annehart

Novels by Anne Hart

What types of careers can you design, develop, and debouch with a creative writing major: How to 'debouch' a creative writing major (emerge from a narrow place upon a more open area of possibilities or places/spaces).

What do creative writing majors do besides teaching fiction writing when they're not developing books, plays, scripts, or stories? They design creative writing tools, preference assessments, work with psychologists and counselors as creative writing or poetry therapists, and work as script doctors to whip a novel, play, or movie screenplay into the shape the producer wants. Some writers focus on the inspirational, religious, or paranormal markets.

Most people are surprised at the number of jobs and independent contractor businesses creative writing majors are working in, related to their major at every level from B.A. to M.A., M.F.A, or PhD in professional writing. Not all creative writing majors end up teaching language arts, tutoring, teaching English overseas, or in technical writing. Some writing majors open their own news/press release writing and distribution services. Other writers seek companies to send out press releases about published creative work. For example see the site, Free Press Release Distribution Service.

Some creative writing majors work in indexing, others are freelance editors in specialty fields, and some move on to library science graduate work, research, or editorial marketing. While the publishers continue to merge, new niche publications spring up, many of them digital.

One field creative writing majors enter is writing resumes. Another is bibliotherapy. And numerous creative writing majors design and write assessments or open copy editing firms, working online at home or in another company's office.

Self-scrutiny through preference assessments for creative writing and the other expressive arts—music, art, drama or dance encourages thinking in new ways and alternative uses of paths not taken by others. Simplicity works well when designing creative writing preference, aptitude, and interest strength assessments.

You can open an online home-based business designing the following assessment tools:

· achievement tests in writing or reading comprehension

· activity directors guidelines and questionnaires

· artists aptitude and interest assessments

· book packager business operation guidelines

· bibliotherapists/poetry therapists

· brain exercises

· caregivers’ aptitude tests

· chaplains’ guidelines

· classifiers for personality preferences

· cognitive intelligence quizzes

· consultants’ handbooks

· corporate trainers’ writing guides

· counselors’ aptitudes

· editorial services and questionnaires or surveys for novelists

· educational technologists tools in corporate or school settings

· emotional quotient questionnaires

· ethnography questionnaires aimed at specific populations and neighborhoods

· frequently asked questions for writers or expressive arts therapists

· gerontologists’ assessment tools for memory enhancement groups

· healers’ handbooks and inventories

· herbalists’ questions and answers on how plants heal and what to avoid

· home nurses or health aides’ guidelines and questionnaires

· hospice workers’ handbooks and surveys

· human resource managers’ corporate testing tools

· job coaches or writing coaches’ assessment quizzes

· light workers’ guidelines and surveys

· literary agent rules, questionnaires, and guidelines

· massage therapists’ tests of knowledge of their field, job opportunities, or health warnings

· musicians interest inventories for prospective music therapists

· new age worker’s quizzes

· numerology quizzes for new-age workers testing knowledge of their specialty

· nutrition consultants’ tests for dietary aides

· organizational psychologists’ decision-making assessments

· personal and/or oral historians’ guide on what questions to ask at interviews and how to record and transcribe oral history; time-capsule making techniques

· personality indicators

· platform visibility, expertise, and promotion questionnaires

· poetry therapists’ guidelines on how to present to a group, tests of ability to interact with various groups and audiences

· qualifying indicators for employment recruiters

· questionnaires for your own area of specialty

· quizzes for pop-up book engineers/artists/writers

· quizzes, surveys for specialized writing fields such as medical writing

· reminiscence therapists (for memory enhancement groups)

· script doctors’ guidelines and surveys

· social historians’ surveys and questionnaires for specific groups

· student interns in social work, counseling, or healthcare assessments

· team leaders tests and assessments

· tests for aptitude or interest for specific occupational groups

· tests of emotional maturity

· therapists in non-traditional areas such as hospice workers using dream analysis guidelines and surveys, books or tests of interpretation

· traditions or religious questionnaires

· translation of assessment tools into other languages

· women’s literary knowledge tests for special interest groups

· writing coaches’ needs assessments for editorial, production, and publishing updates

The range is wide. Design assessments to measure and improve abilities in editorial, creativity, music, art, expressive arts, healthcare, counseling, or business. You can even design assessments for trainers in corporate settings presenting courses to executives on how to improve business writing techniques or how to avoid blind spots that early on derail careers.

