Read posts about: Fiction | Freelancing | Blogging | Motivation | Creativity | Editing
Aliventures Summer Break 2024 – 10 Posts to Catch Up On
Aliventures Summer Break 2024 – 10 Posts to Catch Up On
It’s summer time here in the UK and I’m taking a few weeks off from blogging. I’ll be enjoying a trip to the North Wales coast, plus lots of adventures with my kids! I’ll be back when they start the new school year in early September.
If you’ve got a bit of downtime over the summer, you might enjoy some of these posts from the first half of 2024. (They’ll all open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place here.)
For novelists:
Why Readers Might Not Make it Past Your First Few Pages: Five Reasons (and Five Fixes)
Six Practical Ways to Handle the Passage of Time in Fiction
Five Tips to Help You Rewrite Your Story After Beta Reader or Editor Feedback
Understanding the “Show Don’t Tell” Rule (With Examples … and Exceptions)
For freelancers:
Six Ways to Track Your Freelancing Time and Income (and Why You Should)
Batch Writing: How to Streamline Your Freelance Writing Process in 2024
Seven Useful Tasks to Tackle as a Freelancer When You’re Waiting for More Client Work
If you need motivation:
Seven Common Obstacles on Your Writing Journey (and How to Overcome Them)
How to Write When … You’re Not Making Any Money Yet
Five Different Ways I Use Timers to Stay Focused When I’m Writing
Want even more to read? You can find the full blog archives here and sign up for your free mini-ebooks here.
About
I’m Ali Luke, and I live in Leeds in the UK with my husband and two children.
Aliventures is where I help you master the art, craft and business of writing.
Start Here
If you're new, welcome! These posts are good ones to start with:
Can You Call Yourself a “Writer” if You’re Not Currently Writing?
The Three Stages of Editing (and Nine Handy Do-it-Yourself Tips)
My Novels
My contemporary fantasy trilogy is available from Amazon. The books follow on from one another, so read Lycopolis first.
You can buy them all from Amazon, or read them FREE in Kindle Unlimited.
Ten Sentence-Level Mistakes to Watch Out for When Editing Your Fiction [With Examples]
Ten Sentence-Level Mistakes to Watch Out for When Editing Your Fiction [With Examples]
This post was originally published on Aliventures in 2016 and updated in July 2024.
When you’re editing fiction, whether it’s a short story or an epic novel, you need to edit on several different levels.
There’s the full-scale revision stage: where you go from first draft to second draft, and probably lose or gain some characters, cut or add a bunch of material, and make some major alterations to your text.
Depending on how tidy your first draft is, you might go through several complete rewrites. But at some stage, you’ll get to a point where you’re fairly happy with the broad strokes of your novel: you’ve got the right scenes, in the right order, and you’re pretty happy with the general progression of paragraphs: the pacing feels good and you’ve got a balance of dialogue and narrative that’s appropriate for your style and genre.
At that point, you’re into the “sentence-level” of editing. This is where you zoom in on the details and make sure that every sentence is pulling its weight … and that there aren’t any awkward words or phrases that distract your reader from your story.
Quick note: I’m not going to cover common typos and misspellings here, or how a sentence is put together in English. If you want advice on those, check out this list of the 100 Most Commonly Misspelled Words in English and Grammarly’s article on Sentence Structure.
Here are ten common sentence-level mistakes that crop up for a lot of writers (me included!) and that you might need to fix when you’re editing at this level: (more…)
About
Start Here
Can You Call Yourself a “Writer” if You’re Not Currently Writing?
The Three Stages of Editing (and Nine Handy Do-it-Yourself Tips)
What to Do When Your Writing Goals Seem a Long Way Off
If you’d like more suggestions, head to the “Start Here” page:
Archives
Just head on over to the Archive:
How to Get Your Characters Right As You Rewrite Your Novel
When you’re reworking your first or second draft, you’ll likely be making some changes relating to your characters and their characterisation (how they come across on the page). If you didn’t quite nail your characters’ personalities or their character arcs during the...
Annual Writing Goal Progress in Q2, 2024 (Plus What’s New on Aliventures)
We’re now halfway through 2024 … how’s the year been going for you so far? I hope you’ve been able to get plenty of writing done and make the progress you’ve wanted, but even if that’s not been the case, you’ve still got six months left until the end of 2024 – plenty...
How to Wrap Up a Writing Session Effectively – and Leave Yourself Ready for Next Time
You’ve probably given at least a little bit of thought to how you want to start a writing session. Maybe you gather together specific writing supplies, like your pens and notebook. Perhaps you always play the same music to get you into the writing zone. You might...
What Can You Write About if You Don’t Have Any Ideas?
This is a familiar situation for a lot of writers. You want to write – but you don’t have an idea to actually write about. Whether you’re working on blog posts, novels, short stories, or something else entirely, you need ideas. And it can sometimes feel that ideas are…
How to Write When … You Feel Drained by the Demands of Daily Life
This post is part of my ongoing “How to Write When …” series. Many writers struggle with finding time to write. But it’s often not just about having the time …. it’s also about having the energy levels you need to focus or even to feel like sitting down to write in...
![What Bad Writing Looks Like … and How to Fix It [With Detailed Examples]](https://www.aliventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/bad-writing-fix-it-400x250.png)
What Bad Writing Looks Like … and How to Fix It [With Detailed Examples]
This post was first published in March 2021 and most recently updated in June 2024. A lot of writers worry that they may not be good enough to be successful. The truth is that however “good” or “bad” your writing is, you can improve with practice and with careful...
