The Gilliam Writers Group isn't going to become a standard tutoring or coaching company, nor will it become another vast "umbrella platform" that impersonally connects clients with instructors while taking an unduly large cut of their earnings. Employment-wise, our objective is, in fact, very personal: we want to fortify the skills, influence, and financial independence of young writers of unusual talent -- the kind of talent that has little to do with resumes.

Ransom tells the story of Achilles: beloved hero of the Trojan War, bereaved of his companion Patroclus. But this isn’t the conventional tale of Achilles’ rise to fame, or even of his triumphs in battle. Instead, it’s an account of his reckoning with the loss of his soulmate, who dies on the field as a by-blow of our hero’s own pride.

Each sentence is like a little box into which a writer’s chosen words are piled. How the box looks from the outside, regardless of the words it contains, is very important. Some boxes are brightly colored. Some are small and plain. Some are meant to stack neatly on top of one another. Although opening the box — being able to read the words and absorb their meaning — is thrilling, we wouldn’t experience such a thrill without the careful construction of the box itself.

The Vorrh is admittedly a lot to handle. It’s also an absolutely brilliant work of art. Brian Catling’s pan-medium creative background shines through to stunning effect in every inch of his prose; his style in this novel is immediate, tactile, shamelessly sprawling and descriptive.

My first piece of advice: You, the writer, decide who is telling the story, and how much information they, as the storyteller, are supposed to know and expose.

Reading begins to feel like a trap for children whose parents confuse quantity with quality when it comes to learning; these over-stressed minds learn only that for every page they enjoy, there is a price to be paid in boring, extraneous work.

At some point during our first consultation call, every prospective coaching client asks me the same question. It goes something like: “What is it like to work with a personal writing coach?” or “Can you explain more about your methods?” or “How does a writing coach help you write?” Understandably, most writers, or aspiring writers, who contact me want to know exactly what a coach can do for them.

I’ve worked with dozens of college students who have finished a semester without finishing their final assignments, and who are now working desperately against looming extension deadlines to preserve their grades (and their mental health). Although it’s stigmatized and rarely talked about in academia, end-of-semester paralysis is a troublingly common affliction in today’s universities.

Since the dot com boom and the entrance of millennials into the workplace, creativity seems to have become an increasingly valued asset in the US economy. But for some reason, Americans’ divergent thinking scores have been declining since the time of the internet’s appearance.

When did you last hear of a teacher inviting students to speak up when they’re bored, or when a lesson isn’t engaging them? Our standard educational model does not encourage learners to honor their own desire to learn. In fact, it trains them to suppress this desire when it goes unfulfilled, in order to avoid disrupting the flow of the lesson.

Young people gain less and less in exchange for attending school – specifically in terms of intellectual competency and employment prospects – yet education today is more time-consuming and future-determining than ever. In the US, upward mobility is declining and the quality of public education is poor. Students and their families compensate by working harder, paying more (for tutors and name-brand schools), and participating in more extracurriculars.

A deeper look at the module-style writing lessons that our online writing tutors design for students here at GWG.