Schneider's book is inspiring, full of common sense about fears every writer will recognize and exercises for jump-starting a manuscript. She is well acquainted with naysayers, external and internal. A storyteller, poet, librettist who once struggled to believe in herself, she sees teaching as a mission, writing as empowerment. She's led four workshops a week (one in a low-income project) for 12 years; she explains here how to lead your own. Writing Alone is as much an antidote to writer's block as you're likely to find between two covers: Writing teachers will use it as their bible.-C. Carr, O: The Oprah Magazine
Drawing on her many years of working with writers and would-be writers in workshops, Schneider has authored a useful and comprehensive text for the creative writer seeking to find his or her own voice and authority. Starting with the need to overcome fear, anxiety, and nagging of the relentless self-critic within us, Schneider provides some practical exercises to get the writing process started (again) and to avoid the pitfalls of internal and external criticism. Citing the experience of the hundreds of writers to privilege their own writing despite the distractions they face, to keep a writing journal, and to participate in a writing community with other writers. More than movitivational or purely experiential, this very sensible yet practical text provides scores of proven exercises to help encourage the writer in all of us.-Library Journal
The wisest teacher of writing I know.-Peter Elbow, from the Foreword
I am grateful to Pat Schneider for recognizing that our species is a writing species. If we don't write, it means something in the culture has blocked our natural instinct. [This] helpful, totally personable book shows us how to undo that cultural abuse.-Carol Bly, author of Beyond the Writer's Workshop and My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories
Honesty is creative oxygen. Generosity is creative fire. Pat Schneider is a fuse lighter. Her work is gentle, playful, brilliant, and revolutionary. She is the real animal.-Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write and The Artist's Way
For anyone who wants to write, Writing Alone and with Others is heartening and practical. It unfolds as the story of one writer's journey, and invites the aspiring writer along with a rich variety of anecdote, exercise and advice, celebrating both difference and difficulty as the gifts they are.-Janet Burroway, author of Raw Silk and Writing Fiction
Schneider can help you find your genius. She encourages without ever condescending. She is guide, cheerleader, and advocate. 'What you see, write it,' she counsels. 'Surprise yourself.' You'll find exercises here that will help you do it. The second part of the book, focusing on 'writing with others,' can help the workshop leader or teacher create the kind of atmosphere in which 'images pass in silence from mind to mind,' as writers are affirmed and energized by experiencing creativity, their own and others'.-Marshall J. Cook, author and editor of Creativity Connection
An entertaining and enlightening book...should prove invaluable to poets, writers, teachers, and workshop devotees of all backgrounds and creative denominations.- Mindy Kronenberg, poet and teacher, author of Dismantling the Playground and editor of Book/Mark Small Press Quarterly Review