Use your originally designed quizzes to help your own clients or improve your own creative writing techniques based on matching your personality traits to the characteristics of your chosen genres. You can teach yourself how to design assessment tools in the field in which you already are an expert.

For example, if you’re a writing coach or consultant, you can design tools that will improve the writing of corporate executives and then give presentations to them at various corporations on how to write better sales letters, white papers, reports, training manuals or other business correspondence. Technical and business writing courses are helpful. Join related business communication organizations and/or public speaking societies.

Writing is more than improvement in business. It’s a healing tool when used to analyze how choices are made. After discussing what the words connect to as in dream analysis, the writing may be used to solve problems, resolve conflicts, or seek closure. Writing in a creative fashion comes from inner reflection as well as outer facts. It can be used for healing when it lights up parts of the brain in the same way that prayer lights up the same brain areas.

Help others turn on the self-healing, spontaneous healing mechanism through creative writing exercises that can be useful for deep healing and cleansing of the ego. Light workers or “write workers” speak about “standing up for your writes.” The writes/rights double entendre plays a hand in healing through writing autobiographies, memoirs, life story highlights as time capsules. It’s all about applying personality traits to creative writing as a healing or therapeutic tool in reaching for integrity at various stages of development and ages.

There are four seasons of life: Infancy, Childhood, Adulthood, and Age-Wise Integrity. And like the twelve months of the year, there are twelve visible platforms of life’s stages: infancy, early childhood, late childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, romance, marriage, early parenthood, middle parenthood, late parenthood, empty-nester, and age-wise integrity.) Writers also need visible platforms to promote themselves to a reading audience and be recognized in the mainstream media. To launch your own career as a creative writing coach or therapist, you also need at least one visible platform in one in-demand area of expertise.

Don’t spread yourself too thin as a jack-of-all-trades. The key words are “in-demand visible platform of expertise.” You have to make your expertise nationally visible through promotion, appearances, video, interviews, or speaking and writing. The focal point is publicity and gathering a national audience via Internet, niche, or mainstream radio or TV or public speaking.

Platform visibility can also happen “via the grapevine” of small talk. You can begin by connecting people through writing and personality traits, aptitudes, assessments, questionnaires, or other tools of connection or healing.

When people discuss other peoples’ personalities, they describe personality traits in simple everyday language that’s published in dictionaries. An example would be thinking about how to use light as a tool to twist time back in a loop to reach into one’s past. Then think of concrete examples to explain in plain language using everyday objects how it’s done when writing a science-oriented article or novel.

For example, ask a group of writers to, “Picture a fish bowl filled with light bending space and time together as if space and time both bounced and rippled like a flexible, cloth awning.” Have the writer’s group briefly comment on this in a discussion.

Direct the same comment to theoretical and experimental physicists or physics students and have that science-oriented group comment. Compare the both comments and read the results to the group of writers.

How can the writer’s group use both discussions to enhance creativity? How can the discussions also be used as a healing tool?

Test design for measuring imagination and creativity is all about foresight, insight, and hindsight into specific words for identity. The goal of designing any creativity assessment is to help you avoid pitfalls. Ordinary people are responsible for words describing personality traits that end up in dictionaries.

You can design creative writing aptitude or fiction writing interest inventory tests by looking through the dictionaries and thesauri to find as many words as you can describing the nouns, adverbs, action verbs, and adjectives for character, personality, attitude, and mood.

Then narrow the descriptive, behavioral “tag words” and tag lines to ten opposite concepts: grounded, verve, rational, enthusiastic, traditional, change-oriented, decisive, investigative, loner, and outgoing. You also may wish to see the book, 801 Action Verbs for Communicators: Position Yourself First with Action Verbs for Journalists, Speakers, Educators, Students, Resume Writers, Editors. ISBN : 0595319114.

