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    30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity <I>Coach</I> Businesses to Open: How to Use Writing, Music, Drama & Art Therapy Techniques for Healing
    30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity <I>Coach</I> Businesses to Open: How to Use Writing, Music, Drama & Art Therapy Techniques for Healing
    30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity <I>Coach</I> Businesses to Open: How to Use Writing, Music, Drama & Art Therapy Techniques for Healing
    Ebook418 pages6 hours

    30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity Coach Businesses to Open: How to Use Writing, Music, Drama & Art Therapy Techniques for Healing

    By Anne Hart

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    About this ebook

    Exercise your brain's right hemisphere to write words using improved visual imagery. Here's how to open 30+ businesses as a creative writing coach incorporating selected techniques for healing and memory enhancement inspired by music, drama, and art therapists.

    Learn healing techniques from creative writing therapists using the tools of music, visual imagery, and expressive arts therapies in the background. It's a multimedia approach to enhancing creativity, memory and to write salable work.

    Are you interested in guiding life story writers in a variety of environments from life-long learning or reminiscence therapy to working with hospice chaplains? Be an entrepreneur, career coach, or manuscript "doctor" organizing groups using music and art in the background to inspire authors. Design brain-stimulating exercises for specific types of writing.

    Tired of analyzing puzzles to build brain dendrites and stimulate, enhance and exercise your own memory or those of groups or clients? Help yourself or others write salable works and move beyond journaling as a healing tool. Write therapeutically about a significant event in anyone's life against a background of art or music.

    Fold paper to make pop-up books, gifts, or time capsules where you can illustrate and write. Even add MP3 audio files.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateJan 2, 2007
    ISBN9781532000393
    30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity <I>Coach</I> Businesses to Open: How to Use Writing, Music, Drama & Art Therapy Techniques for Healing
    Author

    Anne Hart

    Popular author, writing educator, creativity enhancement specialist, and journalist, Anne Hart has written 82 published books (22 of them novels) including short stories, plays, and lyrics. She holds a graduate degree and is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and Mensa.

    Read more from Anne Hart

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      Book preview

      30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity <I>Coach</I> Businesses to Open - Anne Hart

      9781532000393_epubcover.jpg

      30+ Brain-Exercising

      Creativity Coach

      Businesses to Open

      ♦

      How to Use Writing, Music, Drama &

      Art Therapy Techniques for Healing

      Anne Hart, M.A.

      ASJA Press

      New York Lincoln Shanghai

      30+ Brain-Exercising Creativity Coach Businesses to Open How to Use Writing, Music, Drama & Art Therapy Techniques for Healing

      Copyright © 2007 by Anne Hart

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      ASJA Press

      an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

      iUniverse

      2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

      Lincoln, NE 68512

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-595-42710-9

      ISBN-10: 0-595-42710-3

      ISBN: 978-1-5320-0039-3 (ebook)

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 Preserving Memories, Enhancing Creativity, and Healing by Writing Memoirs-Text, Oral, Visual, Pop-Up Books, and Multimedia

      Chapter 2 Creative Writing Therapy Group Fiction Projects to Do

      Chapter 3 Creative Fiction Writing Therapy Projects for Playwriting & Scriptwriting

      Chapter 4 How to Create Paperback 98-Page Pamphlets on Current Issues in the News for Students/ Researchers, Teachers, and Librarians

      Chapter 5 Writing, Publishing, and Selling Your Own Small Booklets or Pamphlets

      Chapter 6 How to Format Your Book or Booklet Manuscript

      Chapter 7 Self Promotion and Plugging Products

      Chapter 8 Pre-Selling Your Book with a Web Hub before Publication

      Chapter 9 Getting a Strong and Visible Platform

      Chapter 10 Writing Drama or Memoirs as Time Capsules for Internet Video Theater or Radio

      Chapter 11 Organizing Your Life Story Book as Dramatic Fiction

      Chapter 12 Writing and Expressive Arts Coaches as Creativity Motivators

      Chapter 13 Write about Peoples’ Inner Payoffs and Moral Needs

      Chapter 14 Writing Biography and True Story

      Chapter 15 How Writing Salable Work is about Selling Solutions

      Chapter 16 Does Writing Your Life Story As A Novel Affect Your Memory?

