Creative Writing
- Language
- Dense: Spare but Concrete
- Musical: Sound and Sense
- POV
- Personal: Grounded in Life
- Individual: Quirky or Perceptive (or both)
- Character
- Made real through suggestive details
- Grounded in reality-composites
- Focused on essentials
- Fragmented (text without subtext)
- Content driven rather than form driven
- Subtle rather than obvious
- Discovery and Control
- "Inspired"
Writing is a craft, which means learning the rules, but it is also an art, which means that good writers learn when to break the rules.
"The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."
- Captain Barbosa, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Writers on Writing
- Denise Levertov from "Some Notes on Organic Form"
- "The Art of the Short Story" by Ernest Hemingway
- Tips for Poets: Observation (Kristine O'Connell George)
- The Writer's Digest Blog: 10 Rules of Writing a Novel
- Eight Rules for Writing Fiction (New Yorker)
- How to Write a Novel: 7 Tips Everyone Can Use, Chuck Sambuchino (Writers' Digest)
- 20 Writing Tips from Fiction Authors (iUniverse)
- The 5 Biggest Fiction Writing Mistakes (& How to Fix Them) (Writer's Digest)
- Essays on Poetic Theory (Poetry Foundation)
- Types of Poems (Shadow Poetry)
- Criticism of Poet Power (A. W. Allworthy, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities)
- Inspirational Writing Quotes from Famous Authors (Writer's Digest)