Creative behavior leads to finding descriptive and easy-to-understand definitions of the personalities of creative writers, musicians, or artists. The roots of all these meanings are found in dictionaries and thesaurus, as had been researched in the past by scientists seeking definitions in lexicons of personality traits.

For example, Arabs call angry people a ‘dib’ or ‘bear.’ A clever man evading the corrupted aspects of the law is called a ‘deeb’ or ‘wolf.’ A person no longer rational or in touch with reality is called ‘mejnoon’ after a character in an Arabic play, well known in folklore, titled “Mejnoon and Layla,” about lovers so enamored of each other that they are out of touch with rational thinking.

These are coffee klatch words in many languages used as shorthand to define personality traits or aspects. In Hebrew, a schlimazel is an aggressive leader. A schlemiel is a receptive follower (who usually gets victimized by the schlimazel). In Yiddish a ‘maven’ is an expert with experience. A person out of touch with reality—the Hebrew and Yiddish equivalent of the Arabic word, ‘mejnoon’ is meshoogah. An ‘irrational’ or ‘illogical’ person, like a cross-starred lover, is a ‘meshooganah.’

Those vernacular words from around the world end up in dictionaries and thesaurus, often translated into English language dictionaries, and most often focusing on a variety of personality aspects. These definitions help those who design assessments find new roads to research before questionnaires or other tests are designed.

Sometimes linguists and novelists may contribute the roots or foundation to personality assessment design and tests of abstract thinking, cognitive intelligence, and reading comprehension assessments

When you design aptitude, interest, or personality classifiers for creative workers, you don’t have to go solely to the established tests based on the studies of previous psychoanalysts. Instead, you can turn to a dictionary. Sift through the simplest definitions—the bare bones, or roots of how personality and creativity are defined. And the roots of the definitions of character, personality, attitude, and emotional maturity are all defined in the most basic dictionaries and thesaurus.

Those who study behavioral sciences are familiar with the “lexical hypothesis.” A good description of the lexical hypothesis appears on page 174 of Anne Murphy Paul’s book titled, The Cult of Personality.

What will give you useful practice in learning to define personalities by looking at emotions and behavior is by using dictionaries to describe personalities. Another way of defining creative aptitude is to practice writing tag lines to romance novels and old time suspense radio scripts such as the type of scripts appearing in the early 1960s and 1970s.

Study old time radio of the 1930s and 1940s to find definitions of personality or creative behavior. Look at aspects, styles, and preferences that also appear in all types of dictionaries—from synonyms, thesauri, to rhyming dictionaries and books on action verbs. Then read descriptions of character, position, and attitude as applied to corporations that reflected the personalities of their leaders.

A lot of personality definitions and descriptions are found by reading resumes or even writing resumes for clients in the arts. Some of the best sources of personality definitions or descriptions include plays, scripts, novels, and poems

Share these definitions with your clients who want to hire you as a writing coach or consultant. Some people might ask a coach to go beyond being a script doctor by helping you enhance creativity and break writer’s block by providing practical exercises that encourage vivid imagery through music and art that can be transferred to creative writing.

Psychologists who design personality tests often go to these primary sources instead of the secondary sources such as the books of other psychoanalysts because descriptions, tag lines, and dialogue contain definitions that read like portraits because they are based on conversation broken down to the simplest parts of speech—descriptive words for people’s preferences, decisions, and actions.

For example, is a person down-to-earth (grounded), traditional, and routine or imaginative, change-oriented, and creative? What kind of person is labeled as a conformist or a conventional, practical, detail-oriented thinker?

What kind of individual is tagged as a sentimental, empathetic, abstract, theoretician with spiritual depth who never forgets names or birthdays? All these definitions of personality are based on water cooler gossip or person-to-person intimate conversation about someone’s behavior under stress. Test design of aptitude assessments for creative writers as coaches or certificated bibliotherapists is about describing visual portraits of personalities.

Pare down words to bare bones

The practical aspect of writing resumes for people in the arts helps you to pare down words to bare bones so you can help clients describe themselves in essays, resumes, or memoirs books. The paring down words exercise also works to motivate imagery for novelists.

