In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire. Offering a direct view into the mind and craft of a literary master, From Where You Dream is an invaluable tool for the novice and experienced writer alike.

     Meet Spills, Bea Silly, Albert, and Marge. No, they aren't TV's latest cartoon characters. They're just a few of the new and improved Muses. Combining the whimsical and spiritual appeal of Sark with the concrete step-by-step approach of The Artist's Way, The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard) presents a fresh approach toward accessing your creativity, and is designed specifically for our frazzled and time-sensitive era. Creativity coach Jill Badonsky takes the nine classical Greek Muses and updates them for our time. Along with a little help from their no-nonsense bodyguard, Arnold, they personify ten principles designed to overcome creative blocks and embrace the wonders of self-expression. Meet Aha-Phrodite, the inspired Muse of paying attention to possibility and new ideas. And Audacity, the uninhibited Muse of the courage to take risks. Lull gives you permission to let go of the process and take a break; Marge brings common sense and a call to action; while nurturing Muse Song sings your praises. Arnold acts as protection against such intruders as discouragement, creativity blocks, and mindless TV. With these and other encouraging, supportive, and practical Muses as your guides, you'll discover how to view your talents and creative potential in a positive light, with passion and self assurance. Each Muse will take you on a journey and share with you: o Empowering exercises to awaken creativity o Brainstorming o Muse rituals to inspire faith and confidence o Muse walks o Spiritual affirmations o Quotes from mortals who've been inspired by the Muses o Journaling and much more. This entertaining, inspirational, and practical book is an indispensable handbook for the twenty-first-century seeker.

    A storehouse of practical writing tips, written in a lively, conversational style.

    The latest book from award-winning writer Ellen Lupton is a playbook for creative thinking, showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to create satisfying graphics, products, services and experiences. Whether crafting a digital app or a data-rich publication, designers invite people to enter a scene and explore what’s there. An intriguing logo, page layout or retail space uses line, shape and form to lead users on dynamic journeys.Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual perception from a narrative point of view. Presenting dozens of tools and concepts in a lively, visual manner, this book will help any designer amplify the narrative power of their work. Use this book to stir emotions, build empathy, articulate values and convey action; to construct narrative arcs and create paths through space; integrate form and language; evaluate a project’s storytelling power; and to write and deliver strong narratives.

    It was first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie, who broke down the two dominant issues performers deal with—space and time—into six categories. Since that time, directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau have expanded her notions and adapted them for actors to function together spontaneously and intuitively and to generate bold, theatrical work.The Viewpoints are a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space—they constitute a language for talking about what happens on stage. Coupling this with Composition, which is the practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art, provides theatre artists with an important new tool for creating and understanding their art form.Primarily intended for the many theatre artists who, in the last several years, have become intrigued with Viewpoints yet have had no single source to refer to in their investigations. It can also be used by anyone with a general interest in collaboration and the creative process, whether in art, business or daily life.Anne Bogart is Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is the recipient of two OBIE Awards and a Bessie Award, and is an associate professor at Columbia University. Her recent works include Alice’s Adventures; Bobrauschenbergamerica; Small Lives, Big Dreams; Marathon Dancing; and The Baltimore Waltz.Tina Landau, noted director and playwright, whose original work includes Space (Time magazine 10 Best), Dream True (with composer Ricky Ian Gordon) and Floyd Collins (with composer Adam Guettel), which received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical, an OBIE Award and seven Drama Desk nominations. She has been an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1997.

    Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, knows why. And he knows what we can do. "We have a crisis on our hands, and its victims are our children."Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University's Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults - a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he'd endured. And that was the beginning of Marc's awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn't alone, he wasn't stuck on a timeline, and he wasn't "wrong" to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it.In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc's development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works.This book combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don't have to be. Marc Brackett's life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.

    Harry Evans has edited everything from the urgent files of battlefield reporters to the complex thought processes of Henry Kissinger. He's even been knighted for his services to journalism. In DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?, he brings his indispensable insight to us all in his definite guide to writing well.The right words are oxygen to our ideas, but the digital era, with all of its TTYL, LMK, and WTF, has been cutting off that oxygen flow. The compulsion to be precise has vanished from our culture, and in writing of every kind we see a trend towards more--more speed and more information but far less clarity. Evans provides practical examples of how editing and rewriting can make for better communication, even in the digital age. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR? is an essential text, and one that will provide every writer an editor at his shoulder.