      Chapter 17 Writing Life Stories or Current Issues as Romance Novels or Romantic Stories

      Chapter 18 Using Odd and Even Chapters in Your Book or Biography

      Chapter 19 Music Therapies as Healing and Inspirational Tools in Creative Writing Coaching

      Chapter 20 How to Write a Course Syllabus and Teach Online to Market Your Books

      Chapter 21 Online Creativity-Enhancing Businesses for Writers as Entrepreneurs to Start Media Tours for Authors and Speakers

      Chapter 22 News Monitoring Service

      Chapter 23 Music Video Podcasts

      Chapter 24 Mind-Body-Spirit Businesses Numerology Video Podcasts and Games for Entertainment

      Chapter 25 Inspirational and Motivational Writing with Music for Relaxation Business

      Chapter 26 Creative Writing Preference Assessments as Healing Tools

      Chapter 27 Writing Coaches and Creative Writing Therapists are "Tech Support.

      Chapter 28 How Slice-of-Life Vignettes, Essays, and Journaling Become Healing Tools

      Appendix

      Bibliographies

      Introduction

      Here’s how to open a variety of businesses as a creative writing coach, memory enhancement facilitator, or consultant. Incorporate selected techniques for healing inspired by music, drama, and art therapists. Or design creative writing assessments for clients. Consider life-long learning in expressive arts coaching. Become a creative writing facilitator, therapist or a manuscript ‘doctor’ and writing coach. Here are numerous business to start and operate all focused on applying or enhancing creativity and/or memory.

      You can become certified as a creative writing therapist using the healing tools of music, visual imagery, and expressive arts therapies in the background. It’s a multimedia approach to enhancing creativity and memory. Other entrepreneurial possibilities include alternative healing consultant incorporating creative writing and journaling as healing tools for use in problem solving or conflict resolution. Organize family history and genealogy journalism research workshops.

      You’d work under the supervision ofa health care professional providing writing instruction to a group. Or as a coach, you’d work in a corporate setting as an outsourced independent business contractor training executives in how to improve their writing skills. Or offer coaching in writing to employees and executives in a corporate setting as a business communications trainer. Another possibility is to open a writing coach business and help authors prepare their manuscripts, plays, or scripts for the appropriate markets—publishers, agents, or producers.

      In a religious or alternative healing group, creative writing coaching becomes a tool for journaling inwardly to discuss choices made. Coach individuals in how they can learn from past decisions. Learn how to make better decisions in writing and in life by not overlooking the blind spots. Creative writing as a coaching business in a consulting business also becomes looking beyond editorial revisions to see what type of visible national platform a writer-client can develop.

      Because creative people differ, writing coaches or consultants are trained and hired to recognize blind spots that could lead to a creative worker’s derailment. Copyeditors are hired to revise, edit or otherwise correct the writing rather than heal the writer.

      Creative writing therapists, like biblio/poetry therapists or expressive arts therapists (art, music, drama, and dance), are certificated persons with graduate degrees. Expressive arts therapists have to pass national exams. They are trained in a particular therapy in graduate school and serve in internships in one of the expressive arts therapists working under the supervision of health care professionals, such as a physician prescribing a specific plan of therapy.

      Creative writing therapists help people from all walks of life solve problems and resolve conflicts by making use of journaling, reading, and writing as healing tools in therapy, usually with a group.

      Creative writing coaches are not licensed and don’t need a specific degree or expertise in a special area of training. Most have years of experience in editing books or writing published works, or working as a script doctor on plays or film and video scripts. They are not trained as therapists. They are consultants similar to script doctors that help writers improve their books, scripts, or other works of writing.

      Creative writing therapists and writing teachers may specialize in helping people write, record, or transcribe their life stories, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal or oral histories. Writing teachers who are not creative writing therapists with training and certification are sometimes called personal historians when they specialize in helping clients write or record life stories. Those recording life stories are called oral historians.

      Are you interested in guiding life story writers in a variety of environments from life long learning to working with hospice chaplains? Or perhaps you’d like to be an entrepreneur organizing groups as a writing coach using music in the background to inspire authors?

      Are you a musician or certificated music therapist who wants to write books, stories, or true life experiences in a variety of formats—books, short stories, skits, plays, scripts, poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, or interactive learning materials? Perhaps you’d like to design brain-stimulating exercises for others in specific occupations or life stages. You can combine writing with music and art or drama as multimedia to enhance creativity.

      Tired of analyzing puzzles to build brain dendrites and stimulate your own memory or those of groups or clients? Write about an experience or event in your life or another’s significant event, highlight, or turning point with a goal of writing therapeutically with a background of ethnic or inspirational music.

