by Ali | Feb 4, 2019 | Fiction
An unreliable narrator is a first person narrator who doesn’t entirely tell the truth. That might be because they’re biased or deluded – or it could be because they’re outright lying to us (or, at the very least, deliberately omitting the truth). We could argue that...
by Ali | Nov 12, 2018 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Jul 23, 2018 | Fiction
Novels are tricky. There’s so much to juggle that no-one gets it quite right the first time round … and most authors end up doing wholesale rewrites, rather than just making a few editorial tweaks. I’ve come to accept that rewriting is just part of the process of...
![Choosing the Right Viewpoint and Tense for Your Fiction [With Examples]](https://www.aliventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/viewpoint-blog-image-1.jpg)
by Ali | Jun 4, 2018 | Fiction
Note: This post was originally published in 2013, and was updated in June 2018. Who’s telling your story? Perhaps the choice is easy and obvious: you’re writing from a particular character’s viewpoint in the first person (“I”) and the whole story is from their...
by Ali | Apr 16, 2018 | Fiction
You’re probably known by several different names in your life. I’m “Alison Luke” when I fill in a form. I’m “Mrs Luke” to my bank and to cold-callers. I’m “Mummy” to my kids, occasionally “Mum” (they’re not convinced that I even have another name). I’m “Ali” to...
by Ali | Apr 11, 2018 | Fiction
This post was inspired by an email conversation with Emma from the brilliant blog Science at Your Doorstep. Pick up the nearest book. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, it’s almost certainly split into chapters. As readers, we take that for granted. Chapters give us...
