Replay: Peter Orner shares Five Things He's Learned about Writing about Prose Momentum – in Five Great Paragraphs
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“My theory – and this is a long-held theory – is that just reading stuff out loud sometimes is enough. We don’t need feedback and discussion. We don’t need to talk about it. We just need to hear it.”
“Go all out in speeches. Just have your character do it. Think of the people you know who go on rants. What does that sound like? Can you capture that on the page?”
“When you have a narrator who’s speaking directly to you on the page, you know it. When you’re experiencing it, how intimate is your paragraph? As far as I know, the biggest sin in fiction writing is when you’re conveying information. We’re not information conveyors.”
“Think about those paragraphs where they kind of spin out of your control because the character has gone in some direction. I think sometimes that I assert too much control. And if I just let it go a little bit, you know, it’ll take me places.”
“You know, I think last paragraphs are obviously the thing, right? How are you going to end it? The last paragraph is not the end. It’s got to go on. It’s got to go on.”
—Peter Orner, Five Things I’ve Learned about Prose Momentum – in Five Great Paragraphs
Peter Orner is the author of the remarkable and recently-released Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin. His previous collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He’s also written novels –The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love – and the story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. Here’s the first five minutes of his recent two-hour class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about how great writers create remarkable movement and energy within a single paragraph – and how you can craft equally powerful building blocks within your own writing.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Momentum – In Five Great Paragraphs looks at depth at great paragraphs from a variety of great authors, in each case considering as only Peter can the ways these exemplary paragraphs create momentum and energy on their own, and within the story of which they’re a part. Peter also takes a deep look at selected paragraphs offered by class participants who have inspired by these examples.
If you’re a writer – or just someone interested in the ways that great writing happens – this class is for you.
Peter’s a remarkably thoughtful writer and teacher. He’s been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship – even a Fulbright to Namibia. Peter’s currently the Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and a volunteer firefighter with the Norwich Fire Department.
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