      Or should you work the right hemisphere of your brain and fold paper to make pop-up or origami books where you can illustrate, write, and even add an array of MP3 audio music or speech files on a disc or add a disc with video, photography, and illustrations slipped inside an envelope pasted on the inside back book cover.

      Write while listening to music for inspiration, relaxation, or closure. Write therapeutically for health. Here’s how to write salable memoirs for popular magazines to enhance your memory. The first question to ask yourself or another is, On your way to maturity, what have you given up? What have you added? Is your life story about disconnection and keeping your mouth shut? Or is it about connections and sharing meaning through communication?

      How secure, stable, and steady is your sense of self as the seas crash around you? To what portraits will your memoirs give voice as you cross over to each new stage of life? To what in your life story will you pay tribute? Describe your watershed in colorful words, sounds, or pictures. Highly recommended background reading before starting to write memoirs (for female adolescent memoirs writers, older adults, and journaling coaches or creative writing educators) are the books titled, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, by Lyn Mikel and Carol Gilligan, Ballantine Books, 1992, and In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, by Carol Gilligan, Harvard University Press, 1982.

      Readers reach out to you. Let’s hear or read about your crossroads and paths taken. And to put your words to use, consider writing salable anecdotes and life experiences for popular magazines. Your social history is part of pop culture. Reminiscing is good for your memory and personal history.

      Memoirs are excerpts and highlights of significant events in your life. They can be written in prose form or as skits, plays, dialoguing with relatives, or as monologues. Parts of your life story can even become material for stand-up comics in a laugh-for-your-health workout. Or you can write salable memoirs and put direct experience in a small package and launch it worldwide.

      Write your life story in anecdotes of 375 to 1,500 words. The difference between memoirs and autobiographies is that memoirs are excerpts or highlights of a life story. Autobiographies are life stories than run chronologically from birth to maturity.

      Write salable tributes, eulogies, and highlights of life stories and personal histories for autobiographies. Then condense or contract the life stories or personal histories into PowerPoint presentations and similar slide shows on discs using lots of photos and one-page of life story.

      Collect experiences. Flesh-out news stories, linking them together into first-person diary-style novels and books, plays, skits, or other larger works. Write memoirs or celebration-of-life tributes for the living.

      If ghostwriting is too invisible, write biographies and vocational biographies, success stories and case histories, and customize for niche interest groups. Your main goal with personal history and life stories is to take the direct experience itself and package each story as a vignette.

      The vignette can be read in ten minutes. So fill magazine space with a direct experience vignette. Magazine space needs only 1,500 words. When you link many vignettes together, each forms a book chapter or can be adapted to a play or script.

      By turning vignettes into smaller packages, they are easier to launch to the media. When collected and linked together, they form a chain of vignettes offering nourishment, direction, purpose, and information used by people who need to make choices. Here’s how to write those inspiration-driven, persistence-driven life stories and what to do with them. Use universal experience with which we all can identify.

      Included is an excerpt from a full-length diary-format first person memoirs novel and an entire three-act play. Also, there is a monologue for performances. There’s a demand for direct life experiences written or produced as vignettes and presented in small packages.

      Save those vignettes electronically. Later, they can be placed together as chapters in a book or adapted as a play or script, turned into magazine feature, specialty, or news columns, or offered separately as easy-to-read packages.

      If you are working with activities directors and persons with dementias on stimulating memories, I highly recommend reading an online article and viewing the resource links at the Website called, About Health & Fitness at: http:// alzheimers.about.com/cs/treatmentoptions/a/reminiscence.htm?once=true&. See the article titled, Reminiscence Therapy and Activities for People with Dementia, From Christine Kennard, Your Guide to Alzheimer’s Disease.

      Try writing to ethnic music. Whether you choose Asian, Middle Eastern, Flamenco, new age, classical, Latin beat, Salsa, world music or inspirational tunes, look for specific music recommended by music therapists. The type of music selected affects each individual differently. Music is customized to the individual’s choice. Certain types of music influence your brain waves in one way and another individual’s in another way.

      If you want a joyous, uplifting sound to write to, try klezmer, Rom, Eastern European, Spanish flamenco, or Middle Eastern tribal dance music. If you want music to do your Tai Chi or Qi Gong exercises to, find slower Asian music or flute music from Balinese and Japanese to the music of India or Indonesian

      Gamelan music for slow exercise. Chinese and Indian music also are excellent for slow exercises for balance in walking such as Tai Chi, Qi Gong, or chair Yoga.

