About Christian De Matteo and Tellworthy Creative Writing Services
Everybody has a story, a unique and wonderful tale, aching to be made Tellworthy. Finding it, feeding it, guiding it and making it art, YOUR ART, is our sole purpose.
christian
De Matteo, MFA
Founder, Tellworthy Creative Writing Services
Writer • Editor • Writing Coach • College Professor
Christian De Matteo has spent more than two decades helping people figure out exactly what they want to say—and finding the best possible way to say it.
A professional writer, editor, writing coach, and longtime college professor of writing and literature, Christian works with writers at every stage of the process, from the first spark of an idea to the final sentence of a finished manuscript. His clients include novelists and short-story writers, academics completing dissertations and scholarly work, professionals developing business and organizational materials, and people who simply know they have something important to say but aren't yet sure how to say it.
Christian brings something different to each project: he is both an editor and a working writer. His fiction has been published across literary, horror, and crime markets, giving him firsthand experience with the craft, revision, submission, and publication process he helps other writers navigate. As co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Fugitive Poems, an independent comics publisher, he has also spent decades writing, editing, developing, and publishing comics, graphic fiction, and prose.
That experience matters. Christian doesn't approach a manuscript as a collection of grammatical problems waiting to be corrected. He approaches it as a piece of writing that needs to work.
For fiction, that means character, voice, structure, pacing, dialogue, tension, clarity, and the thousand small decisions that make readers want to turn the page. Christian works with authors without attempting to turn their writing into his own, helping them identify what makes their work distinctive and strengthening the choices that allow that voice to come through.
For academic and nonfiction writers, it means transforming complex ideas into clear, organized, persuasive prose without sacrificing intelligence or individuality. Christian has spent his career teaching research, composition, literature, and advanced writing at the college level and has worked extensively with graduate writers on dissertations and other long-form academic projects.
For businesses and organizations, it means understanding that nobody has time for lifeless writing. Christian writes and edits speeches, presentations, scripts, promotional materials, web content, professional communications, and other projects where the right words need to accomplish something. His clients have included nonprofit organizations, entrepreneurs, educators, executives, and professionals across a wide range of fields.
Whether he is coaching an author through a novel, restructuring a dissertation, editing a short story, developing a script, or turning a page of corporate language into something another human being might actually want to read, Christian's philosophy remains the same:
Your writing should sound like you—only clearer, sharper, stronger, and impossible to ignore.
That's what makes it Tellworthy.