Writing Tips
Persona Poetry: How to Write a Persona Poem
Persona poems allow poets to inhabit the minds of other people and write from their perspectives. If you’ve ever wanted to get inside someone’s brain, crawl around in it for a while, and come to a deeper understanding of their psyche, you might want to learn how to write a persona poem. The persona poetry…
Read MoreHow to Write a Love Poem
Love poems have tried to capture the essence of love since the dawn of poetry itself. Because love is a highly personal and variable experience, no two love poets will approach the topic in quite the same way. As a result, a corpus of beautiful love poems has emerged throughout our many millennia of writing…
Read MoreWhat is Form in Poetry? 15 Poetic Forms to Try
The relationship between poetry forms and language cannot be overstated: with different forms of poetry, poets encounter new ways to grapple with complex poetic topics. Indeed, poets have played with form since the dawn of poetry, resulting in the countless forms of poetry that us poets have at our disposal. Understanding most forms is easy,…
Read MoreWhat is Purple Prose? The Case Against Overly Ornate Writing
Ah, purple prose: that ornate room of language: that jeweled scabbard with which the writer unsheaths their mightiest thoughts, decorated and aglitter in the light of passing eyes; so wrought with its own exigence, it twists the reader’s mind, so labyrinthine. If you didn’t understand that paragraph, I didn’t either. It’s not good writing, but…
Read MoreCreative Writing Feedback: How to Workshop Creative Writing
Writing workshops are a wonderful way to grow and expand your writing skills—provided you know how to workshop creative writing. There are different writing workshop models, both online and in person, each with their own particular ways of benefiting your writing journey. What are those models, and how do you engage in proper critique writing?…
Read MoreWriting Styles: What is Style in Writing?
Writing styles may be hard to define, but something separates Hemingway from Steinbeck, Atwood from LeGuin, or Keats from Wordsworth. Though two given writers might dwell on similar themes, every writer expresses a unique writing style, conveyed through elements like word choice, narrative structure, and the author’s own voice. But what is style in writing?…
Read MoreParallelism Definition: Writing With Parallel Structure
Parallelism, or parallel structure, describes a type of sentence structure common in the English language. When poets and prose stylists effectively employ grammatical parallelism, they strengthen the connections between ideas and objects, embedding relationships in syntax. It might seem silly to write an entire article on a singular sentence structure. Writing parallelism certainly isn’t difficult,…
Read MoreWhat is Point of View in Literature? Exploring Narrative Point of View
You might not notice it, but most published writing contains a narrative point of view. This includes every book, poem, email, instruction manual, even some street signs and cereal boxes. For us writers, defining the point of view of a story or poem is essential: it’s an important part of making our writing “believable.” Like…
Read MoreWhat is Mood in Literature? Creating Mood in Writing
When we talk about the different feelings that a work of writing evokes, we’re talking about the types of mood in literature. Creative writers are experts at drawing out specific sensations in their writing. When a poem or story leaves you feeling elated, nervous, hopeful, melancholy, or any other particular emotion, then the writer has…
Read More“Show, Don’t Tell” in Creative Writing
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the simplest guidelines in creative writing, and one of the most helpful. In short, it encourages writers to transmit experiences to the reader, rather than just information. “Show, don’t tell” encourages writers to transmit experiences to the reader, rather than just information. “Show, don’t tell” is not just a…
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