Ask fiction-writing clients to show you how they write their resumes, essays, or novels. When the novels or other writing is edited or revised, ask your clients what method are they using to find good matches in their novel or script between the ‘character’—a position or attitude of specific corporations or editors and the clients’ own personality styles.

Matching writers to corporations or editors is similar to matching single couples seeking life partners. The key to designing a creative arts interest inventory or personality assessment is to find specific vivid ‘tag’ words to express nuances and preferences chosen from a palette of personalities. That’s why you need to make a list of outstanding tag lines from novels, particularly romance or relationship novels and autobiographies or memoirs.

Visual portraits for writers

When you read novels, describe emotions, behavior, and personality traits by painting visual portraits with definitions of behavior described by specific words. A person does not only say something. He or she speaks the words “timorously” or “scoured with disdain in a voice dark as pumice.” Or a character says ‘yes’ marvelously, or silently expresses shyness using only gestures or body language. He puts his head down and looks at his sneakers.

Those aspects of personality described in novels or creative non-fiction are called tag lines. The tag line comes before or after dialogue is spoken in a book. The words describe the behavior and not the emotion.

When you work as a writing coach or certificated and degreed creative writing therapist, help other writers enhance creativity and memory by asking them to note and describe behavior, not emotion in their writing. It’s the body language and the gestures that inspire creativity and imagery by finding the words that show the gestures—the behavior you’ll only see in a photo, cartoon, or illustration.

In music, you can hear the tag lines played as feeling, mood. In art, it’s texture and movement in portraits.

Look at Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper.” Now describe it in words using tag lines for what the characters might be saying to one another, or what they may be silently thinking.

What’s great about using dictionaries and thesauri to design personality assessments is how simple it is to design a test based on a dictionary definition of a behavior, trait, style, attribute, mood, texture, emotion, or preference. If you look at dictionaries throughout the world, each language has a word describing some aspect of personality, behavior, preference, or attitude.

The more words you find in a dictionary describing an aspect of personality, the more important in that society that certain aspect of personality is to the specific society and language.

Guide clients in creative writing based on how important and highly valued specific aspects of behavior are--based on the number of words ascribed to that particular trait, action, or behavior.

Search through dictionaries in other languages if you can read words or simple translations in a second language. Look at how some Asian languages list words that are ascribed to certain personality traits

Note the synonyms and antonyms. Do the same with dictionaries in your native language. For example, the Greek word, Zeus, is related to the Sanskrit word, Deus. Also the word, Jupiter, familiar in various ancient Mediterranean lands, is related to the Sanskrit words “Deus Pitar.” What behaviors connected these related and connected Indo European words for deity between Greece, Rome, and India in prehistoric times? (Geographic migration or a common root for worship?)

If you want to design a creativity in writing aptitude assessment, go to the roots—Roget’s Thesaurus, or any unabridged dictionary. Scientists already have searched dictionaries and thesaurus for words describing aspects of character and personality continuously since and during the 19th and mid 20th century. Look up names such as Gordon Allport, American psychologist of the mid 20th century, and Francis Galton, 19th century British scientist.

These scientists’ names are mentioned in Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Cult of Personality. So it’s nothing new that scientists look to dictionaries to find personality trait definitions. Not only organizational psychologists and questionnaire designers look for personality and character definitions in dictionaries but so do novelists and playwrights do this exercise for practical reasons.

They look in dictionaries to find more ways to speak a tag line with body language, behavior, feeling, mood, texture, and new attitudes.

The reason why scientists go to dictionaries to define personality traits is that they are looking for the simplest definition. And who creates those definitions? Mostly people gossiping about how various people act and speak towards strangers or relatives who don’t have the power to hire, pay, or promote them.

Listen to what neighbors are saying when talking small talk. A century ago neighbors spoke over the fence. If novelists recorded their dialogue and paired down the words to only what is necessary to understand the point, the resulting novel would have powerful dialogue.

