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...
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....
Image from Flickr by Andrew Morrell Photography One common mistake that fiction-writers make with point of view is head-hopping while writing in the limited third person. In case that sounded like gobbledygook, let’s get some definitions pinned down:...
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...
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