Replay: Peter Orner shares Five Things He's Learned about Writing (by Not Writing)
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“I spend most of my life not writing. I’m not especially proud of this fact, and for years I’ve spent most of the time I’m writing worrying about the fact that I’m not writing. You know the feeling? And yet lately I’ve found that if I worry less, the writing I do manage to do is at least slightly better. It shouldn’t have taken me twenty or so years to realize all I need to do is chill out and revel a little in not writing—but this is the truth of it.”
– Peter Orner, Five Things I've Learned about Writing (by Not Writing)
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 Peter’s two-hour class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about how worrying less, chilling out, and reveling (a little) in not writing makes all the difference and connects him to where stories really come from.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing (by Not Writing) aims to help writers improve their craft by embracing periods of not writing. Peter encourages participants to ease off the pressure of constant writing and instead emphasizes the importance of activities like close, intense, slow reading, listening to others and silence, and engaging in basic practices like wandering in their neighborhood with a pen and notebook.
Peter focuses on the belief that less can be more in writing, and aims to provide insights and techniques that go beyond the traditional advice of "shitty first drafts" and excessive word output, helping writers make a meaningful start in their creative endeavors.
If you’re eager to learn the hard-earned secrets of not-writing from one of our greatest writers, this class is for you.
Peter has also published two story collections: Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. A three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Orner's work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, The Believer and many other publications. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. He's the Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont where he’s also a volunteer firefighter with the Norwich Fire Department.
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