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.
Leonard Cohen: Poet, Novelist, Songwriter, Guide
To understand Cohen is to trace the intertwined paths of literature and music, and to recognize how he continually tested the limits of intimacy and form. Writers today who draw inspiration from his work can find a wealth of creative strategies to explore in conversation with a writing coach, especially when developing manuscripts that embrace lyricism and ambiguity.
The Many Faces of Belief: Fiction and Religion
Some of the most compelling works of literature find their force in the way they wrestle with the sacred. Authors across cultures have shown that fiction can be a space where belief is questioned, dramatized, or celebrated, and their analyzing their varied strategies with a creative writing mentor can provide a roadmap for contemporary writers who wish to attempt the same.
Arcadia Revisited: The Pastoral Tradition in Contemporary Eco-Poetry
It’s important to note that eco-poetry is not always grand or global. Often it begins with what feels most personal: the backyard garden, the remembered childhood tree, the river where one learned to swim. These small, intimate details carry enormous power when situated within larger ecological frameworks. A coach may encourage you to mine your own lived experiences with nature, to trust that personal specificity can open into something universal.
Rethinking Gender in Sports Writing: How Coaching Shapes Better Narratives
A personal writing coach brings an external perspective that helps challenge these patterns. By engaging closely with a writer’s drafts, a coach can point out moments where language choices may be unintentionally reinforcing stereotypes.
Writing the Chorus: Lessons from Song
Writing coaches often see repetition as one of the hardest techniques for new writers to use effectively. Left unchecked, repetition can flatten prose, creating monotony. Like a poorly written chorus, it can feel predictable and overbearing. The art lies in making repetition evolve—each recurrence must gain something from its placement.
A World Turned Upside Down: How Social Upheaval Shapes Literary Movements
This interplay between historical disruption and literary innovation demonstrates the resilience of the written word and the capacity of literature to illuminate human truths amid uncertainty. For contemporary writers, understanding this dynamic can be an artistic lifeline, particularly when guided by a mentor who helps channel the energy of lived experience into stories.
Why It’s Never Too Late to Write Your Book
Far from being at a disadvantage, older writers often carry strengths that younger writers must work for decades to earn. And with the support of a skilled book coach, these strengths can be honed into a finished work that feels both seasoned and urgent.
Charting the Unknown: A Brief History of Travel Writing and the Role of the Writing Coach
To understand how creative writing coaching fits into this genre, it helps to begin with the genre’s past. The writing coach, like the cartographer of old, helps the modern travel writer chart a course through the ethical and aesthetic choices that make a journey worth writing about.
Writing the Brief and Beautiful: The Travel Encounters We Carry
In their rawness, these interactions challenge us to write with honesty and restraint. And yet, capturing their fleeting complexity on the page can be difficult. This is where author mentorship becomes essential—helping the travel writer mine these moments for emotional resonance without tipping into sentimentality, voyeurism, or cliché.
I Think It Happened This Way: What the Personal Essay Gains from What We Forget
The slipperiness of memory is not just a permissible element of personal essays; it’s a powerful tool. Rather than striving for photographic accuracy, great essayists interrogate memory itself, using gaps, distortions, and doubts as fertile creative ground. And this is precisely where a publishing consultant can become an invaluable ally: not only helping you shape the content of your essay, but encouraging a more nuanced understanding of what “truth” can look like in personal writing.
What Changes, What Remains: The Lifelong Evolution of the Writer's Voice
These stylistic evolutions rarely happen in isolation. Rather, they emerge from a constellation of influences: lived experience, intellectual development, cultural shifts, and perhaps most significantly, mentorship—those sustained relationships that offer critical engagement, guidance, and encouragement through years of artistic searching.
From Kafka to le Carré: The Literary Consultant’s Guide to Bureaucratic Fiction
In today’s publishing landscape—where writers experiment with dossiers, emails, and redacted files—the literature of bureaucracy remains enticingly contemporary. Yet its subtle power also presents unique craft pitfalls. A manuscript evaluation with a literary consultant can illuminate those hidden traps, ensuring that bureaucracy serves the story rather than smothering it.
Memory, Meaning, and Misinformation: The Role of the Memoirist Today
More than just stories about individual lives, contemporary memoirs often stand as quiet acts of resistance against the erasure, distortion, and oversimplification of lived experience. For writers seeking to craft such work, partnering with a literary coach or manuscript consultant can make all the difference in navigating the aesthetic, ethical, and political challenges this kind of writing entails.
Telling Time Differently: Coaching the Fiction Writer in a Post-Pandemic World
Book coaching services are especially valuable for writers who do not wish to write “pandemic stories” in any obvious way, but who sense that their characters, settings, and temporal structures are nevertheless shaped by the emotional residue of the last few years. Whether the novel takes place in a near future, a remembered past, or an entirely fictional world, the pandemic’s shadow might still inflect how the protagonist navigates change, how time is depicted, or how isolation is rendered.
Before the Genre Had a Name: Mentorship and the Books That Broke the Mold
When a book doesn’t follow existing rules, it often appears to be breaking them badly. But in reality, it’s forging new ones. It is hard to name something that has no precedent. It is even harder to advocate for its value when you are the only one who sees it clearly. This is where author mentorship can make the difference between a misunderstood work that is eventually celebrated and one that never sees the light of day.
The Hidden Curriculum of Creative Writing Workshops: Why Authors Need Mentors to Build More Equitable Systems of Critique
Literary mentors create a space for critical conversations about the hidden curriculum of writing workshops. In a one-on-one relationship, mentors can help writers identify when feedback they receive is genuinely about craft and when it may be colored by unconscious bias or limited cultural frameworks.
Writing the Athlete’s Story: Literary Techniques for Sports Narratives
For writers interested in developing fiction that integrates sports in meaningful and stylistically rigorous ways, the challenge lies in navigating both the technicalities of the sport and the subtleties of character and theme. Working with an online creative writing coach can help writers address these challenges by offering guidance on narrative structure and prose style. This post explores key literary novels that incorporate sports in substantive ways and discusses how fiction writers can benefit from coaching support while pursuing similar creative goals.
Myth, Modernism, and Now: The Irish Literary Heritage
Irish writing has always examined the pressures of history, the fractures of colonialism, and the nuances of personal and national self-understanding. Its authors have employed a wide range of narrative forms and tonal strategies—from mythic structure to lyrical prose to sharp satire—while returning to core thematic concerns such as exile, memory, language, and the tensions between tradition and change. For contemporary writers working under the influence of this tradition, the challenge is best approached with sustained critical engagement, and a book writing coach can play a central role in helping authors identify, refine, and realize their literary goals in light of this demanding legacy.
Starting in the Middle: Using In Media Res to Build Narrative Momentum
Especially in short fiction, where space is limited, in media res provides a method for building tension, revealing character, and structuring information efficiently. This blog post examines how in media res functions across classical and modern literature, explores its practical benefits and challenges, and outlines how collaboration with a creative writing consultant can support writers in executing this technique effectively.
W.G. Sebald and the Art of Blending Genres: A Practical Guide for Writers
Sebald's prose tends to move seamlessly between personal reflections, historical accounts, and literary references, creating a layered and intricate narrative texture that resists simple categorization. His work explores memory, trauma, and historical reflection, often focusing on the lingering effects of World War II and the Holocaust. For writers inspired by Sebald’s approach, book writing coaching can help give insight into this challenging form.