15 Ways to Make Your Characters Suffer (for the Good of Your Novel)

by Ali | Jun 18, 2018 | Craft

Note: This post was originally published in 2016, and was updated in June 2018. Do your characters suffer enough? Even if you’re writing a light and fluffy romance, at some point, someone in your novel is going to need to get hurt. I’m not suggesting all-out graphic...

Five Straightforward Ways to Create Stronger Characters

by Ali | Oct 23, 2017 | Craft

If your story doesn’t have strong, compelling characters … no-one’s going to want to read it. That might sound harsh. But however intricate your plotting or however exotic your setting, if your characters are flat and uninteresting, there’s nothing for the...

Why Repetition Can Be Powerful … and How to Get it Right

by Ali | Jun 5, 2017 | Craft

Is it ever okay to repeat the same word or phrase in your writing? Unintentional repetition is something that authors are (quite rightly) warned to watch out for, particularly in fiction. Intentional repetition, however, is a powerful tool: it can be used to make your...

Ten Book-Level Mistakes to Watch Out for When Redrafting Your Fiction [With Examples]

by Ali | Jan 30, 2017 | Craft

A few weeks ago, I posted about sentence-level mistakes: ones that are easy to spot from a page or a paragraph of writing. Even if you write flawless prose, though, it’s possible to make bigger-picture mistakes over the course of a novel or novella … and these...

What Bad Writing Looks Like … and How to Fix It [With Detailed Examples]

by Ali | Jan 16, 2017 | Craft

A few weeks ago, on Amazon, an odd-looking book popped up as a recommendation for me. It was this one: I was a bit surprised to see fanfiction being sold on Amazon – particularly being promoted to me (however unwittingly) by Amazon. So I took a look. Before I go any...

Ten Sentence-Level Mistakes to Watch Out for When Editing Your Fiction [With Examples]

by Ali | Dec 19, 2016 | Craft

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...