by Ali | Apr 29, 2019 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Apr 22, 2019 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Apr 16, 2019 | Fiction
This post was first published in August 2015, and updated in April 2019. Kudos to LycoRogue for inspiring it. 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...
by Ali | Apr 9, 2019 | Fiction
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 interesting: characters who seem real. Novelists often talk about...
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...
