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Quote by Peter Orner

“What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.”

Author

Peter Orner, born in 1968, is an American writer known for his unique narrative style and profound insights into human nature. His works cover a variety of themes, including family, love, memory, and social change. more

“A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.”

Thinking Kind Long Different Novel Short Story

Author:Peter Orner

“I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.”

Trying Novel Mystery Short Story

Author:Peter Orner

“I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.”

Thinking World Powerful Silence Silence Is

Author:Peter Orner

“We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.”

Soul Emotion

Author:Peter Orner

“As a professor I can't teach writing.”

Writing Teach

Author:Peter Orner

“People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.”

People World Trying Vision Odd Awkward

Author:Peter Orner

“I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.”

People

Author:Peter Orner

“I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.”

Thinking Writing Teacher Crazy Notebook

Author:Peter Orner

“I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's block; I just don't have anything to say.”

Writing Block

Author:Peter Orner

“I think some writers should wait for something to say.”

Thinking Waiting

Author:Peter Orner

Quote by Peter Orner

Author

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