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.
The Memory Frame: Writing Through Recollection and Return
Because memory feels natural and immediate to the writer, it is easy to assume that the narrative will feel equally clear to the reader. But what makes sense internally may confuse when transposed onto the page. A book writing coach can provide the distance needed to assess whether the structure makes sense, whether shifts in time are signaled effectively, and whether the layering of perspectives deepens the story or muddies it.
The Investigation Frame: Writing Stories of Discovery and Suspense
Writers often know their mysteries too well to see how they play for fresh eyes. A novel writing coach can test whether clues appear at the right moments, whether red herrings are too obvious or too obscure, and whether the pacing sustains curiosity without exhausting patience.
The Architecture of Adventure: Writing the Quest Frame
The stories that endure are those that take the familiar and make it new, that remind us of the power of the quest while revealing paths we had not yet imagined. For that, craft, awareness, and the honest eye of manuscript critique are indispensable companions on the writer’s journey.
Framing the Story: An Introduction to Cognitive Frames and Narrative Worlds
A publishing consultant, especially one with experience in narrative theory, can help illuminate how frames are functioning in a manuscript. They can see when a writer leans too heavily on convention, producing a story that feels predictable, or when a frame has been established but then abandoned midstream, leaving the reader unmoored.
Reading Aloud for Writers: A Path to Stronger Prose and Better Performances
For authors preparing to share their work at a live event or record it for an audiobook, reading aloud shifts from an editing exercise to a performance skill. Developing this ability takes practice and intention, but it can enrich both the craft of writing and the art of sharing one’s work with an audience. With guidance from creative writing coaches and mentors, writers can learn to refine the sound of their prose and deliver it with clarity and confidence.
Literary Marginalia: Questions, Scribbles, and the Secret Life of Books
An online writing mentor encourages writers to treat their own marginalia as raw material—early drafts of essays, poems, or stories that might later take shape. Together in manuscript consultation, mentor and writer can revisit these annotations, asking what they reveal about the writer’s instincts, questions, and obsessions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

