Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.