The Writing Cycle Blog

It’s one thing to tell trauma to a therapist. It’s another to share your story with the world. The Writing Cycle has rounded up ten powerful quotes to offer insight and inspiration as you engage in writing your trauma narrative. Which resonates with the triumphs and challenges you’ve had healing trauma? Would you add other words […]

Hi Carol, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally? “The creative adult is the child who survived,” said author Ursula K. Le Guin. This has been a guiding light for my artistic evolution. As a creative writer, I’m obsessed with how artifacts, images, and language hoarded in family systems reveal—and hold the potential […]

As a young writer, I assumed everyone had a process similar to my own. It was only in an MFA that it dawned on me most writers do not work the way I do. This distinction increased starkly once outside an academic environment. Bestselling guides advocated following concrete rules, and, above all, chasing market trends. Community critique groups […]

Scottsdale author and editor Carol Test talks rejection, inspiration, and the writing life with VoyagePhoenix. Read about her current projects and learn more about The Writing Cycle’s services in this week’s Trailblazer series. “I love helping authors find their voice and connect with larger questions about the human experience their writing [...]

Is writing worth the time and effort if we can’t make money from our creative endeavors? Are am I a “real writer” if I don’t make a living from my writing? The Writing Cycle’s upcoming coaching series explores the anxiety that arises when the need for market value collides with personal motivations for making art. This year, [...]

For more than three decades, The Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron has been offering compassionate insight on the challenges of creativity. Her tools help writers overcome writer’s block by exploring how fear manifests as procrastination, the relationship between creativity and the unconscious, and by helping authors design not merely a [...]