by Ayesha Ali | Sep 17, 2026 | Character, marketing, Plot, Querying, Writing Craft
If you are thinking about submitting your work to agents or publishing, they you’ve probably come across the query letter. You know it’s the first thing publishing industry people read. You know you need to somehow condense the thousands of words of your...
by Ayesha Ali | Mar 9, 2026 | Character, marketing, Uncategorized
Age categories are an essential part of the publishing process, yet the least talked about. Often, the term “age category” gets lost inside conversations about genre: You got romance, you got historical fiction, you got picture books and you got young...
by Ayesha Ali | Feb 13, 2026 | The Writing Life
Bias is a loaded word anywhere, but especially for writers. No matter what we write, our job is to create an entire world for our characters. We don’t want to repeat patterns in our fiction that we dislike in real life. But doing so seems prohibitive. My...
by Ayesha Ali | Oct 23, 2025 | revision, Writing Craft
Last year I was asked to offer some revision advice for the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast (listen to the episode here). As I thought about it, I realized the key to my revision process is the climactic scene. To be quite honest with you, the first...
by Ayesha Ali | Aug 27, 2025 | Character, Writing Craft
As a new writer, I read a lot of articles about how to create characters yet none of them proved helpful to me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get through the numerous questions on character sheets or figure out what my character had on their bedside...
