On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published.

Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative.

Above all, there’s the matter of voice. Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his “style.” He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty.

The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.

I mention this because one of the questions often asked by memoir writers is: Should I write from the point of view of the child I once was, or of the adult I am now? The strongest memoirs, I think, are those that preserve the unity of a remembered time and place:

When you write your family history, be a recording angel and record everything your descendants might want to know.

Finally, it’s your story—you’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past.

For them, writing a memoir became an act of healing.

“Daddy, what are you looking at with such pride? Is it your house?” He said, “No, it’s you! You have become my eyes and ears and legs. Thank you for taking this trip. It makes me feel as if I’ve gone there myself.”

That’s a highly specialized subject for a piece of writing; not many people owned a mechanical baseball game. But everybody had a favorite childhood toy or game or doll.

They don’t identify with my baseball game; they identify with the idea of the game—a universal idea. Remember this when you write your memoir and worry that your story isn’t big enough to interest anyone else.

The small stories that still stick in your memory have a resonance of their own. Trust them.

Remember: Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance—not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became.

My mother was also a woman of humor and optimism. These are lubricants in writing, as they are in life, and a writer lucky enough to have them in his baggage will start the day with an extra round of confidence.

He accepted the news with his usual generosity and wished me well in my chosen field.

my “style”—the careful projection onto paper of who I think I am—is

Like the rest of creation, they come in all varieties.

An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.

a writer is writing by ear, trying to achieve a particular sound or cadence, or playing with words just for the pleasures of wordplay.

You will write only as well as you make yourself write.

A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said: “I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”