by Ali | Jul 15, 2019 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Apr 29, 2019 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Apr 22, 2019 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Apr 16, 2019 | Fiction
Making Bad Things Happen to Good Characters 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...
by Ali | Feb 4, 2019 | Fiction
Unreliable Narrators: What Are They and Why Might You Want to Use One? 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...
by Ali | Nov 12, 2018 | Fiction
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...
