If you have an interest in taking up a career that involves creative writing, it is essential that you understand what would be expected of you. All writing can be termed creative, though this is a style which usually refers to a format which goes beyond that used in technical compositions and journalism. Drama, poetry, personal essays, and short stories can all be classified as falling under the category of creative writing.

There is the option of studying this style of composition to an advanced level. Many schools, colleges, and universities run programs that can allow you to learn exactly how to write creatively and to various levels, there is even the option of studying the subject at a master’s level. One of the best ways to boost your knowledge of this topic is to read a lot of books. In fact, it is often suggested that to become an accomplished writer, an individual must be extremely well read, and familiar with both classical and modern fiction.

There are numerous avenues which can be explored that result in a writing career, though many people choose to opt for a course of education, this is not necessarily the best approach.

Some of the most accomplished writers never took a single class relating to creative writing, though studying the subject can of course be beneficial.

Today, there are plenty of resources available to individuals who have an interest in becoming writers. Thanks to the internet, the potential to self-develop skills and knowledge has been vastly enhanced.

If you are determined to get paid for your compositions, it is essential that you have an excellent command of the English language. Most writers need to have a clear understanding of grammar rules, and have a broad and extensive vocabulary.

It should be noted that even the best writers do get work rejected, this is a situation that needs to be taken constructively as opposed to personally.

There are many ways in which writers, be they beginners or professionals, can hone their skills. It can be productive to always carry a notebook, this can be used to write down thoughts and observations which may come in useful at a later date. It is surprising the inspiration that can be had in the most normal of scenes. For instance, the dialogue overheard on public transport or in cafes can be adapted and used in your compositions.

There are certain times of the day when all writers are more creative, this may be early in the morning or late in the evening. Figure out when you are most productive, and use this time constructively. If you live with friends or family, it is useful to let them know when you are at work so that you will not be disturbed.

At the end of the day, creative writing should be fun. If you feel like it is a chore, then you should take a break or think about whether this really is the best career for you. It is natural to get writers block every now and then, but if this appears permanent you will not be able to earn a livable wage.

Do you have an interesting and eventful life? You can share it with others by writing down your own personal history.

This isn’t a hard job. You just need to remember the major events that have happened in your life and write them down. You don’t have to be a professional author to write it.

Of course, you may not consider your own experiences to be all that interesting. Still, don’t discount them, they may be very interesting to others.

Besides, you may be creating a family heirloom. Imagine having your great-grandchildren find and read your memoir! Wouldn’t they be very interested? Sure they would!

Think about when you read about your grandparents or other distant family members. It sounds like they lived in another world, which is very fascinating. They have memories and experiences that are unlike anything you have experienced yourself.

Sometimes when you first start out to write a personal history you feel a bit lost. This is normal. Try to break it down by years, this can help. You can also break it down by life period, such as school years. The important thing isn’t where you start, it is that you start somewhere.

If you begin with your school days you will remember all kinds of things. Some memories will be better than others of course. Maybe break this down still further by school year.

You can also include information on your interests and hobbies. Lots of people find these things very interesting. What you do and don’t like is also a possible topic. Pay attention to your everyday life, including food choices and tastes. Some people like to read about this.

If you want to really make progress on your personal history, establish and stick to a writing schedule. It doesn’t have to be every single day, even weekly is good, so long as you write when you are scheduled to. Over time the writing will add up and you’ll have a nice and detailed personal history before you know it.

A bereavement poem is a poem that you can use in a eulogy, a remembrance service or on a memorial site as a way to deal with the death of a loved one through imagery and words. When you are having a service, when you need something to get you through it, or when you are looking at words to have posted somewhere in memory of your loved one, a funeral or memorial poem is something that you might want to think about.

There have been many in memory of poems that have been written in the past for many situations. There are funeral poems for the loss of parents and grandparents, or children, or friends or other family members. Each memory poem has the potential to speak to your heart and to the hearts of the people who have lost loved ones. A memorial poem is designed to help with the coping process.

