Writing Alone And With Others

For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. Now, Schneider's acclaimed methods are made available in a single well-organized and highly readable volume.

The lonely life of a writer need not be. There are ways to break that isolation and find encouragement and support within groups of like-minded people. Sections in Writing Alone, Writing Together include Writing Practice Groups, Creating Writing Prompts, Group Leadership, and even What to Do with the Bores, Whiners, Control Junkies, and Thugs. Whether the group is oriented toward writing the great American novel or a family memory book, this useful book offers an array of effective techniques to help writers achieve their goals.

Part memoir, part writing practice, part inspiration, this book is a multi voiced creation of three passionate and committed journal writers. Writing Alone Together reveals the depth and complexity that emerges from going to the blank page, transforming the act of writing into a catalyst for meaningful conversation, storytelling, mindfulness, personal growth, creative self-expression and mutual support. Writing Alone Together is a practice of gathering with other women to write, read and create a sense of community through the transformational power of journal writing. This communal practice creates shifts in consciousness, in our lives and in the world. Each time we meet, we bring the intention of being fully present, listening to ourselves and to one another and sharing our words, thoughts, views, visions, dreams and intuition. While we may not always agree or feel resonance with one another's ideas or experiences, through Writing Alone Together we cultivate acceptance and compassion. Through writing in journals, we discover and remember the stories and poetry of our lives. As we share and reveal these stories within these pages and within our journalling circle, we begin to see new perspectives, gain clarity, find solutions, celebrate accomplishments, notice and change patterns of behaviour and refine our understanding of our life experiences. In this process, we make meaning through our stories, constructing who we are and who we are becoming.

“Kind, realistic, and genuinely helpful...Install a copy on whatever surface is functioning as your desk, and you may even feel a little bit less alone.” —The Observer (London) A practical, accessible, and charming guide for finding joy while navigating your professional life working remotely from home—without losing your mind. Like it or not, working alone is now the new normal. The COVID-19 pandemic may have accelerated the process, but the trend is clear—making a living outside the confines of a public workplace is here to stay. For anyone who needs guidance on how to navigate working from a home office—or a home sofa—here is a charming, expert, and genuinely helpful guide to managing a productive career without impromptu hallway conversations or on-call IT support, but with more joy—and, for most of us, better coffee. Written by a dedicated work-from-home expert, Solo culls wisdom from the latest research in psychology, economics, and social science and explores what we gain, or lose, in the shift to solo work. In chapters like “Loneliness and Solitude,” “The Power of Planning,” and “The Curse of Comparison (and Why Social Media Sucks),” it picks up where the bibles for freelancers stop, offering practical, inspiring, and uniquely reassuring advice culled from a range of influences, from Aesop’s fables to medical journals, and explaining what helps us stay resilient, productive, and focused in a company of one.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

For anyone who feels compelled to write, this writing tool is as important as pen and paper.

"Savvy and insightful." --New York Times Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Based on hundreds of interviews and with a new introduction taking us to the present day, Alone Together describes changing, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, and families.

Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author. As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.