Welcome to our informational blog.
Topics covered include literary theory and practice, academic writing techniques, philosophy of education, and explanations of our methods for strengthening creative intelligence.
How Much Should Each Book in a Series Stand Alone?
The best writing coaches can also help a writer distinguish productive openness from when a novel has been left incomplete. Some unanswered questions create tension that pulls the reader toward another book. Others feel as though the author abandoned a storyline before it reached its natural destination. The distinction can be difficult to perceive from inside a long project.
The Flash Essay as a Container for Memory
Writers working with memory often struggle not because they lack material but because they have too much of it. Every recollection seems connected to another recollection, and soon a two-page piece begins carrying the burden of explaining an entire family history. An online writing coach can help identify the true center of gravity in a draft.
What Nature Teaches Us About Story
Writers often become so accustomed to the existing architecture of a manuscript that it becomes difficult to imagine a radically different organizing principle. A creative writing mentor can help identify natural patterns already emerging from the environment.
Writing Memory in the Digital Age
Writers dealing with memory often accumulate far more material than the finished piece can hold. Digital archives make that problem even more pronounced. Hundreds of photographs, messages, recordings, and remembered scenes may all feel important because they genuinely belong to the writer's experience or the character's history. A creative writing coach can help distinguish between material that merely documents the past and material that generates narrative movement.
How to Prepare an Excerpt for a Public Reading
A literary coach can also help distinguish between a passage that is important to the book and a passage that works well aloud. Those are not always the same thing. Together, writer and coach can experiment with different openings, trim unnecessary explanation, clarify transitions, and consider how the excerpt represents the larger project without attempting to summarize it.
Changing With a Manuscript
Early in a project, book writing coaching may help with generating material, building structure, or maintaining momentum. After several years, the value in manuscript consultation often lies in its ability to restore the writer’s perspective on the project.
The Reflective Voice: Writing From Two Points in Time
Writers working with autobiographical material often know their experiences too intimately to recognize when the distinction between the experiencing self and the reflective narrator has become blurred. Author coaching can help identify moments when the older narrator is explaining too much, scenes in which the younger self possesses knowledge they could not realistically have had, or passages where the writer has not yet explored the significance of what has been described.
Writing Like Jazz: What Improvisation Can Teach the Novelist
This kind of responsiveness can be particularly important during drafting. Writers sometimes become so committed to their initial conception of a book that they fail to recognize the better book beginning to appear underneath it. A book writing coach can be useful in helping a writer negotiate this tension.
Before the First Book: Building a Literary Career
Writers therefore need ways of measuring progress that do not depend entirely on publication. A manuscript becoming more structurally coherent is progress. So is learning how to revise, developing a distinctive voice is progress, and building relationships with other serious writers. Author mentorship provides continuity where the literary marketplace often provides only scattered responses.
What an Agent’s Client List Can Tell You
A database can tell a writer that an agent represents literary fiction. A publishing consultant can help determine what that description seems to mean in practice. This might mean comparing an author’s manuscript to the kinds of books represented by several prospective agents, examining recent sales, and identifying which agents appear to share the manuscript’s aesthetic and commercial territory.
What Writers Can Learn from Painters About Composition
Good composition is rarely symmetrical in any simple sense. Paintings can be deliberately lopsided, crowded, spare, or unsettling. Novels can be as well. The more useful task to approach with a book writing consultant is to understand what the existing arrangement is doing and whether it produces the experience the writer intends.
The Myth of the Perfect Conditions for Writing
Before a residency begins, a writing coach can help define the questions worth carrying into it. Rather than arriving with the enormous and vague instruction to “work on the novel,” a writer might identify several concrete problems.
The Art of Literary Research
Knowing when research has become generative and when it has become evasive can be difficult, particularly during a long project. This is one place an online writing coach can be useful. Because the coach stands outside the writer’s private accumulation of notes, books, interviews, and discoveries, they can often see more clearly which material is actually shaping the manuscript.
Should Reading Make Us Better People?
The best literary mentorship therefore resembles the best literary education. Neither supplies a set of correct interpretations. Both cultivate attention. The student learns to stay with a difficult passage. The writer learns to stay with a difficult character. In each case, understanding comes from resisting the urge to resolve complexity too quickly.
For Blog Writers: Finding Meaning in the Mundane
This distinction between the visible subject and the deeper subject is one of the most valuable things a writer can learn. An essay about cleaning out a parent's garage may ultimately be about grief. A post about taking the same bus every morning may become an essay about loneliness or community. A piece about learning to bake bread may slowly reveal itself as an exploration of patience. A publishing consultant can help identify those moments and ask how they might be developed.
The Personal Essay as a Form of Thinking
A writing consultant can read for the moments when the essay becomes more complicated than the writer’s stated intention. The writer may believe the essay concerns independence, while several of its strongest scenes concern obligation. They may think they are writing about resentment, while the language keeps returning to nostalgia.
When Reality Starts to Look Like Fiction
Writers working closely with autobiographical material often become unable to distinguish between what genuinely happened and what now feels narratively inevitable. A publishing consultant can identify moments that seem overly engineered, point out where a reader may begin to distrust the narrator, and help the writer preserve dramatic force without polishing away complexity.
The Essay and the Examined Life: Nonfiction as a Practice of Self-Knowledge
Many people think they need to know exactly what their essay is about before they start. They expect to prove a point or deliver a clear takeaway. But that pressure can get in the way. A good personal writing coach can help loosen it. Some of that help is practical—structure, pacing, revision—but a lot of it is about helping the writer notice where the real questions are.
Writing About Failure Without Self-Pity
Writers often arrive at the page with a story they have already told themselves many times. They know who disappointed them, what they regret, and where the pain lives. But the essay may be hiding somewhere slightly to the side of that familiar account. An author coach can help listen for the places where the writing goes vague, feels too guarded, or becomes too polished.
The Traveler as Stranger
Travel writing depends on balance, and that balance can be difficult for the writer to judge alone. A manuscript may contain vivid descriptions without enough reflection, or it may offer a lot of personal revelation without enough attention to the actual place. A manuscript consultation with a skilled writing consultant can help the writer see where the gaze feels most alive and where the narrative gaze feels too possessive.