      You choose the music according to the mood you want to create and than move to the rhythm or write or do both. Let the music carry you away in your visualization and imagination to bring out the creativity in your writing. Make your writing animated—alive and move your words to the music.

      Take stirring klezmer wedding music, for example. If you want to write a scene in a novel, in your autobiography, or memoirs, pick klezmer or Middle Eastern dance music or tribal dance, and see what scene comes out in your creativity. Writing historically? Pick stringed instruments, flutes, or 16th and 17th century Baroque music to stir you to write creatively. Think of ways that music and writing together can heal you with the music as one tool and your writing and imagination or historical research as another tool. Let’s look at klezmer.

      Klezmer music like any genre of folk music is music of, from and by thefolk. The melismatic sounds of klezmer, the Arabic scales that form the DNA of klezmer all contribute to its universal sonority. Klezmer is just another way for me to express to the listener my perception of the human condition.

      —Yale Strom.

      I highly recommend The Absolutely Complete Klezmer Songbook, by Yale Strom. The book provides a collection of Klezmer music as a book that includes a CD. Before the 1970s, klezmer music was little known to the non-Jewish world outside of the nostalgia of ethnomusicology or from interviews of ethnologists, folk music devotees, and with older adults who remembered Yiddish theater or radio in the thirties.

      Now this prolific book of music provides 313 full-length klezmer songs, including out-of-print and previously unpublished melodies, many with Yiddish lyrics. All with musical notes. The material comes from both Yiddish and Rom (Gypsy) Holocaust survivors that recalled the songs from childhood. The book offers an excellent compilation of bulgars, horas, nigunim, and other klezmer songs and music. There’s also a glossary, perspective, and history of klezmer and Rom music.

      The book of music notes and songs include archival photos, historic background, cultural material, and the CD containing 36 klezmer songs recorded by Yal Strom’s Klezmer band, Hot Pstromi. The book is available at many music sellers or from the music publisher, Transcontinental Music Publications.

      Klezmer music is for dancing, celebrations, weddings, and entertainment. Strom also is a musical archivist. He has made many trips to Eastern Europe to interview klezmer and Rom musicians. Strom has advanced knowledge of what the music was like when klezmer and Rom musicians played at celebrations in rural Eastern Europe of the past century. Check out his films at: http://www.yalestrom.com/films.html#

      For variety you might also keep CDs of Greek dance music to write with, medieval and Renaissance music, classical, new age, world music, Latin Salsa, or whatever mood you want to create for writing. Put the music on and begin to imagine what you’d write on a blank page. Make a list of what words, pictures, and sounds would go on your computer screen. That’s the start of multimedia writing as one healing tool.

      Personal and Oral History Therapy

      Creative writing therapists also might consider researching the effects of personal and oral history listening, recording, and transcribing as therapy. To begin your research from a viewpoint of how to help writers learn to listen more effectively, you might find helpful an article titled, Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analyses, by Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack. The article appears on pages 157-171 in the anthology titled, The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson. The article discusses women and counseling.

      It originally was published in Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai’s book titled, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (1991: 11-26). Oral history therapy group facilitators would find this article helpful when discussing healing or therapeutic effects of oral history.

      Oral or personal history also is helpful when teaching writers to listen with efficacy for the therapeutic, beneficial, and healing elements of life stories combined with social history before writing a first draft in a creative writing therapy workshop.

      Oral and personal history listening techniques may be taught and practiced for use as a tool before classes begin creative writing therapy or memoirs writing workshops for memory enhancement. Listening to oral history is helpful before the actual writing process starts.

      Working with writers, artists, or musicians not interested in speaking publicly, an online group combining photos or illustrations and text materials can be turned into multimedia, using musical backgrounds with themes or melodies related to the setting of the stories. The materials would be saved to a digital disc. Work could be uploaded to a Web site in e-zine, blog, or newsletter format.

      Other alternatives include pop-up books, (paper engineering) pop-up books on disc or on Web sites, anthologies, chap books in gift or prayer boxes, and family or social history time capsules. Creative projects as healing tools could include the cooperation of musicians, artists, and writers setting stories to music and illustrating significant scenes or themes.

      1

      Preserving Memories, Enhancing Creativity, and Healing by Writing Memoirs-Text, Oral, Visual, Pop-Up Books, and Multimedia

      Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

      —Carol Burnett (1936-)

      Writing in the mind-body-spirit sense to lessen stress can be a healing tool. One of several healing, problem-solving, or conflict-resolving goals of using multimedia for mood-lifting is to write inspirational words against a non-distracting background of meditative or high-spirited ethnic dance music.

