Creative Writing Blog | Writing Tips and Ideas

How to Write Better Stories

This post contains affiliate links that earn commissions from qualifying purchases. You know that feeling you get when you read a novel and become completely lost in it? You can’t put it down, so you lose track of time. When you finally finish, you wish it would just keep going. Isn’t that the kind of…Read More

What is Form Poetry?

We can classify most poetry into two groups: form poetry and free verse. Free verse is a style of poetry that doesn’t adhere to any structure; the poet is free to write lines and stanzas of varying lengths and meter, with or without rhymes. Form poetry, on the other hand, adheres to a specific structure,…Read More

What’s The Difference Between Dashes and Hyphens?

To the passive reader, it’s a short horizontal line that appears somewhere in a text, usually joining two words together. To a writer, it’s something else entirely, but what? Is it a dash, a hyphen, or a minus sign? More than once, I’ve been pecking away at my keyboard and stopped suddenly when confronted with…Read More

14 Types of Creative Writing

When we talk about creative writing, fiction and poetry often take the spotlight, but there are many other types of creative writing that we can explore. Most writers develop a preference for one form (and genre) above all others. This can be a good thing, because you can specialize in your form and genre and…Read More

From 10 Core Practices for Better Writing: Revising Your Writing

I’d like to share a few excerpts from my book 10 Core Practices for Better Writing. “Chapter Three: Revision” explores the importance of revising your work and includes tips and ideas for editing and proofreading. Enjoy! “The best writing is rewriting.” – E.B. White We use the terms first draft or rough draft when we…Read More

Writing Tips: Know Your Audience

It’s an old adage for writers: know your audience. But what does that mean? How well must we know the audience? And does knowing the audience increase our chances of getting published or selling our books? Some writers insist that the best way to write is to just write for yourself. Sit down and let…Read More

Screenplay by Syd Field

This post contains affiliate links that earn commissions from qualifying purchases. Studying the craft of writing from a variety of angles will benefit any writer. If you write short stories, you’ll learn something from studying a little poetry. If you write poetry, you can learn something useful from playwrights. And if you’re a novelist, you…Read More

Poetry Writing Exercises to Engage the Senses

Ah, the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. How do they relate to poetry writing? We delight in the pleasures of the senses, but infusing poetry with sensory stimulation is not an easy task. It takes a deft and creative writer to forge images — using text — that engage a reader’s senses. So…Read More

Writing Dialogue: A Storytelling Exercise

Today’s fiction writing exercise is excerpted from Story Drills: Fiction Writing Exercises, which includes lessons and exercises that help beginning to intermediate storytellers study and practice the craft of storytelling. This exercise, which is from a chapter on narrative, focuses on dialogue. Enjoy! Dialogue Dialogue is one of the most compelling elements of any narrative….Read More

Stock and Cloned Characters in Storytelling

I was recently reading a novel, and a few chapters in, I realized I had mixed up two of the main characters. In fact, I had been reading them as if they were a single character. I’m a pretty sharp reader, and this has never happened before, so I tried to determine why I’d made…Read More