Emphasize simplicity. Readers want validity and value from writers. They want easy-to-follow, step-by-step clarity also known as simplicity

Simplicity in writing means the story or feature gives you all the answers you were looking for in your life in exotic places, but found it close by. Publishers publish the books of writers that pose the least financial risk to the publishing house. A writer posing the least financial risk appeals to readers who want the easiest-to-follow practical steps to solving problems or resolving conflicts common to most people.

Therefore, a simple to understand book or story shows readers and clients what traits an individual has that allow the person to stand on his or her own two feet and put bread on the table. That's the moral point of any work of writing or any creativity assessment, to pull your own weight.

Pulling your own weight is a buzz word that measure maturity and emotional ‘quotient’ through simplicity and empathy. There are no right or wrong answers, only individual differences

Emotional quotient is a type of maturity that allows children and adults to wait their turn instead of seeking instant gratification. If you ask a four-year old to not eat the candy on the table until you return in five minutes and then leave the room, the child with the highest emotional ‘quotient’ will let the candy stay in the plate until you return.

To make it easier to hold off the instant gratification and empathy, you can say that you’ll give the child a reward when you return that will be better than the candy in the plate. Then when you return, you can substitute a reward most four-year-old kids would consider better than one piece of candy.

The same type of delaying emotional gratification and building up of empathy assessment can be put to writers, artists, or musicians. Only instead of a candy, the reward is publication and promotion or some other valuable prize such as an industrial-quality camcorder. Help the writer figuratively walk a mile in the reader’s shoes.

Creative writing coaches (not required to be certified) like creative writing and expressive arts therapists (that are certified and have graduate degrees) emphasize the simplicity supporting morals, confidence, self-insight, empathy, and emotional maturity.

These are interests, aptitudes, and preferences

These traits include universal values that hold true for everyone. For example, everyone goes through similar life stages—infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and the age-wise silver years of finding integrity instead of despair.

Help clients to do their best to take care of their creative works. If clients do the best with what they have, the creative works create “buzz appeal” or charisma provided the creative work matches the character of the publisher’s leaders and/or founders.

Without a successful match between writer and publisher or writer and agent, self-publishing or print-on-demand publishing is the answer when the match is directly between the writer and the audience of readers or viewers. When writers promote directly to readers, by passing publishers and agents, they need a direct, charismatic connection to their audience.

As a writing coach, creativity consultant, or licensed therapist, emphasize commitment, reliability, and responsibility. A writing coach is supposed to help clients raise their creativity and connectivity emotional quotients to emphasize commitment to empathy and maturity.

Simply said, writing meant for publication that becomes a healing tool for the writer is meant to have some redemptive value to a universal audience.

That's the most important point: Redemptive value can be used by writers and speakers when unleashing imagination and creativity to give you the momentum. Practical applications of ideas that have changed into palpable designs actually solve problems or resolve conflicts. The practical applications help the writer to move along the pipeline leading to the right connections from team building to decision-making.

To make creativity practical, treat imagination like an invention. Show that you’ll do the best you can do under the circumstances, and that you trust in your self-insight. Decision-making assessments or questionnaires given to writers, artists, or musicians point out what obstacles you need to overcome in a reduced amount of time, and what blind spots such as valuable details you overlooked that could derail your client’s goal.

Without the “buzz appeal” of publication, writers, musicians, artists, and other creative people that have applied ideas to practical uses might not get the attention they deserve for years of hard labor

Writing coaches and creative writing therapists, like book publicists, help writers from falling through the cracks. No matter how great your client’s work is, unless you find someone to buzz you into the eyes of the reading public, the artist or journalist might not be noticed that easily. To be promoted with a visible platform, an area of expertise that is widely recognized by the public, a writer must be in vogue within a publishing house or among a widening circle or audience of readers.

Written work needs to be presented at the right time just when your client’s expertise and experience is “in vogue” with a publisher, agent, or a reading audience for self-publishers. Creative writing therapist work with personality profiles, decision-making test results, creativity assessments, and tests of emotional maturity. But it is in the writing that a published work stands alone. What is good remains unread unless promoted to a niche audience. Writing widely promoted in the public’s eye will “buzz you in.”

