All Write - Fiction Advice

There’s nothing worse than spending months, years even, writing your novel, only to find that the moment you come to publish it or submit it to agents or publishers, there is one already one the shelf with virtually the same plot as yours. While this can be quite disheartening, it does not mean writers should abandon their projects with failed hope. The simple truth is that plots are not limitless, but ideas are.   How often have you watched a movie or read a book and the story is so familiar to something else you’ve seen or read? That’s because they are inevitably similar; they share the same plot outline, but they’re not exactly the same.   That’s because they will have very different characters, different themes, different subplots and different styles. They will have different titles, too. So even if you have a novel that is very similar to one that has just hits the book shelves, don’t despair. Yours will, inevitably, be quite different. All stories are uniqu...

You may have heard ‘passive’ and ‘active’ voice mentioned in previous articles, or seen something written about them online and wondered if they are really that important in fiction writing, especially with the emerging consensus among self-published writers they can ‘write what they like’. Of course they can write what they like. It’s just most of it isn’t worth reading. So what is passive and active voice? Is it really that important? When we talk about active or passive voice, it means that the verb is either active or passive. For instance: John answered the door = active sentence. The door was answered by John = passive sentence. The first example is active because the subject and verb is in the correct sequence. In active sentences, something that is doing the action is the subject of the sentence. The thing receiving the action is the object . Therefore in the above sentence, John is the subject . ‘Answered’ becomes a verb because it is the action being used w...