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 | 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...
by Ayesha Ali | Jul 29, 2025 | Dialogue, Writing Craft
Sometimes, you can learn more about writing techniques when learning other subjects. I learned a lot more about dialogue taking a theatre class than I ever did in a writing workshop or craft book. When I went back to university in my mid-twenties, I decided to...
by Ayesha Ali | May 20, 2025 | Worldbuilding, Writing Craft
Setting is an important part of storytelling. The environment a story takes place in changes how it’s told, what the characters are able to do, and a whole host of other small decision a writer makes. For example, a story set at a fantasy academy will have very...
by Ayesha Ali | Feb 18, 2025 | Character, Writing Craft
Hey friends. We have come to the last part of the series on writing immigrant characters. In part 1, we explored research as a decision-making tool and honed in on some vital details about our immigrant characters. In part 2, we explored the “heavier”...
