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.
"You can look at any great paragraph, short or long, and learn a hell of a lot about how a story moves. In prose, the momentum comes from the stuff inside the paragraphs. It’s how we move things along, we carry a story from paragraph to paragraph.”
– Peter Orner, Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing 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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