Tener helping entrepreneurs find the writer within

SPARK PLUG: Writing coach Lisa Tener teaches writers to make their book a priority, and offers time-management techniques, hopefully helping them find their creative spark. / PBN<2008>PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
SPARK PLUG: Writing coach Lisa Tener teaches writers to make their book a priority, and offers time-management techniques, hopefully helping them find their creative spark. / PBNPHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Ask writing coach Lisa Tener how to pen an inspirational memoir, and she’ll point to one of her own success stories, Dr. Tim Warren.
Before he turned to her for advice, he was best known as a Rhode Island chiropractor. Outside the clinic, though, he was a globe-trotting outdoorsman. He’d trekked to the top of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, and well before the Himalayas became a trendy hotspot. Warren’s experience made him a popular speaker at local schools, and that got him thinking he should aim for a bigger audience.
He took Tener’s eight-week writing course, and then sat down at a keyboard and banged out “Lessons from Everest,” a high-adventure story with a universal message for everyone seeking to reach their full potential. He still talks to school kids, but these days he’s also in demand at gatherings for corporate executives.
“Tim Warren could have written a book that was simply about climbing Everest, but there are a lot of other books about that,” Tener explained. “Instead, he’s giving you the personal tools he used to make the climb, and making it a captivating story that applies to the business world.”
That kind of advice has made Tener – a Rhode Islander for almost a decade – one of the country’s most successful writing coaches. She’s got a tool box of techniques to get creative juices flowing, and the know-how to help writers deal with the publishing industry as well. Authors who’ve graduated from her course have signed contracts with Simon and Schuster, Random House, Scribner’s and other major publishers. Others have self-published.
As an author’s guide and mentor, Tener has also garnered worldwide recognition. At last year’s International Business Awards, she picked up a Stevie, the business world’s Oscar. The category: Best New Service-Media. Graduates of Tener’s program are quick to sing her praises, too.
Anne Burnett signed up for the course when she decided to write about raising her autistic son. Her book “Step Ahead of Autism” was published by Sunrise River Press in 2011. “When I found her, I knew I’d made the right choice,” the author raved. “On my way home from the first class I got a brainstorm and had to pull over to the side of the road and scribble down my first chapter.”
Some of her clients gather every Friday morning for eight weeks in an oceanfront home in Narragansett. Those from beyond New England take a self-study course with email support. The focus is on self-help and how-to.
Tener’s clients are executives with a lifetime of experience to share. They are therapists and psychologists who seek to extend their reach beyond their clinic, and motivational speakers who want to continue to be heard after their talk is over. And these days she’s also teaching book-writing workshops at Harvard Medical School’s continuing education program.
“I work with a lot of people who’ve been told they’re not a writer,” she said. “It’s so exciting for me when they discover what they can do.”
The New York City native took a circuitous route to her current profession.
“As a kid, I always felt I’d like to be a writer,” she said. “But my father had encouraged me to do something practical.”
As a result, she found herself at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied high-level computer languages. But she made writing her minor, and took courses with some well-known poets and novelists, including Frank Conroy, author of the memoir “Stop-Time,” and Broadway playwright A.R. Gurney, Jr.
After graduation she went on to work in management-information systems, but after several years she was feeling restless. She knew she needed a career that was more “people-oriented.” She returned to MIT and studied marketing at the Sloan School of Management. That led to a job as executive director of Hospitality Homes in Boston, a nonprofit that matches families of patients in Boston for medical treatment with volunteer hosts who open their homes to visitors. She led the organization for several years, leaving in 2000. About the same time she also began work on a self-help tome for those handling harmful emotions. “The Ultimate Guide to Transforming Anger: Dynamic Tools for Healthy Relationships,” penned with co-authors Jane Middleton-Moz and Peaco Todd, was published in 2005. “Should be mandatory reading,” author Amy Tan said in a review.
In 2005, Tener’s husband moved his business from Massachusetts to Rhode Island. Once the family had settled down in the Saunderstown section of North Kingstown, Tener was ready to begin a new project. With advice from her town’s librarian, she launched a website and began enrolling students in her writing course.
“The course attracts a lot of entrepreneurs, people who have a business and realize they can use a book to grow their business,” she said. “People are coming to realize marketing is not about selling people something they don’t need. It’s more about understanding your audience and what they need and want.”
As a coach, Tener focuses in part on providing antidotes to procrastination and writer’s block. She teaches writers to make the book a priority, and offers time-management techniques. She also helps writers find their creative spark.
She’s now preparing for her next Rhode Island class, which starts April 26, and a teleseminar scheduled to begin April 23.
She’s also making plans for her own writing projects. “It’s all about the creative process I use for helping people write their books,” she said. •

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