    Silencing that stifling voice once and for all, this salve for creatives introduces ten truths they must face in order to defeat self-doubt. Each encouraging chapter deconstructs a pivotal moment on the path to success—fear of the blank page, the dangers of jealousy, sharing work with others—and explains how to navigate roadblock. Packed with helpful anecdotes, thoughts from successful creatives, and practical exercises gleaned from Danielle Krysa's years of working with professional and aspiring artists—plus riotously apt illustrations from art world darling Martha Rich—this book arms readers with the most essential tool for their toolbox: the confidence they need to get down to business and make good work.

    Here, Peter Elbow emphasizes that the essential activities underlying good writing and the essential exercises promoting it are really not difficult at all.Employing a cookbook approach, Elbow provides the reader (and writer) with various recipes: for getting words down on paper, for revising, for dealing with an audience, for getting feedback on a piece of writing, and still other recipes for approaching the mystery of power in writing. In a new introduction, he offers his reflections on the original edition, discusses the responses from people who have followed his techniques, how his methods may differ from other processes, and how his original topics are still pertinent to today's writer. By taking risks and embracing mistakes, Elbow hopes the writer may somehow find a hold on the creative process and be able to heighten two mentalities--the production of writing and the revision of it.From students and teachers to novelists and poets, Writing with Power reminds us that we can celebrate the uses of mystery, chaos, nonplanning, and magic, while achieving analysis, conscious control, explicitness, and care in whatever it is we set down on paper.

    But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming.This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming.Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented gamesImprove collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniquesImprove understanding by role-playing customer and user experiencesGenerate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever beforeShorten meetings and make them more productiveSimulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamicsIdentify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution

    Engaging IdeasShows how teachers can encourage inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate in their courses. Presents a wide variety of strategies for stimulating active learning and for coaching writing and critical thinking. Offers teachers concrete advice on how to design courses, structure assignment, use class time, critique student performance, and model critical thinking activities. Demonstrates how writing can easily be integrated with such other critical thinking activities and inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, and interactive lectures.

    You should never quit your day job, but your ultimate goal should be to quit your day job. It's an endless, confusing, and often controversial conversation that, despite our bare-it-all culture, still remains taboo. In Scratch, Manjula Martin has gathered interviews and essays from established and rising authors to confront the age-old question: how do creative people make money? As contributors including Jonathan Franzen, Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Nick Hornby, Susan Orlean, Alexander Chee, Daniel Jose Older, Jennifer Weiner, and Yiyun Li candidly and emotionally discuss money, MFA programs, teaching fellowships, finally getting published, and what success really means to them, Scratch honestly addresses the tensions between writing and money, work and life, literature and commerce. The result is an entertaining and inspiring book that helps readers and writers understand what it's really like to make art in a world that runs on money-and why it matters.

     The time-tested secrets this book discloses include Cicero’s three-step strategy for moving an audience to action—as well as Honest Abe’s Shameless Trick of lowering an audience’s expectations by pretending to be unpolished. But it’s also replete with contemporary techniques such as politicians’ use of “code” language to appeal to specific groups and an eye-opening assortment of popular-culture dodges—including The Yoda Technique, The Belushi Paradigm, and The Eddie Haskell Ploy. Whether you’re an inveterate lover of language books or just want to win a lot more anger-free arguments on the page, at the podium, or over a beer, Thank You for Arguing is for you. Written by one of today’s most popular language mavens, it’s warm, witty, erudite, and truly enlightening. It not only teaches you how to recognize a paralipsis and a chiasmus when you hear them, but also how to wield such handy and persuasive weapons the next time you really, really want to get your own way.

    Combining practical, theoretical, and historical, this book is a must for graphic artists, editors, or anyone working with the printed page using digital or traditional methods.Having established itself as a standard in its field The Elements of Typographic Style is house manual at most American university presses, a standard university text, and a reference work in studios of designers around the world. It has been translated into italian and greek, and dutch.

    In this delightful classic -- now translated into English for the first time -- Rodari presents numerous and wonderful techniques for creating stories. He discusses these specific techniques in the context of the imagination, fairy tales, folk tales, children's stories, cognitive development, and compassionate education. Gianni Rodari was one of the founders of the innovative educational approach that began in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and is now making itself felt throughout the U.S. The Grammar of Fantasy grew out of a series of informal workshops that Rodari conducted for the teachers of Reggio Emilia.