All Write - Fiction Advice

Every story has something to say and every story conveys a message to the reader, whether it’s something about the world in general, or about the human condition, and the kind of issues that relate to all of us. These are all relayed through the characters that inhabit the story. Any intended message can be overt, subtle or implied. The moral of a story is not to be confused with the author’s personal thoughts and feelings, because as a rule, an author should never personally intrude a story.   Instead, morals are the products of our observations and the issues that impact all of us, and how we can learn and grow from them.   Think of the snippets of wisdom given to you by your parents or grandparents – these are the basis of various morals adapted by society and used for generations. Our lives are dictated by morality, and fiction is no different. Even from the dawn of time, storytellers have included morals in their tales; they all want to give us a message of some...

Setting tone in your stories is one thing, but expressing it is another thing entirely. When we talk about tone, it generally means the overall quality, exposition and pitch of the writing and the value it brings to the narrative in terms of what it gives to the reader because they need to understand the tone of your novel or story. The tone is about the writer’s ability to covey thoughts and feelings in relation to the themes that make up the story.   Often writers confuse tone with mood and ‘voice’, but although these aspects complement each other in fiction writing, there are subtle differences between them, and they both have different roles to play within the narrative.   ‘Voice’ is the essence and individual style of the writer coming through the narrative. Mood however, (and its close relation, atmosphere), is the effect created by the writer to evoke a range feelings within the reader – horror, sadness, humour, empathy and compassion etc. The real impo...

If you have ever wondered how you can make your writing that much stronger, then the power of verbs and nouns might help. Unlike adjectives and adverbs, which actually weaken your writing, the use of strong verbs and nouns make the narrative more dynamic, vibrant and, above all, active in order to help strengthen the narrative considerably. They are often referred to as ‘action’ words because they are especially useful for the fluidity and motion within sentences, where the subject is ‘doing’ something.   So when it comes to injecting clarity, movement and action, words like walk, grab, run and chop etc., convey to the reader exactly what they need to know.   They can express the physical (to run, to walk, to fight), they can show a state of being (to appear, to be) or they can show us mental actions (to think, to ponder). The interesting thing about verbs is that, unlike adverbs and adjectives, they can change in form, and there are several forms that belong to ...

To know how important it is – or not – it’s best to get a feel for what writing style is all about. Plenty of writers are under the impression that in order to be a successful, published author, they must create and promote their own distinctive and characteristic writing style, but the truth is by doing that, they could be cultivating some bad habits instead. The truth is, writing styles are not something that writers typically think about, but rather something that develops naturally over time. Writing style is as much to do with individuality as it is about writing.   It’s about how the writer presents the words to the reader, how well he or she knows the beauty of the language, how well a fiction world or fictional characters are blended together, how each sentence starts and ends, how each paragraph is unified with the narrative, how narrative and description are invented.   It’s how well a writer tells their tale. In order to force style into their writing...