Creative Writing Blog | Writing Tips and Ideas

Creative Writing Prompts for Crafting Compelling Imagery

Today I’d like to share a collection of prompts from 1200 Creative Writing Prompts, which contains a variety of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction writing prompts. Some of the prompts in the book are story starters. Some are word lists. The prompts I’m sharing today are simple but provocative images that are designed to spark a…Read More

Poetry Writing Exercises: Using Connotation to Find the Perfect Word

Poetry writing exercises are an excellent way to develop writing skills, especially skills that are essential to writing compelling poetry. Writing exercises can provide us with new perspectives, techniques, and ideas that strengthen and improve poems we’ve written and poems we have yet to write. Words are the most basic building blocks for writers, and…Read More

Narrative Point of View in Storytelling

Today’s post includes excerpts from What’s the Story? Building Blocks for Fiction Writing, chapter six: “Narrative Point of View.” Enjoy! The terms story and narrative can be used interchangeably, meaning a sequence of events, real or fictional, that are conveyed through any medium ranging from prose to film. However, when we talk about narrative, we’re…Read More

Poetry: Making Music with Words

Most writers are primarily concerned with the meaning of the words they choose. Is the language precise and accurate? Do the words provide the best connotation for what the writer is trying to communicate? Does the language show, rather than tell? But poets take language a step further and push it into the realm of…Read More

Grammar Rules: Further vs. Farther

Believe it or not, the words further and farther have different meanings, although people tend to use them interchangeably. And it’s no surprise, because these two words look and sound similar, and the difference in meaning is subtle. Plus there are a few circumstances when they are legitimately interchangeable. Let’s solve the further vs. farther…Read More

How to Be More Creative in Your Writing

Here’s an age-old question: is creative writing an art or a craft? Artistically minded writers will say that writing is most definitely an art while those who who think more analytically will claim writing is a skill, a trade, and a business. My answer is that writing can be either an art or a craft,…Read More

Eight Characteristics of Good Writing

How important is it for a writer to be able to discern the difference between good writing and bad writing? Pretty important, if you ask me. I know some writers aren’t concerned with quality. In today’s do-it-yourself and get-it-done-fast world, quality plays second fiddle to quantity. Who cares if your books are full of typos,…Read More

Ten Tips for Writing a Book

Writing a book is a big deal. It takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you want to do it right, which means creating something that people will find entertaining or useful and then polishing, marketing, and promoting it. It all begins with an idea — a concept. It might start with a…Read More

Writing Resources: The Crafty Poet

This post contains affiliate links. One of my favorite classes in college was a poetry writing workshop. Sometimes we did poetry prompts or exercises. Occasionally we read and analyzed poetry. But mostly we shared our poems and received feedback that would help us see the strengths and weaknesses in our work. And then we could…Read More

100 Poetry Prompts

My first love in writing was poetry. In my early teens, writing poetry was a creative and cathartic way to explore my ideas and vent my emotions. Writing poetry was accessible — all I needed was some paper and a pen. It didn’t even require a huge investment of time. I scrawled words onto the…Read More