The literary circles of the past were a special form of literary companionship that is mostly lacking today. Between the noncommital “likes” on social media and the constraints of the final publisher, literary circles provided a commited, ongoing critical conversation with the author and her work, providing a middle-ground for the literary progress. With the introduction of the Poetic Circle we want to recreate this type of poetic conversation.

Creativity in writing is neither images, voice, setting and story, nor any superficial advice you might get in writing courses. This is craft at best, but not creativity. Creativity isn’t a steady, guided road to reality, but the lightning spark that shines at some moments out of a web of experiences, knowledge, and preparation. If you had the task to describe a pyramid, would you write that the pyramid is a polyhedron for which the base is a polygon and all lateral faces are triangles? You would hardly do that. …

One of the main advantages of TextRoll is the efficient implementation and replication of the text creation process. If you are a novelist, a journalist or if you are writing your academic thesis, the organization of your writing workflow is key to improve the creativity and the efficiency of your texts. Do you know how you are writing? Do you have a process in place how to plan and write your novel? In fact, most writers are not fully aware of the writing process based on which they create their texts. They probably have more or less intuitively organized their notebook…

When writing text, we intuitively think of the finished work and the nicely ordered pages from the first to the last. This linear image often guides our writing efforts as we do not realize that linearity is the smallest part of the writing process. At some point during the writing process, we get uncomfortably trapped between the chaos of our ideas, scribbles, notes, blocks of text, chapters, and the finished text. Now we want to get out of this mess as quickly as possible to get to a nice, final book that we can…

The baffling fact is that most of us are not really aware of how we create our books, articles or academic papers — or how exactly we write what we write. Every writer has her own text creation flow that proceeds from first experiences or imaginations to the first ideas…

Many word processors claim to deliver focused writing for authors, reducing the user interface to a bare minimum. Clearly, this is an advantage compared to the cluttered UIs of Microsoft Word and its brethren. Yet the fact is that focused linear writing is only the end phase of text creation…