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…
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...
Most stories, these days, don’t have flawless heroes and evil cackling villains. Readers – and writers! – enjoy more complex characters. At what stage, though, does a dark hero (aka “anti-hero”) turn into…
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...
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...
This is the second post in our series on "Developing Better Plots". If you missed last week's post, you can find it here: What is Plot ... and is it the Same Thing as Story or Narrative? Confession time: research is definitely not my favourite part of writing. The...
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...
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...
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…
![Stylised Talk: Writing Great Dialogue [With Examples]](https://www.aliventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/stylised-talk-great-dialogue-1.jpg)
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…
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...
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
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…
If you’ve been in any writing groups, read any writing books or blogs, or hung out in any writing-related forums online ... you’ve probably come across these three words of advice: “Show, don’t tell.” It’s a very commonly quoted writing “rule”. There’s...
Last week, I gave you four pieces of bad – even dangerous – advice that writers all too often hear. Today, I’ve got even more bad advice! Most of this is aimed at fiction writers, though the final two could apply to any type of writing. Bad Advice #1:...
Any writing-related advice that says you should always or never do something can generally be taken with a very large pinch of salt! I’m sure you’ve heard lots of poor writing advice over the months, years or even decades that you’ve been writing. Here are some that I...
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...
I’ve got a particularly bad writing habit – and I suspect I’m not the only person who does this... All too often, I leap straight into the next scene with very little thought about where exactly my characters are located. If I was writing something...
A couple of weekends ago, I headed off on an overnight writing retreat and started work on a new fiction project. This is the first time in more years than I care to count (nine, yikes) that I’ve been working on a long piece of fiction other than my...
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...
Whether you’ve written any fiction yet or not, you’re probably extremely familiar with how dialogue appears on the page: it’s surrounded by quotation marks. Even if you’re not quite confident with all the finer details of formatting spoken words on the page, it’s...
Have you ever told yourself something like this: “Once I have a bit more time, I’ll start work on that novel.” “Once life is less manic, I’ll get back to my novel.” “If only I could take a year off work, I could finally write my novel.” A novel is a major undertaking....
Image from sxc.hu by tatlin. You want to write a novel. It’s been your New Year’s resolution more times than you want to admit. And you might well have been day-dreaming about it or scribbling notes about it for months or years. But you’ve never quite...
I’ve not been to nearly as many workshops and classes this year, due to a certain little person taking up a lot of my time... But my friend and fellow writer and blogger Lorna Fergusson of fictionfire runs inspiring Saturday afternoon “Focus Writing...
For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is short for (inter)National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November. Across the world, tens of thousands of writers sign up to the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in just one month. (That’s 1,667 words...
Image from Flickr by adrperez Is your novel looking a little bloated? Do you have a sneaking feeling you’ve repeated yourself a few times? Are some of your scenes really just unnecessary padding between episodes of action? Believe me, I’ve been there. I...
Maybe you’ve been working on your novel for months, or even years. (Or maybe you’ve not started yet, because you’re waiting for a chunk of free time to come along.) Life is busy. You’d love to have all day, every day, to write, but of course you don’t....
Kitty at one month. If you’ve been following Aliventures for a while, you’ll know that my husband and I have a baby daughter. She’s two months old now and, over the past weeks, I’ve come to realise that although parenting is an exciting new adventure,...
Something different today! The wonderful E.J. Newman is on a short story tour, and I'm thrilled to be hosting one of her stories. (I also recommend signing up to get her stories straight to your inbox; they're always a great read and a nice break from the usual run of...
If you read blogs about writing, or follow writers on Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the word “NaNoWriMo” recently. In case not – NaNoWriMo is short for “National Novel Writing Month”. It takes place every November, where writers all over the world...
This is the second post based on sessions I attended at Winchester Writers’ Conference, 2012. You can read the first here: John Gilbey on Writing Flash-Fiction / Short-Short Stories “Writing Stories: Telling Tales” was a workshop run by Alison Habens, a lecturer in...
Image from Flickr by Creative Tools This is the first post about some of the sessions I attended at Winchester Writers’ Conference, 2012. These posts are based on my own notes, and while I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, I do not intend them to be...
You can read Winchester Writers’ Conference, 2011, Part One: Characters here. Today, I wanted to share a little more of what I learned at Winchester Writers’ Conference. I was there for two-and-a-bit busy days of lectures and workshops, so I won’t give you everything,...
As you might have seen in my last post, or on Twitter (I’m @aliventures), I was away last weekend at the annual Winchester Writers’ Conference here in the UK. Run by the energetic, lovely and irrepressible Barbara Large, it’s a great festival of all things...
I first met I J Black when I was very new to the blogging scene: I was in a small email group of bloggers and she was one of them. She was podcasting her Amnar books back then – and I was impressed, and a bit stunned, by just how much she’d written and how much...
I've been blogging for a little over three years. I've been writing fiction since ... well, pretty much since I could write. My blog posts are read by thousands of people. Only 1% of the fiction I've ever written has been published. Fiction is incredibly...