In-Depth Articles About ... Fiction

How to Get Your Characters Right As You Rewrite Your Novel

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...

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22 Tips for Writing Fiction (Whatever Stage You’re At)

22 Tips for Writing Fiction (Whatever Stage You’re At)

Whether you’re new to writing fiction or you’ve already written a bunch of stories, it often feels like there’s a lot to learn. There’s tons of great advice out there – but some of it can seem confusing (should you always stick to “show, don’t tell”) or even contradictory (like whether you…

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How Much Should You Plan Before Starting a Novel?

How Much Should You Plan Before Starting a Novel?

Thinking of writing a novel? You might be wondering about how best to plan it … but before you figure that out, you need to decide how much planning you’ll want to do in advance. Some novelists like to plan out every chapter before they begin. Others pick up a blank…

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Six Practical Ways to Handle the Passage of Time in Fiction

Six Practical Ways to Handle the Passage of Time in Fiction

This post was originally published in February 2016 and updated in March 2024. Whether you’re writing a short story or an epic novel series, fictional time is going to pass during it. Obviously enough, fictional time is not the same thing as real time (unless you’re...

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How to Start a Novel: Eight Options Plus Examples

How to Start a Novel: Eight Options Plus Examples

Writing the first scene of a novel is tricky. Perhaps you’ve been slowly developing an idea for weeks, months, or even years. You might have written pages of notes or created a full outline. And now you’ve opened up the document to start … but how do you actually...

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Five Different Approaches to Developing Characters

Five Different Approaches to Developing Characters

This post was first published in April 2019 and updated in April 2022. Whether you consider plot to be more important than character or you believe they’re just two sides of the same coin, it’s clear that character matters. Readers want characters who are engaging and...

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Seven Simple Tips for Writing Great Dialogue

Seven Simple Tips for Writing Great Dialogue

This post was first published in March 2012 and updated in November 2021. A lot of fiction-writers struggle with dialogue. It’s tough to make fictional people sound convincing. And on an even more basic level, it's tricky just to punctuate dialogue correctly. But...

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How Do You Divide Your Novel into Chapters?

How Do You Divide Your Novel into Chapters?

This post was inspired by an email conversation with Emma from the brilliant blog Science at Your Doorstep and by a question from an Aliventures reader. It was first published in April 2018 and updated in October 2021. Pick up the nearest book. Whether it’s fiction or...

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How to Stop Procrastinating … and Start Writing

How to Stop Procrastinating … and Start Writing

One theme’s come through already in the survey responses: procrastination. It’s the bane of many writers … or would-be writers. Some people spend months, even years, trying to get round to writing, but never quite manage to…

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How Long is a Novel … and How Long Should YOUR Novel Be?

How Long is a Novel … and How Long Should YOUR Novel Be?

For some writers, the question “how long should a novel be?” sounds a bit like “how long is a piece of string?” They feel that their novel should be long enough to get the job done – even if that means it falls outside the bounds of what readers and publishers are used to. However, if you’ve written something that’s…

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How to Write Stronger Scenes: Add More Depth and Detail

How to Write Stronger Scenes: Add More Depth and Detail

All stories are, at one level, a collection of scenes. It can be tough to get scenes right. Maybe the action and surroundings were so vivid in your head, but they just haven’t translated well to the page. We’re going to take a look at how to write stronger scenes by adding more depth and detail. Before we dig in, I want to…

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Five Straightforward Ways to Create Stronger Characters

Five Straightforward Ways to Create Stronger Characters

If your story doesn’t have strong, compelling characters … you’ll struggle to get readers. However intricate your plotting or however exotic your setting, if your characters are flat and uninteresting, there’s nothing for the reader to invest in. We read stories because we’re interested in…

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How to Start Writing a Novel: Get Inspired and Get Going

How to Start Writing a Novel: Get Inspired and Get Going

This post was originally published in April 2016 and updated in July 2020. You’d like to write a novel ... but how do you even begin? I’m not thinking here about ways to write a great opening (if that’s what you’re after, check out this excellent article from The...

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Five Handy Ways to Patch Plot Holes in Your Novel

Five Handy Ways to Patch Plot Holes in Your Novel

Sometimes, you feel like your story hangs together pretty well ... until you re-read your whole draft. That’s when you notice all the places where it’s not quite working. If there’s a tiny inconsistency (like a character changing eye colour half way), that’s pretty...

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Novel Structure: Seven Plot Points You Should Know

Novel Structure: Seven Plot Points You Should Know

In screenwriting, there are commonly agreed "plot points" that movies are expected to follow. With novels, you've got more flexibility – but many writers and theorists would argue that you should hit specific plot points at specific stages in your novel. These are the...

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Stuck on Your Novel? Here’s How to Get Moving Again

Stuck on Your Novel? Here’s How to Get Moving Again

It’s a familiar situation for most novelists: you get a few chapters in (or if you’re unlucky, a few pages) … and for one reason or another, you find yourself stuck. Maybe your initial enthusiasm for the project didn’t last. Maybe you had the first few chapters...

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What’s a Character Arc, Who Needs One, and Why?

What’s a Character Arc, Who Needs One, and Why?

You’ve probably come across the idea of a “character arc” before now ... but what is it, and why’s it called that? A character arc isn’t the same thing as your plot. It’s the progression of your character as a person throughout your story. You might also think of it...

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Seven Common Problems Writers Have With Characters

Seven Common Problems Writers Have With Characters

Most writers love creating characters and writing about them – but it can be a struggle to get characters right. If you’re normally quite plot-focused, you might find yourself creating characters who are lifeless “pegs” that fit into the right-shaped spaces in your...

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Making Bad Things Happen to Good Characters

Making Bad Things Happen to Good Characters

Do you have a hard time hurting your characters? Maybe it’s pretty easy with some of them. (For me, villains are fair game, and Woobies seem to invite a fair amount of suffering.) But chances are, you’ve either got characters who you hate to hurt…

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Stylised Talk: Writing Great Dialogue [With Examples]

Stylised Talk: Writing Great Dialogue [With Examples]

If you’re a fiction writer, unless you’re writing a very short story or something decidedly experimental, you’re going to have to write dialogue. For some writers (me included), dialogue comes easily. It may even be a little too easy – sometimes, the first words you think of aren’t necessarily the best…

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Eight Easy(ish) Ways to Finish the First Draft of Your Novel

Eight Easy(ish) Ways to Finish the First Draft of Your Novel

I’m doing NaNoWriMo this month – maybe you are too? (For the uninitiated, “NaNoWriMo” stands for National Novel Writing Month. It happens every November, where people all over the world try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.) This is the eight book-length piece of fiction I’ve

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Short Story Competitions: Are They Worth Entering?

Short Story Competitions: Are They Worth Entering?

Over the years, I’ve entered a fair few short stories into competitions. I’m a novelist by inclination, and so most of my fiction writing has been on much longer projects ... but I’ve found short stories a great way to try out different techniques, to...

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Everything You Need to Know About Writing Great Dialogue

Everything You Need to Know About Writing Great Dialogue

I’ve written a fair amount about dialogue over the past few years ... partly because I love writing dialogue! And I figured it was about time I collated those posts in one place. Whether you enjoy dialogue too (and want to make yours even better) or whether it’s...

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