On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

at any age, the physical act of writing is a powerful search mechanism.

What gives them their power is the narrowness of their focus. Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it.

Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

One secret of the art is detail. Any kind of detail will work—a sound or a smell or a song title—as long as it played a shaping role in the portion of your life you have chosen to distill.

It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

The following passage is not only a good example of how to write with your nose; it shows how memoir is nourished by a writer’s ability to create a sense of place—what

I felt that my father brought the outside straight into our house with each day’s copy of the World.

That childhood whisper is now an adult writer’s voice that speaks to us with wisdom and humor, and I’m grateful to have that voice in our midst.

powwow.

But in a way it was that weekend, for all its stillness, that was my awakening.

The crucial ingredient in memoir is, of course, people.

all the pieces of paper that circulate through your office every day are forms of writing. Take them seriously.

How we write and how we talk is how we define ourselves.

four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

The way to warm up any institution is to locate the missing “I.” Remember: “I” is the most interesting element in any story.

Preoccupied with their high technology, they forget that some of the most powerful tools they possess—for good and for bad—are words.

If you work for an institution, whatever your job, whatever your level, be yourself when you write. You will stand out as a real person among the robots,

“let’s not go peeing down both legs.” It was a plea he made often, and it was the most inelegant advice I ever received. But over a long career of writing reviews and columns and trying to make a point I felt strongly about, it was also probably the best.

“Something crazy is going on here—some erosion in the quality of life, or some threat to life itself, and yet everyone assumes it’s normal.”

Clichés are the enemy of taste.

Yet he went to his typewriter every day and made the English language dance.

How can you fight off all those fears of disapproval and failure? One way to generate confidence is to write about subjects that interest you and that you care about.

“Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.”

Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer.

If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.

if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject.

The reason he knows so much about his field is because it’s his field; you’re a generalist trying to make his work accessible to the public.

So we proceeded, Mr. Expert and Mr. Stupid, until I had extracted many ideas that I found interesting.

“The attitude of people towards birds has changed the attitude of birds towards people.”

“That’s interesting.” If you find yourself saying it, pay attention and follow your nose. Trust your curiosity to connect with the curiosity of your readers.

We are a culture that worships the winning result: the league championship, the high test score. Coaches are paid to win, teachers are valued for getting students into the best colleges. Less glamorous gains made along the way—learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, dealing with failure—aren’t given the same respect because they can’t be given a grade.

Looking back, I notice that many students in my class, assigned to think about a place that was important to them, used the assignment to go on a quest for something deeper than the place itself: a meaning, an idea, some sliver of the past.

We can write to affirm and to celebrate, or we can write to debunk and to destroy; the choice is ours.

Some of the decisions are big (“What should I write about?”) and some are as small as the smallest word. But all of them are important.

Learning how to organize a long article is just as important as learning how to write a clear and pleasing sentence.

The hardest decision about any article is how to begin it. The lead must grab the reader with a provocative idea and continue with each paragraph to hold him or her in a tight grip, gradually adding information.

Readers can process only one idea at a time, and they do it in linear sequence. Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three.

Altogether, the sentence took almost an hour. But I didn’t begrudge a minute of it. On the contrary, seeing it fall into place gave me great pleasure. No writing decision is too small to be worth a large expenditure of time.

Desperately poor, Mali was people-rich.

a vibrant market town on the Niger that we liked enormously and also left too soon.

The only consolation for the loss of so much material is that it isn’t totally lost; it remains in your writing as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.

What I’m after is resonance; it can do a great deal of emotional work that writers can’t achieve on their own.

The last sentence is a small bomb dropped into the story. But it is allowed to speak for itself—just the facts, please—without comment. I didn’t add an exclamation point to notify readers that it was an amazing moment. That would have spoiled their own pleasure of discovery. Trust your material.

I had always wondered what that austere existence was like.

But after a while the almost-nothingness became an object in itself—the entire point of the desert. I tried to get that fact into my metabolism. It lulled me into a certain acceptance and I totally forgot why we were out there.

I remembered from all those books that in the desert there’s no such thing as an intruder; anyone who turns up is somehow expected.

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

Writers are the custodians of memory,

When my father finished writing his histories he had them typed, mimeographed and bound in a plastic cover. He gave a copy, personally inscribed, to each of his three daughters, to their husbands, to me, to my wife, and to his 15 grandchildren, some of whom couldn’t yet read. I like the fact that they all got their own copy; it recognized each of them as an equal partner in the family saga.