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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 to Listen: Coaching Meter in Poetry
Meter is music—a rhythm that breathes tension and tone into a line of verse. It’s the beat beneath the words that tells us how to feel, even before we understand what the words are saying. But learning to hear that beat, and use it intentionally, isn’t always straightforward. That’s where author mentorship can help.
The 650-Word Bildungsroman: How a Writing Coach Helps Students Tell Their Story
One of the lasting gifts of working with an online writing coach on a Common App essay is that students begin to see their lives differently. They learn to ask the same questions writers and readers have always asked: What does this moment reveal about the self? What’s the turning point? What am I still learning?
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.
More Than Evil: Writing the Morally Complex Villain
In a natural fiction coaching relationship—one grounded in trust and nuance—a writer can begin to see the villain not as an obstacle to the protagonist’s journey, but as a key to the emotional heart of the story.