Read it through once

I do not mean by this that the novelist should ignore fact. Facts are necessary; but they cease to be sufficient. The novelist must, I think, be a recorder of impressions — impressions in the sense of the immediate data of consciousness. He must endeavour to transmit, not a series of external actions, but a pattern of moods and sensations. Instead of beginning with plot, with action, he should begin with a mood — with a sense of being, and letting that mood expand. For the life of the mind, like the life of the ocean, has currents and eddies; it has depths and shallows; it has interruptions and resumptions. To follow those movements is the true business of fiction.