[Adrian Fry]

Ivy Compton Burnett
1: 'A large country house' is sufficient scene setting to satisfy anyone.
2: Since their behaviour will do more to homogenise them than their features differentiate, describe your characters precisely once and none too well.
3: When it comes to dialogue - and it does, almost entirely - imagine that you are writing Wildeian epigrams from which most of the humour has been subtracted. This is certainly how your readers will experience it.
4: There should be incidents in your novel but they should not be unduly emphasised: infanticide is no more worthy of note than a butler coming in from the pantry.
5: In many scenes, have a number of characters speaking at once in the same manner, so that it is difficult to identify who is saying what to whom. It will give readers precisely the headache they deserve.
6: The only father worth having is a cruel father. God set the example with aplomb; follow it in all your novels.