When you are thinking about poems for funerals, there are a couple things that you want to remember. Poems for memorial services should somehow have reference to the person that you have lost – their life, their loves, their faith or something that they loved. You want to be sure that the poem you have chosen is one that is going to speak to you and speak to the other grieving family members.

A well-chosen funeral poem can be something that you hang on to for a long time. You may want to consider printing copies of the memorial service poem to keep and to give to others who want to keep it. By having this poem with you and keeping it along with photos of your loved one either in a scrap book or on an online memorial website, you have words that you can always go back to for a memory. Writing down feelings either in prose or in poetry is highly recommended as a way to deal with severe grief.

All of the memories that you have wrapped up in a certain person can be easily expressed with a well chosen funeral poem and you will be able to keep these words as a memorial for a long time to come. Share a poem with others in hopes of helping them deal with their grief over losing a loved one. It is only by dealing with the grief that comes with losing a loved one that you can truly come out on the other side and learn to live your life again.

~ Ben Anton, 2007

Hopkins saw plainsong as a form of recitative, characterised by its primary intention of the delivery of words, by a restricted tonal range and by irregular rhythmic units, including very long ones.

The relationship between this and his three most chant-like, long-lined poems, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1882), That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire (1888), Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves (1886), is clear, even visually. These poems look to sprawl, a mass of language, across the page, the lines at first barely distinguishable.

To write like this in the 1880s shows the distance Hopkins had travelled from his conventional early poems. Perhaps we should add to this group ‘To what serves mortal beauty’ (1885) and the sonnet on Purcell (1879), both notable for risks taken with the line as unit.

In all these poems the overall pace is slow, stressed, emphatic, but nowhere is there a hint of any mechanism of units or stop-start movements; line,Cartier Jewelry rhyme and sonnet form are totally absorbed into full and sometimes urgent diction which follows its own rhythm.

To call these poems ‘musical’ is somehow crass, but it points out the fundamental difference between Hopkins’s practise and the common generalisation that sets ‘sound’ against ‘sense’.

These poems are not fluid and not easy, and none of their diction relates to pure sound.

Sound is sense, because that is at the root of language, as Hopkins knew, and pause, silence and stress, dissonance and resolution, cumulative and local rhythms are the business of both music and poetry.

The intensity of Hopkins’s thought and the rhythms it generates slow and reorders conventional reading habits. This is made clear by a basic analysis of the structure of any one of the poems, i.e. the number, length and sequence of their phrase and line units, considered simply by the number of end-stopped lines and the number of unbroken lines.

An average Victorian sonnet runs smoothly in mainly unbroken lines: Hopkins roughens this fluency with sub-clauses, interjections and multiple-broken lines, even in the sonnets considered by Bridges as metrically the most standard and therefore, for him, the most accessible of the poems.

Compare Alice Meynell’s sonnet ‘Renouncement’, published in 1893, a standard Italian sonnet: 12 of the 14 lines are end-stopped, 9 of them unbroken. The same sonnet form, Hopkins’s ‘To RB’, written 1889, has 9 end-stopped lines, of which only 4 are unbroken.

Meynell’s sestet flows thus: But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, And all my bonds I needs must loose apart, Must doff my will as raiment laid away, With the first dream that comes with the first sleep I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

For Hopkins standard five-foot ten-syllable lines simply will not do the job. Even in the ‘standard rhythm’ sonnets of the 1870s the lines Jewelry Store begin to lengthen, break-up, and roughen. Because of this move away from the visual and aural conventions of verse punctuation becomes the chief means by which the poem controls its reader’s delivery and thus its reception.

The high number of pauses of different weight, dashes, the hyphenated words and run-on lines are an attempt at total control of the reader: our attention is fixed by this process as the singers’ attention is fixed on the cantor’s hand. He makes a significant distinction between his ever-changing and uncertain system of stress marking and his punctuation.

