands.
And what if you're having trouble getting started? This happens to everyone. You're all ready to go, all ready to write your story, and ... nothing. Been there. Try writing exercises and prompts to get your juices flowing. Once they're flowing, keep them flowing, and don't get distracted.
Novel Writing Techniques
Writing a novel is much like writing most fiction. Except for the length. The sheer size of a novel has stalled more than one aspiring novelist before the thing ever got finished. Finishing that novel is less about specific writing techniques as it is about just getting to the finish line without falling over in exhaustion.
Try keeping a writing journal. Oh, I can hear the groans now. Yes, I know it sounds like I'm suddenly your high school English teacher. But journals really do work. Keep track of your progress. Write down your word count. Track your plot. As you see your progress boiled down to a few sentences, you could find yourself more motivated to keep going. It's a long way, but you will eventually get there.
By that same token, set goals. Tell yourself that you're going to write X number of words every day. I write 5000, but I'm a writer by profession. Maybe you'll want to start with 500 words a day, 5 days a week. Or 200 words. Whatever. But make sure you keep these promises you make to yourself. If you let yourself ignore your goals for one day, it becomes easier to ignore them the next.
Genre has nothing to do with these little tips. All writing can be improved by a willingness to keep going. Keep the end in sight and your novel will slowly take shape.
Supplemental Writing Activities
Some of the things that help me improve my writing actually involve very little real writing, at least as far as the story is concerned. I write fantasy fiction, so not all of these will be applicable to you. But fantasy is by its very nature an act of creation, from the world my characters exist in to the creatures they interact with.
I start with creating the world itself. High fantasy, by definition, takes place in a different realm, not in the world we live in. Therefore, I have to create everything from scratch. I sketch out maps (even though I'm the worlds worst artist), then transform those sketches into words. I describe mountain ranges, cities, rivers ... whatever happens to be on the map. And I keep these descriptions in a folder. This lets me take a shortcut later. I can pull out the descriptions and slip them into my books.
Characters get the same treatment, but since I can't draw, I look for pictures that look like the people in my books. My sketches look more like stick people, so writing everything out and searching for pictures works best for me. If you're a better artist, you might be able to actually draw your own characters.
These relatively minor techniques help me, both when I'm first starting a new novel and as I progress through the story. But you should use whatever techniques work for you. Don't let anyone tell you what techniques you should use. And don't fret over trends or what anyone else is doing. These things come and go. Just do what works for you.
