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@Karthmin yep. Tolkien is great. I’ve got a classmate, also a Creative Writing major, who says he’s only about average, but then he doesn’t think very highly of Lewis either, so I don’t think his opinion counts for very much. But it’s not just his technical skill at writing that makes him great (though having such a thorough grasp of the English language, he is good at picking just the right word for a given context), it’s the themes of his stories. Anyone, now that he’s done it, can build a world with four or five main races and an evil antagonistic force. But hardly anyone’s copycatted his themes. And his Christian worldview is essential to his skill at working things out with poetic justice and all — like Saruman and Denethor and even Boromir (though he died redeemed) contrasted with Frodo (though he fell) and Sam and Faramir and Gandalf.

How familiar are you with Chesterton? This is kind of a tangent but he had good things to say. And a large part of his writing was for money, because he was a journalist for many years, but he was also good at saying unpopular things (and, when it came to poetry, in unpopular forms — he kept to rhyme and metre when it was very out of fashion) about writing and stories.