Everybody knows writing a story is not easy. Like the drama or the poem, it is imaginative literature that should appeal to the emotions of the readers. Since it communicates the writer’s interpretation of reality, there must be an artistic use of language to signify human experience. But how do we write a great short story? What are the things to keep in mind in order to come up with a short story that works? Here’s a quick guide to get you started:

1. Read

Reading is essential to anyone who wants to write. In order to be able to write a good short story, you must read other short stories first. This will not only give you the motivation and inspiration for your own story, but it will also help you learn how other authors made an impression on the reader and use their style as basis to create your own style and impression.

2. Get inspired

For seasoned professionals, there is no need to obtain inspiration because thoughts naturally flow and they only have to put them into words on paper.

But for novice writers, it is important to have one because it will not only help you begin your first paragraph but also keep you going throughout. Your inspiration may take the form of an object. a person, or an event that you just can’t seem to forget.

3. Conceptualize your story

Think of something you want to talk about with your readers. Let’s say you want to relate a story about a couple who fell in love with each other. What about the couple? What is it about them that you are interested to let your readers know? Focus on this idea and think of other concepts that you want to associate with this couple. Suppose the girl’s parents discommended their relationship.

What about the parents? What did they do to stop the two from loving each other? This could signal a good beginning for your story. From here, you would have the notion what to write down.

4. Map out the scenes

In order to keep your writing aligned with your pre-conceived story events, it is good to briefly map out scenes of your story on a different piece of paper. Write down the possible characters of your story and list the main events in order. You don’t have to put so much detail on them because this only serves as a rough sketch of how your story will look like.

5. Chooose your point of view

Who tells the story and how it is told is very critical for a short story to be effective. The point of view can change the feel and tone of the story radically. Hence, you must decide carefully before finally resolving with the angle of vision to use for your story. But whatever it is you decide to choose as the point of view, make sure it stays constant throughout your story to maintain consistency.

6. Conceive your characters

For a short story, create a maximum of only three main characters. Too many main characters will make your story confusing since each new character will provide a new dimension for the story. Each character should be more than cardboard caricatures. Make your characters speak naturally in proportion with their traits. Make them believable but mysterious.

7. Furnish a good introduction

When you have everything planned out, start scribbling your first paragraph. Introduce your main characters and set out the scene. The scene must be some place you know much about so that you’d be able to supply the necessary snapshot for a clearly described setting. Make your introduction interesting to hold the reader’s interest and encourage them to read on to the end. It is also important to hold back significant details and the greater part of the action at this point so the mystery is kept.

8. Build up a great plot

From your introduction, draw out events that will eventually create a problem or a conflict for the main character/characters. After that, begin laying out an array of clues to keep the reader interested, intrigued and guessing. Intensify the conflict as the story moves forward. This will not only make your reader enthused to read more but will also keep them riveted to your story.

9. Show don’t tell

The characters should be the ones responsible for expressing the story through their actions and dialogue and not the writer telling the reader what is being expressed. Rather than saying, “Annette was really mad at her bestfriend Christina for stealing her boyfriend”, say “Annette felt an ache in her stomach and a strong pang of betrayal as Christina approaches her and flashes her with a sweet smile. She breathed hard trying to calm herself as she speaks with suppressed anger: “I hope you’re happy now that you’ve proven yourself as a friend.”

10. Use active verbs

Put as much life into your story as you can. In order to do this, employ verbs in the active voice in your story. Instead of saying,”The flower was picked by Johanna”, say “Johanna picked the flower.”

11. Use some dialogue

Dialogue is important in bringing your story to life. Don’t just use it to pad out your characters. Use it to convey your characters to identify with the reader. Use it in direct quotes like “Go there!” instead of indirect quotes as “She told him to go there.”

12. Keep references handy

A good reference such as a thesaurus or a dictionary is crucial in creating a good story. You can use them to check your spellings and to find the words which best fit your description. Instead of using one lengthy sentence or paragraph, you can utilize one or just a few words to convey what you want to say. Oftentimes, one strong word has a greater effect than a paragraph full of fancy language.

