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.
Borges’s Labyrinths and the Role of the Publishing Coach
In today’s literary marketplace, Borges’s intellectual density can be both an asset and a challenge. A publishing coach helps writers translate that style into work that can find a home with publishers, journals, or presses.
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.
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.
Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque: When Writers Turn the World Upside Down
The carnivalesque is a structured play of disorder, where subversion and parody allow us to glimpse other possibilities—what life might look like if the usual rules didn’t apply. From Rabelais’ ribald tales in Gargantua and Pantagruel to the anarchic humor of contemporary satire, the carnivalesque offers readers both joy and critique. For someone drafting a novel or short story, a manuscript consultant can be invaluable in identifying where the carnivalesque can enliven a narrative and sharpen its commentary.
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.
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.
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.
The Bard Today: Why We Still Read Shakespeare and How a Writing Coach Can Help
The answer lies both in the continued relevance of his themes, the unparalleled richness of his language, and the psychological depth of his characters. And for those who find the first steps into Shakespeare’s world daunting, writing coach services can provide essential support, helping readers unpack the complexity of his work and discover its resonance in their own lives.
The Stories Animals Tell: Challenging Human-Centric Narratives
By giving animals a narrative voice, authors disrupt the human-centric focus that dominates most stories. For writers seeking to explore this mode of narration, working with a book publishing coach can guide them through the process of creating animal voices that feel both authentic and readable.
Learning from Failure: How Abandoned Drafts Teach More than Finished Works
Creative writing mentors have the benefit of distance. They can read a struggling draft and point out its strengths, even if you can only see its flaws. They can also identify which issues stem from fixable craft problems—such as structure, pacing, or character development—and which come from a deeper mismatch between you and the project itself.
Microstructures: How Paragraph Shape Affects Narrative Pace
In publishing and workshop settings, writers often focus on what they’re saying. But how those words are spatially and rhythmically delivered can carry just as much weight. This is the territory of microstructure—a layer of craft that is subtle, yet vital. And it's also a level of prose that publishing coaches and manuscript consultants are uniquely skilled at helping writers refine.