      Another reason to have nearby the sound of selected uplifting, relaxing, inspirational, ethnic, historic, or other stress-reducing mood music and art "to write by" is to produce a hand-made, finely bound memoirs or success-story gift book. The useful project might contain a DVD or CD placed in the inside cover of the book in a plastic envelope attached to the cover.

      The disc enhances the paper or vellum text transcription. One outcome might be a healing ritual or a family history, life story highlight, or tribute in the form of a paperback or hand-crafted bound book.

      When creative writing, art, drama, dance, or music therapy is prescribed and supervised by licensed health professionals trained in one of the specific expressive arts therapies and carried out under the supervision of a physician, it is called ‘therapy.’ It may be used as a healing tool, usually for stress reduction, problem-solving, or conflict resolution. The results are measured and evaluated as to any healing that may occur.

      Creative writing used as a tool of inspiration, exercise, or enhancement in any of the expressive arts—music, art, dance, oral or written memory/memoirs, or drama usually can be encouraged by writing or drama trainers, coaches, literary and editorial services, organizational communications managers, personal/oral historians, and communications consultants.

      In a gerontology-related setting, creative writing as a healing tool can be applied for memory enhancement exercises or oral history recording and transcription. Activities directors, counselors, or gerontologists also can apply reminiscence therapy for memory enhancement along with writing using a background of music and art. The outcome might be life story experiences skits done in multimedia with music and visual imagery, or exercises in stress reduction through creative writing. The goal of creative writing therapy for memory enhancement is to show how two or more people bring out the best in one another. It’s a time capsule of an individual’s life—turning points, significant events, and highlights.

      What questions will you ask? How would you interview people for the significant moments in their life stories, and then write, publish, and bind by hand exquisitely crafted personal gift books, memoirs, or business success stories? The questions and interviewing techniques in the next chapter will give you a healing tool that you can use for yourself or with others in your work using creative writing therapy to freshen memories by writing multi-media memoirs that emphasize those turning points and events.

      What’s your opinion of creative writing therapy? Some colleges award masters degrees in creative writing therapy, especially bibliotherapy. It combines writing poetry (poetry therapy) fiction, memoirs, journaling, and dramatic writing as part of an expressive therapies masters program for those with a background in creative writing, art, or drama.

      What’s A Creative Writing Therapist?

      Creative writing therapy differs from bibliotherapy or poetry therapy. Creative writing therapy emphasizes listening to oral or personal history—either one’s own or someone else’s personal history and then writing from inspiration using facts, significant events, and turning points as highlights of an experience, issue, or life story.

      Bibliotherapy may focus more on either reading books, articles, or poems and discussing the facts, experiences, or emotions in the written word read. Biblio-therapy may emphasize reading and discussion, whereas creative writing therapy emphasizes expressive writing from behavior, emotions, or logic. Bibliotherapists in the USA have a Federal Title classification for this job description.

      In 1977, a Federal Title, classification 601, was created for bibliotherapists to be hired. Poetry therapists undertook 440 hours of the study of poetry therapy became eligible for the newly created position, according to the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT). Check out the NAPT’s Web site located presently at http://poetrytherapy.org/contact.html or write to:

      Sheila Dietz, NAPT Administrator

      525 SW 5th Street, Suite A

      Des Moines, Iowa 50309-4501

      Email: info@poetrytherapy.org

      http://poetrytherapy.org/contact.html

      The Association publishes a quarterly for Poetry Therapy called the A.P.T. News. It’s estimated that thousands of professionals use poetry therapy. The requirements for a trainee in poetry therapy include graduation from an accredited college with a degree in the humanities or behavioral sciences.

      Equivalent credit may be granted for combination of completed college courses and experience in a recognized institution. There should be evidence of concentration in poetry covering the primitive, classical, post-renaissance, modern, and avant-garde writing. The trainee must be accepted into a mental health program as a volunteer or paid employee under professional supervision.

      As a poetry therapist, you must not exaggerate your own importance in the therapeutic team. Certification allows you to put a C.P.T. (Certified Poetry Therapist) designation after your name. Training programs in poetry therapy and bibliotherapy are offered through the National Association for Poetry Therapy and through other private schools.

