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.
Mentorship and the Sublime: Finding Voice in the Tradition of Burke, Kant, and the Romantics
The sublime began as a philosophical category, found poetic expression in the Romantics, and continues to evolve as writers reinterpret its possibilities. What remains constant is the challenge: how to render the immensity of experience in the smallness of language. Author mentorship offers one of the surest ways to meet that challenge, guiding writers to study the past while discovering their own voice within it.
The Western Novel: The Legacy of the Frontier Myth
To appreciate how the Western novel has evolved, it helps to trace how this myth has been constructed, reinforced, and contested, and to see how contemporary writers grapple with its complicated legacy. For anyone seeking to write within or against this tradition, the support of an online creative writing coach can help navigate the cultural baggage that comes with working in a myth-laden genre.
Staging the Uncanny: Experimental Puppetry
A script consultant helps shape the literary architecture of a puppet performance: deciding how language enters the space, how repetition builds rhythm, how silence balances spectacle. Just as a writing coach guides authors through the hazards of experimental prose, a script consultant ensures that the language of a puppet play carries its weight alongside design and performance.
The Strange, Brilliant World of Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme’s short fiction remains a landmark in American literature, a testament to the power of experimental collage. His stories continue to inspire writers who seek to challenge narrative norms and capture the texture of contemporary life in all its strangeness. For those drawn to follow in his footsteps, working with a book publishing consultant can help ensure that bold, unconventional stories not only get written but also get read.
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.
The Writer's Life: Literary Mentorship Through Erikson's Stages of Development
Erik Erikson, the mid-twentieth-century psychologist known for mapping out the psychosocial stages of human growth, offers a striking framework through which we can understand the writer’s journey. When paired with the guidance of an author mentor, Erikson’s stages illuminate how writing changes with each phase of life, and how creative work both mirrors and reshapes our sense of identity.
Writing Coaching: The Human Touch in the Age of AI
AI is powerful but indiscriminate: it produces text, but it doesn’t know the student. A writing coach, by contrast, sees the individual—their voice, their struggles, their potential. A coach can help a student navigate the temptation to let AI “do the work” and instead show them how to use it responsibly.
Monsters and Misfits: Exploring the Grotesque in Fiction
From Rabelais to O’Connor, from Kafka to Peele, the grotesque has offered writers a way to capture the in-between—between laughter and horror, the beautiful and the ugly, the comic and the tragic. For a writer today, the grotesque is a way of telling truths that realism alone cannot express. And with the guidance of a fiction writing coach, navigating its distortions can be exhilarating.
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.
Choice or Fate? Exploring Free Will and Determinism in Screenwriting
Many writers, deeply immersed in their stories, lose sight of whether their characters’ actions feel inevitable or arbitrary. Script feedback from a screenwriting consultant can help them strike the right balance, ensuring that characters come across as fully realized individuals rather than as pawns of plot mechanics or mouthpieces for philosophical abstractions.
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.
Learning to See: The Ethics of Attention in Writing and Education
Writers are, in some sense, professional noticers: they catch the glimmer in the ordinary, the strange in the familiar. But the ability to attend deeply is not innate; it must be nurtured. A writing mentor, unlike a teacher bound to a curriculum, offers guidance in the ethics of attention itself, helping a writer learn to look, listen, and care.
In Conversation: Intertextuality and the Echoes That Shape Literature
Intertextuality is a deliberate engagement with the texts that came before, a conversation across time that allows writers to deepen and complicate their work. But like all conversations, it requires balance. This is why professional guidance matters. Manuscript critique services with a publishing consultant can help a writer discern whether their intertextual strategies are enriching the work or hindering it.
Bending Chronology: The Philosophy of Time in Screenwriting
A screenwriting coach, particularly one skilled in detailed screenplay analysis, can help writers see time as both a structure and a philosophy. Writers often internalize storytelling conventions without realizing the assumptions about time that underlie them. When a student insists their story must “build up” to a climax, they are often thinking within a chronological model that assumes events must accumulate in a linear chain.
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.
From Fractals to Free Verse: Mathematical Blueprints for Poets
Numbers, patterns, and proportions have been used to shape the rhythm, length, and themes of poems in ways that both sharpen their craft and deepen their mystery. For writers who are drawn to this union of precision and beauty, the guidance of a literary coach can help them understand how to harness mathematics as a source of inspiration without letting it flatten the poem into a technical exercise.
The Scripts That Shaped American Film History
Looking at the most influential screenwriters and movements in American film history offers a window into the changing tastes, technologies, and cultural attitudes of their times, as well as providing a roadmap for contemporary writers looking to refine their craft. And for emerging talent, engaging with a screenwriting mentorship program can be one of the most effective ways to learn directly from those who have navigated the shifting landscape of the industry.
Six Traits of Successful Authors: Cultivating Good Habits with Literary Mentorship
When we gather these attributes—persistence, discipline, openness to revision, curiosity, empathy, adaptability—we notive an interwoven set of habits and mindsets. Some may be stronger in one writer than another; each can be cultivated over time. The creative writing mentor’s role is to help the writer recognize and strengthen these capacities in ways that align with their voice and ambitions.