13. Conclude briefly

Conclusions are tough sledding. For a good ending, it is advisable to experiment and to add a little twist. Make your ending unique but not hanging in a loose end. Make it satisfying without making it too predictable. Keep in mind to keep it short but concise and lingering so that the reader is left with a feeling of resonance. Your conclusion should wrap up everything from start to finish.

14. Edit and revise

After fashioning the last words of your story, it is time to begin the editing cycle. Carefully go through your work and fix all your mistakes regarding sentence construction, word usage, formatting. punctuation marks, diction, spelling, grammar, and descriptive analysis. Scratch out words, phrases and even paragraphs which don’t seem to contribute to the basic elements of the story. After you’re done, let it sit for a while for days and even weeks, then edit it again. Reread your story over and over again at different occasions. This will make you see various things you may want to change to make your story shine at its best.

15. Let others proofread

Have your friends take a look at your work. They may just be able to see mistakes which you have missed. For instance, they may be distracted with some words or lines which you adore dearly. In this case, you have to decide on changing it or cutting it off completely.

Writing a short story may not be easy but it can surely be done. With some knowledge on the basic elements and some passion and patience, it’s effortless to pull together a story with just a few ideas. Just keep in

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Dealing with something new when writing a fantasy story is a real problem.

Many times I have been writing something and realized that I read it in some other stories first. It is may be a disaster for you regardless your kinds of writing. Fantasy is particularly annoying, because, because “acceptable” fantasy is mostly based on Tolkien.

The few writers that dare step away from those works, typically draw on mythology to inspire them. So the first question you should ask yourself is what direction you want to go in? Tolkien style fantasy, mythologically inspired fantasy, or do you want to try and step outside the box and create something new?

The first two are far easier of course. The latter can be the most rewarding. Once you know what you want to write about, the next step is to decide what it will be about. What is the drive of the story? Who are the characters? What are they struggling for? There has to be a struggle, no one wants to read about elves doing the laundry on a perfectly lovely day. Not unless a dragon comes along and eats one of them at any rate.

When writing fantasy the key is to allow the sensational to happen, but not too much. Magic is of course present, but it must be used with care. There is nothing wrong with characters who can destroy mountains with a wave of their hand, as long as the enemies can destroy two with the wave of their’s. You should not allow magic; or powers, to take the place of the people. The story is not about what they can do, it is about who they do it to. Never let the fantasy over ride the story.

Once you have learned how to keep the fantasy part of the story under control, writing high fantasy is no different than any other kind of story. The real challenge is knowing when to use the fantastic, and when not to. The plot should always be the most important part, not who can throw the bigger fireballs.

The thought of youthful innocence came swirling in my soul like a little whirlwind full of dry summer dust. I created the characters along with a back drop and began to build the story around them. I knew the mind of the little boy from my own experiences in life and had to work a little harder on the girl. I had to become 11 years old again.

The title “Summer at the swimmin’ hole and Tammy’s pie of life” didn’t come to me until the end of the story. The first feelings of love may be the greatest feelings we ever have. I enhanced the story with that very thought. If I were going to tell anyone how to write, I would tell them to make one emotion the trunk and grow all of the branches from it. To make a great story, song or novel, I believe that one basic emotion has to flow from beginning to end.

Let the words flow from a thought of emotion.

Don’t think about what to write, just write. Don’t think about the middle or end of the story, it will come. Walk through your mind with the story. If it is in a room, be in the room. If it is in a meadow, be in the meadow. You must be a witness to your story. Your creative imagination will fill the room or the meadow with words.

A thousand beautiful stories are in every writer’s heart just waiting to be written. The only thing that can ruin a story is to over think it or ponder fame and fortune as you write. You will know that it is great when you read it the first time and the hundredth time. It is a wonderful feeling!

