Real creative effort: a copywriter’s perspective

Yeah, most of what I post about here pertains to the so-called “creative” writing arts — the short story, novel, novella, poem, etc. But I cut my teeth in journalism, then public relations and marketing, and some of the best lessons I’ve learned about writing and creativity have come from those fields and from great copywriters like Andrew Boulton, the author of Copywriting Is…, which is a great resource for anyone who writes promotional or ad copy. Boulton is also a frequent poster on LinkedIn (worth a follow), where he recently posted this gem about the source of “real creative effort.”

How are you directing your creative effort?

Friday Five: Q&A with flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean

‘Short stories and novels are the whole nine rounds of a boxing match, while flash is a duck of one punch.’

Tommy Dean, writer.
Tommy Dean

The genre of flash fiction has become more popular and visible in recent years, thanks to the work of people like today’s Friday Five writer, Tommy Dean. A writer of “mostly flash fiction,” as he puts it on his website, Dean also is an editor of the flash fiction literary magazine Fractured Lit and a writing coach who offers editing services and writing workshops. He is the author of Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022), a collection of flash stories, and two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). He has been previously published in The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, and Pithead Chapel. His stories have been included in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. He lives in Indiana with his wife and two children, and he and I share the common experience of having detasseled corn in our youth.

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