Oh gosh... I was reading an earlier version of FREAK and it was SO BAD. I was literally cringing in my seat as I read it because it was so awful. But, on the plus side, it has inspired tutorials, this being one of them.

So basically, one of the things that I thought was so good was that I was interrupting dialogue. Constantly. So I would have pretty good dialogue going on and then suddenly I would have the freak interrupt with some mental thought like, "I have no clue what they're saying!"

Um... yeah.

This was, of course, an effort to be a good writer. After all, the freak is my main character, so I should have her present in my story, right? The problem is that I thought that this meant she had to be in every paragraph. So what I ended up doing was interrupting the flow of dialogue and making it an angsty bowl of mush-flavored water.

Bad stuff.

So remember: though your main character is important, he's not THAT important. If there's some important dialogue going on, forget about your main character for a while and just go with the flow of the dialogue. Your reader knows that your main character is the main character, and that's enough. Now tell the story.