How does one become a skilled creative writer? This is an article which aims to explore outside the usual writing tips about technical ability, time management, vocabulary choices, etc. There are already thousands of articles and books, even classes on that subject matter. Let’s get real about what it really takes to succeed in writing creatively.

How to create a fictional world for a fantasy setting in either stories or games. Learn how to create a world and look at the various aspects that are important to help make it believable as well as fictional.

Original horror screenplays are tough to find. When an original idea appears on a Hollywood agent’s desk though, he or she knows that gold has been struck.

Are you ready to tell your story? Take these steps to kick off the writing career you’ve always wanted.

In creative writing, examples of dialogue can help readers identify a masculine or feminine character. Consider real-life examples.

One of the questions I received from a reader was about voice. He wanted to know how he could establish his voice as a writer or determine if he had one and how to strengthen it if he did. Establishing your voice as a writer can be achieved by doing three things.

People write from their ego and produce not-poetry; people write to heal themselves and this is good and meaningful; and thirdly, and more famously, people write poetry because they write poetry and produce art. And a number key factors come together when this happens. First, the third desire – for beauty – comes into play (in every sense of the word). The writing is an aesthetic, an art, and a certain skill and knowledge comes into its construction which seeks to render meaning as it truly is: namely, beautiful. It is not a ‘gloss’ on meaning – that would be versification – but it reveals the essential nature of meaning and is often a kind of discovery. We read the poem and we see something, we hear something, we feel something that had not existed before – and this can surprise the poet his or herself. Meaning and truth are not abstractions anymore but are given form, symbolic, metaphoric and mimetic too, and this is beauty. Beauty, as Thomas Aquinas observed, arrests motion…

Writing a successful novel requires the author to draw the reader into her world. She can do this by setting the scene with effective descriptions. By using an example from an Roman Historical novel, you can see how this can be done without slowing down the story.

The second primary reason to write poetry is to heal, oneself first of all, and others secondarily, if they able to read your words and take strength from, and identify with, your situation. Healing and poetry have been soul mates from the beginning: the god Apollo was the god of healing and the father of the Nine Muses of poetry, and specifically, inspiration. We need to bear in mind that there are three fundamental desires of the human spirit, or soul if you will: the desire for meaning, for truth, and for beauty. And these three intangible concepts are not isolated systems or mutually exclusive; at their greatest moments all three are present in the greatest works of art and poetry, and they interact with each other. A simple example would be looking at a stupendous scene of nature: we are overwhelmed by its beauty perhaps in the first place, but oftentimes we also sense that that beauty stems from a deep meaning or purpose in the heart of things.

There are two plus one primary reasons to write poetry, which is not to say three; all numbers may or may not be equal, but reasons certainly are not. There are good reasons, and less good ones for all sorts of things. I am excited myself by good reasons to write poetry, and groan when I encounter the wrong reason. To deal with the negative first: the bad reason for writing poetry, which is really a reason to not write it, is the ego. Poetry written from and by the ego, pure and simple. This is bad because the ego cannot write poetry, and when it does it subverts it, and puts in place an ersatz product which deceives, much like a medicine or a food which actually in the long term poisons. The ego wants to write because it perceives that poetry is status-laden and a way to the prizes that it seeks; one crucial prize being immortality – the idea that life is short but art is long, and so there is some perpetuation of its own existence through the glory of words.

Everyone recognizes his or her loved ones on the phone. What is it about them that make their voices unique?

Many years ago when I was first getting into the writing world I had no idea what a Try/Fail was when I heard someone bring it up. (Maybe I was a bit slow on the uptake.) I also happened to be painfully shy at the time and couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone. So for those people like me who are not quite getting it here’s a short explanation…