For Thain, that motivation revolves around a poetics that attempts to fuse the synchronic and the diachronic, the transcendent moment and the narrative sequence. Her book concentrates on Michael Field’s lyrics, devoting only one chapter to their vast oeuvre of verse dramas and their diaries together and a chapter each to their most important collections of lyrics. Thain defends this approach with the assertion that the lyrics offer a clearer statement of their artistic manifesto and a more interesting approach to the paradox of their dual authorship. Subsequent scholars may argue with this point, though to judge by the scant attention so far to their drama, despite their recent popularity, no one to date has. Thain questions whether it is even appropriate to categorize Michael Field under the rubric of Victorian woman poets, arguing persuasively that partly because of their persona, the authors did not engage with the objectifying dynamics of poet and muse with which so many women poets had to contend. Thain also writes against those critics who have claimed Michael Field as simply a lesbian hero. In her chapter on Long Ago, their book of Sapphic translations, she argues that in this collection Michael Field identify with Sappho in order to participate in an amorphous sexual identity, one in which, avoiding contemporary sexology, they do not have to commit to categories of gender and sexuality. This refusal to commit allows them to focus on acute desire itself, rather than on the form it takes. Thomas Sabo Charms

Likewise, the male pseudonym affords the opportunity for occupying multiple positions rather than pointing towards Bradley and Cooper’s masculinity. Situating Michael Field in the context of aestheticism, Thain follows other critics in noting the importance of figures like Walter Pater and in finding concerns about the function of art in their work. For instance, in her examination of Wild Honey from Various Thyme, she reads the book by its cover, showing the significance of Charles Ricketts’s design for the book. Reading the outside as well as the inside, Thain sees the collection as at once, paradoxically, both commoditized and protected from commoditization; while the book object is to be purchased, the poetry inside is priceless. The term ‘poetry’ however, is equally if not more important to the thesis of the book.

Some of the greatest poetry perhaps comes in the simplest of forms. And when we read good poetry it captures our soul and takes hold of our emotion. Not all poetry works the same on every person, some folks feel for one poem and then dislike another, then a different person will become enamored by exactly the opposite. And yet, some poetry is so good that it connects will all, why do you suppose that is? It’s hard to say really.

But what if I told you of a poetry book that you would love and enjoy, a fast, quick read, that would make you think, feel, and understand life, just a little better? Would that be of interest to you? Well, just in case it would let me recommend such a book to you; the book is;

“Calculations on a Mental Mirror,” by Leonard Harlig, self published poetry; copyright 1972 (106 pages).

He writes about reflections throughout his life and the lives of his loved ones from their point of view or from his perception of what they are thinking, challenged by and their own challenges.

Just the other day, I had an individual make some statements to me, and as I read them, I so wanted to recommend this book.

You see, it takes a long time to reach the proper reflective state, to find honesty with your mirror, and some folks need a little help. I believe this book says it all and will get you there. It would also make a great gift for someone who really needs to think. So, please consider it.

If you want editors to notice (and publish) your poetry, here are some ways you can get a competitive edge.

Avoid one-word titles. Or at least be sure your one-word title is amazing and unique. Titles like “Inspiration,” “Passion,” or “Remember” are easy to overlook because they don’t pack a punch.

Reject clichés. They say there are no new ideas, but you’ve got to write in a fresh, new way. To know if your writing is truly innovative, you’ve got to keep an eye on what other poets are up to. Read contemporary poetry. Lots of it. That’s the only way you’ll know where you stand in relation to your peers.

Short and sweet. Poems that are one page long seem to be the most popular among editors (who are often pressed for space in their literary magazines). Also, watch your margins. A poem that is too wide may not fit on the pages of literary journals.

Nix the rhyme. Rhyming poetry is difficult to publish.

For that reason, we can’t even work with poets who primarily focus on rhyme. If you want to rhyme, please do. There are plenty of venues online and even a few print journals for rhyming poets. Just know that at many magazines, rhyme is not favored.

Build a strong bio. The better your bio, the more likely you’ll be well-received. Don’t be discouraged if you have no credentials. Start small and work your way up. If you get too frustrated doing it on your own, find an author’s submission service that can help.

Submit three to five poems per submission. Also, don’t submit more than ten pages total (5-8 pages is best). You don’t want to skimp or overwhelm editors with too many or too few poems.