Look at the value the writer gives to the work when the writing is analyzed in detail. Does it hold any weight with most readers? Is the writing simple enough for you to follow?

Simple is understandable, and that's what's buzz right now in books are—bio-inventories based on learning tutorials applied to practical courses that appeal to a wide audience. One example would be books on how to answer any type of business correspondence by writing specific types of letters. Writing has value only when it is judged simple and earthy--in the news and print media.

To train people in creative writing coaching or consulting, you have to be yourself in your drama. Assessments can spot phoniness in a minute. Be true to yourself. Finding the right publisher is about listing your traits, interest inventories, and preferences.

Your client’s writing is judged by what is valuable to the publisher. With self-publishers, the writing is judged by what appeals directly to readers seeking specific information or entertainment. Writing coaches need to ask simple questions, and writers or other artists need to answer simply. Books go through fads every few years. But commitment to your goals, self-insight, and hindsight are universal values. Target those values when you coach.

What answers give you the most credibility among your peers and employers?

Be true to yourself. Publishers are impressed by the stability of writing that symbolizes dependability, security, and centeredness. Those are universal values that the business world wants to see in writers and readers at all levels.

Creative writing coaches, consultants, or therapists may help writers and other artists gain visibility and credibility if the writer or artist is a match with the reader’s needs. Coaches, literary agents, book packagers, and editors match the “personality aspects” of various publishers’ philosophy, purpose, and goals with specific writers. Book publicists promote already published books.

Freelance copyeditors help writers revise manuscripts. And creative writing therapists help people solve problems and resolve conflicts through creative writing as therapy or through bibliotherapy—reading passages from books, or through poetry therapy—reading poems.

A creative writing therapist works with people who read already published writing and write for themselves and the group and not necessarily for publication. Bibliotherapists focus more on helping people resolve conflicts or solve problems and measure results by reading books, excerpts, poems, and articles and discussing them. There may be some creative writing, but not necessarily for publication. Writing may be done for healing, against a background of healing music for inspiration.

Creative writing as a healing tool gives you a voice of resilience, hindsight, and self-scrutiny. You can develop insight into your dominant personality traits with the care of an artist, writer, or musician because surviving the publishing arena depends upon internal scrutiny. Writing for personal healing, like journaling, motivates you to examine your drives and differences with the goal of refining your triumphs. Creative writing for healing is a tribute to your life experiences.

Coaching is about discussing your voice of resilience. Creative writing therapy is about analyzing and transcending your choices. Some writers specialize in writing for the religious, spiritual, or inspirational markets, either novels or nonfiction.

Some Religious and Spiritual Book Publishers

Abingdon Press
Augsburg Fortress Publishing
Baker Book House
Behrman House
Bethany House Publishers
ChariotVictor Publishing
Dharma Publishing
Discipleship Resources
Feldheim Books
Gefen Publishing House Ltd.
Gospel Advocate Company
Hachai Publishing
Hazelden Publishing Group
Herald Press
Hope Publishing House
InterVarsity Press
Jason Aronson Inc. Publishers
Jewish Lights Publishing
Jewish Publication Society
Jonathan David Co., Inc. Publishers Joy Publishing
Judson Press
Kar-Ben Copies
Ktav Publishing House
Liguori Publications
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
Llewellyn Publications
Moody Press
Numata Center
Paraclete Press
Paulist Press
Pilgrim Press
Pitspopany Press
Red Heifer Press
St. Anthony Messenger Press
Targum Press
Thomas Nelson
Tyndale House Publishers
United Methodist Publishing House
Urim Publications
Vendanta Press
Westminster John Knox
Zondervan Publishing House

Magazines

Alive Now
Angels on Earth
Bible Advocate
Campus Life Magazine
Catholic Digest
Celebrations
Christian Families Online
Christian Home & School
Christian Science Monitor
Christian Week

Catholic Peace Voice

Catholic Rural Life

Our Little Friend (Weekly take-home paper for 1-6 yr olds)

Alphabetical Listing of Periodical Publishers

Association of Jewish Book Publishers

Christian Book Publishers

Secular Newspapers with Religion Editors