The Writer's Studio: Games to Keep the Writing Flowing with John Peterson

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You’ll leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

Games to Keep the Writing Flowing

“Writer’s Block” is not just a cute name for a hipster bookstore. It’s a hot mess of psychological frustration that visits whenever it wants. Come to a workshop where we play games to move through walls that block curiosity, passion, and desire. We’ll play short, light games to start. Our goal is to generate new material or extend a project already underway. These methods can work with any writing, from stories to research projects to screenplays. By the end, we will have explored more complex psychological and metaphysical games, discovering new ways to deal with the naturally occurring walls that separate writers from what they want to accomplish.

John Peterson is an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. He is researching the relationships between collaboration, improvisation, and electronic sharing in environments such as Google Docs and social media for his book project, Free Speech and Improvisation: The Danger and Beauty of Speaking Off the Cuff. He received his MFA (fiction) from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.