by Ali | Feb 23, 2023 | Fiction
Five Powerful Ways to Make Your Novel’s Plot More Complex Is your novel’s plot complex enough? If you’ve drafted a novel and you’re done in 50,000 words when you were aiming for 80,000, or if the pacing feels wrong – perhaps not much happens and you’ve dragged out...
by Ali | Oct 26, 2021 | Fiction
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...
by Ali | Jul 5, 2021 | Fiction
What Are Dialogue Tags and Dialogue Beats? (And Why You Should Use “Said” Frequently) This post was originally published in April 2016 and updated in July 2021. Dialogue is vital to your story. It helps reveal and develop character – and it drives the plot...
by Ali | Aug 19, 2020 | Editing
Should You Ever Edit While You’re Writing? This post was originally published in October 2017 and updated in August 2020. A lot of writers will say that you should never, ever edit when you’re writing. You can even get software that disables the backspace key or that...
by Ali | Dec 9, 2019 | Editing
Can You Edit Something You’ve Already Published? We’ve been looking at the importance of editing over the past few weeks and, so far, we’ve only been considering editing your work before publication. It’s also possible – increasingly so in the age of...