      There are several poetry therapy institutes. The New School for Social Research in New York City offered training programs in poetry therapy and bib-liotherapy. One poetry therapist, Don Theye, has a motto: Observe, absorb, create, share. Check out the book titled: A Seminar on Bibliotherapy: Proceedings by Dr. Franklin M. Berry, a psychology professor. Research bibliotherapy-related books at the Library School, University of Wisconsin, Helen White Hall, 600 N. Park, Madison, WI, 53706. See the ERIC (Educational Research Web Portal) ERIC # ED174226, Seminar on Bibliotherapy. Proceedings of Sessions, June 2123, 1978 in Madison, Wisconsin. The ERIC Web site is at: <http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED174226&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&objectId=0900000b8011ce45>.

      For guidelines to poetry therapy and book lists, write: J.B. Lippincott, Co., East Washington Sq., Philadelphia, PA 19105. Of interest are the pioneer books written in the sixties and seventies, such as Poetry Therapy, by Dr. Jack J. Leedy (1969), and Poetry, the Healer, Dr. Jack J. Leedy (1973). For the current newsletter, click on the association’s Web site at: http://poetrytherapy.org/contact.html.

      Publishing Your Creative Writing Therapy Book

      Some people pay handsomely for one hand-bound, gilded, and elegant gift book of lifetime or corporate events. You’d be surprised how many people are satisfied to offer up to $10,000 (or more, depending upon the publisher) to have only one copy of a hand-bound hardcover book published about their event or life story. What does it take to create and publish a memoirs gift book commemorating a celebration of life, Bar Mitzvah, confirmation, wedding, or true experience? What quality of personal book do you want to make from scratch—writing, printing, and binding? As far as printing and binding, you can make one finished book at a cost to you of only $1.50-$4.50. What you charge a client depends on what it costs you.

      If you create and publish a custom gift book, you’d publish only one copy of a hand bound, hardcover book. The tome would contain anywhere from 60 to 100 photos. Text material would be based on phone or live interviews. The interviews usually would run at least two hours or more for one person (and about two hours spent per each interview). The gift book would be about 80 to 120 published pages or slightly more if necessary. Look at yourself as a designer, writer, interviewer, and bookbinder.

      You can even tailor a pop-up book creation (with the help of input from engineers on how to fold paper). Or learn how to make your own pop-up books. See the Joan Irvine Web site on making pop-up books at:

      What questions do you ask to help people respond calmly and openly at an interview? Start with "What do you enjoy the most about this particular time of life? What do you enjoy most about this event? What do you enjoy most about this holiday? What do you enjoy most about this experience? What thought, act, or feeling do you want to emphasize in the gift book?

      Serious Life Experiences

      If the person is going to emphasize a war-related or military service event, an ordeal, medical or survival details, or a factual report of behaviors related to any other serious segment of a life story, you could ask in addition to the details, what have you learned from this experience?

      How have you transcended the past and moved on? What have you learned from other people’s mistakes or choices? What have you learned from your past choices, mistakes, decisions, or alternative solutions and paths? For business case histories, ask your client to relate the details step-by-step so readers can follow how your client arrived at solutions to problems or achieved measurable results. A memoirs book is like a public relations campaign. It’s about image built on solid detail and storytelling illustrated by visually-striking photography (photojournalism).

      Answer the individual’s silence or long pauses (to gather thoughts) by using action verbs such as, Bring me up to date on your life story, a special event, or your work. Tell me about your plans for this book. Also let your client describe experiences in detail and color. Ask interview questions such as the following: What’s your favorite experience and why? Describe a special gift you have given. What have you received that transformed your life? What lessons have you learned from past mistakes? What holiday or event do you enjoy the most?"

      For further information on using action verbs, see my book titled, 801 Action Verbs for Communicators: Position Yourself First with Action Verbs for Journalists, Speakers, Educators, Students, Resume-Writers, Editors & Travelers. ISBN: 0-59531911-4. Also check out my Web site links at http://www.newswriting.net.

      The interview questions should be given well ahead of the time of the actual live or telephone interview. Meet with the person by phone and/or in person before you arrange any interviews so you can learn your client’s expectations.

      If your client wants to exceed the maximum number of words allowed, that client would be charged usually a dollar for each extra word included in the book above the maximum words allowed. (It varies with different publishers, of course.)

      Each reprint of the book you’re your client would pay your team $10,000 for also would cost the client $250 or more per additional copy. The gift book would be wonderfully hand crafted in full color—a lifetime experience. The book could feature only one person being interviewed, for anywhere from two to 70 hours. Or an entire family may be interviewed in any

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