Writing Alone and with Others [Paperback]

For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. She has taught all kinds--the award winning, the struggling, and those who have been silenced by poverty and hardship. Her innovative methods have worked in classrooms from elementary to graduate level, in jail cells and public housing projects, in convents and seminaries, in youth at-risk programs, and with groups of the terminally ill.
Now, inWriting Alone and with Others, Schneider's acclaimed methods are available in a single, well-organized, and highly readable volume. The first part of the book guides the reader through the perils of the solitary writing life: fear, writer's block, and the bad habits of the internal critic. In the second section, Schneider describes the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method, widely used across the U.S. and abroad. Chapters on fiction and poetry address matters of technique and point to further resources, while more than a hundred writing exercises offer specific ways to jumpstart the blocked and stretch the rut-stuck. Schneider's innovative teaching method will refresh the experienced writer and encourage the beginner. Her book is the essential owner's manual for the writer's voice.

Contents
Foreword by Peter Elbow
Acknowledgments
How to Use This Book
Introduction: A Writer Is Someone Who Writes
Part I: The Writer Alone
1. Feeling and Facing Fear
2. Getting Started (Again)
3. Toward a Disciplined Writing Life
4. Writing Practice: The Journal
5. Writing Practice: Developing Craft
6. Voice
7. Growing as a Writer
8. The Form Your Writing Takes
9. The Ethical Questions: Spirituality, Privacy, and Politics
Part II: Writing With Others
Introduction: Writing With Others
10. Basic Principles of a Healthy Workshop
11. Writing in a Classroom
12. Creating Your Own Workshop or Writing Group
13. Using Writing to Empower the Sl³@