Roland's Creative Writing Blog

To fully harness your creative potential, it is essential to grasp the subtleties of the creative process and understand how at first, elements of the craft of writing and storytelling can often feel counter-intuitive or counter-instinctive. Writing...

Writing is very much an art and a craft. Unlocking your creativity and producing strong writing doesn't just happen by accident. You have to learn to access what is deep inside you. Every aspiring writer has a large reservoir of untapped talent. ...

Writing a novel or screenplay doesn’t happen by accident. Just because you are fluent in English doesn’t mean you can just lock yourself in a cabin in the woods for a couple of months, sit down to write and bang out a good story. As author An...

We love hearing from writers who have taken our courses to see where their creative journeys have taken them. We've recently received updates from several former participants and wanted to share their good news. What makes writers succeed is not tal...

Kathleen and I recently conducted a three-hour workshop at the New South Wales State Library as part of the 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was the third sold out workshop we’ve run at the event.Our goal in the session was to give participants an i...

In fiction, particularly commercial fiction, the most important thing is to keep your reader turning the pages.As the English novelist, E.M. Forster said in his book Aspects of the Novel, a story “…has only one merit: that of making an audience want ...

Writing is an art and a craft. If you want to write a novel or screenplay that other people are going to want to read, you have to learn how to craft your story from beginning to end. In this blog we are going to talk about the critical opening of y...

John Truby is a Hollywood screenwriting teacher and story consultant who shares many of the beliefs we hold about the process of storytelling and structure. One of the key lessons we took away from this interview with him is that a good story and go...

This is an exceprt from an ABC Book Show interview between Jennifer Byrne and best-selling Welsh novelist, Ken Follett. I thought it was a great interview that captured the essence of what    makes a successful novel. In her background brie...

Many people who take our courses are lawyers, investment bankers or other professionals who have always had that itch to do something creative instead of corporate. Matt Sherring was an advertising executive when he first signed up for Unlocking Crea...

Over lunch on Sunday during the second day of our Weekend Intensive for the live Ten Month Novel & Script First Draft Writing Course, one of the writers, a professional journalist, asked a key question: “How on earth could anyone possibly write ...

Every time you sit down to write and face an empty page or computer screen, you need to take a leap of faith. Writing is a confidence game. If you think you can or you think you can’t you are probably right.  In an effort to keep you inspired ...

There are a number of writing courses out there. What makes the Writers’ Studio different? There’s an old writing saying: You can’t be taught how to write, but you can learn. In other words, it is one thing to sit in a room and listen to someone di...

Bob Mayer is the author of The Fiction Writers' Toolkit. He has published 30 fiction books and has two million books in print, translated into eight languages. He is a regular teacher and speaker at the Maui Writers' Retreat and Conference. He says...

Writing a powerful story is a four part process - planning, writing, re-writing and editing. In a recent interview, American screenwriting structure teacher, John Truby talks about the importance of structure and planning when writing a fistory. H...

Daring is the X factor in creativity. That ability to take chances and explore the unknown. The American novelist, Eudora Welty said, "If you can't be a genius, immitate the daring." Gore Verbinski, who directed the Pirates of the Carribean serie...