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June 11 - June 23, 2024
E. B. White, as it happened, was very much on my mind. I had long considered him my model as a writer. His was the seemingly effortless style—achieved, I knew, with great effort—that I wanted to emulate, and whenever I began a new project I would first read some White to get his cadences into my ear.
Sometimes they bring that early edition for me to sign, its sentences highlighted in yellow. They apologize for the mess. I love the mess.
My students are men and women who want to use writing to try to understand who they are and what heritage they were born into. Year after year their stories take me deeply into their lives and into their yearning to leave a record of what they have done and thought and felt.
matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping.
E-mail is an impromptu medium, not conducive to slowing down or looking back. It’s ideal for the never-ending upkeep of daily life. If the writing is disorderly, no real harm is done. But e-mail is also where much of the world’s business is now conducted. Millions of e-mail messages every day give people the information they need to do their job, and a badly written message can do a lot of damage.
I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself.
This is the personal transaction that’s at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.
Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important.
The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn’t think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it.
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it’s not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery.
Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.
Beware, then, of the long word that’s no better than the short word: “assistance” (help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “individual” (man or woman), “remainder” (rest), “initial” (first), “implement” (do), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try), “referred to as” (called) and hundreds more.
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.
Today many of those students are professional writers, and they tell me, “I still see your brackets—they’re following me through life.”
Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful?
The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do.
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing. I can testify from my newspaper days that the number of trips to the water cooler per reporter-hour far exceeds the body’s need for fluids.
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
“Who am I writing for?” It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself.
If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. (It can always be taken out, but only you can put it in.)
You’ll never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.
It saves you the time of rummaging in your brain—that network of overloaded grooves—to find the word that’s right on the tip of your tongue, where it doesn’t do you any good.
It’s the difference between, say, “serene” and “tranquil”—one so soft, the other strangely disturbing because of the unusual n and q.
today’s spoken garbage may be tomorrow’s written gold.
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.
Try to give your lead a freshness of perception or detail.
The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. They didn’t expect the article to end so soon, or so abruptly, or to say what it said. But they know it when they see it. Like a good lead, it works.
Something I often do in my writing is to bring the story full circle—to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. It gratifies my sense of symmetry, and it also pleases the reader, completing with its resonance the journey we set out on together.
How could it not be a perfect ending? Surprise is the most refreshing element in nonfiction writing.
The difference between an activeverb style and a passive-verb style—in clarity and vigor—is the difference between life and death for a writer.
“Joe saw him” is strong. “He was seen by Joe” is weak. The first is short and precise; it leaves no doubt about who did what. The second is necessarily longer and it has an insipid quality: something was done by somebody to someone else. It’s also ambiguous.
Don’t choose one that is dull or merely serviceable. Make active verbs activate your sentences, and avoid the kind that need an appended preposition to complete their work.
Be precise. Use precise verbs.
Again and again in careless writing, strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs.
The dash is used in two ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. “We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner.” By its very shape the dash pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they decided to keep going. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. “She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town.” An explanatory detail that might otherwise have
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Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’s what you learned, unlearn it—there’s no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.
Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try.
With every small refinement I feel that I’m coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.
The reader plays a major role in the act of writing and must be given room to play it.
No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
Choose as your subject someone whose job is so important, or so interesting, or so unusual that the average reader would want to read about that person.
“Be prepared” is as apt a motto for the nonfiction writer on his rounds as it is for the Boy Scout.
Never let anything go out into the world that you don’t understand.
The old men who were his main subject were custodians of memory, a living link with an earlier New York.
Writing is a public trust.
The nonfiction writer’s rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of real people to write about.
When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would ha...
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