On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

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...

Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.

Another way to help your readers understand unfamiliar facts is to relate them to sights they are familiar with. Reduce the abstract principle to an image they can visualize.

Speaking of compression, that paragraph is a gem of tight linear writing, successively explaining the implosion device and its three main elements.

If a scientific subject of that complexity can be made that clear and robust, in good English, with only a few technical words, which are quickly explained (kryton) or can be quickly looked up (fissile), any subject can be made clear and robust by all you writers who think you’re afraid of science and all you scientists who think you’re afraid of writing.

Humor, to them, is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.

Control is vital to humor. Don’t use comical names like Throttlebottom. Don’t make the same kind of joke two or three times—readers will enjoy themselves more if you make it only once. Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you’re doing, and don’t worry about the rest.

“All humor must be about something—it must touch concretely on life,”

My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that’s enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.

Clichés are one of the things you should keep listening for when you rewrite and read your successive drafts aloud. Notice how incriminating they sound, convicting you of being satisfied to use the same old chestnuts instead of making an effort to replace them with fresh phrases of your own. Clichés are the enemy of taste.

After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.

Since then I’ve made that sense of enjoyment my credo as a writer and an editor. Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it’s funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day’s work.

Fear of writing gets planted in most Americans at an early age, usually at school, and it never entirely goes away.

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.

Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested.

As a nonfiction writer you’ll be thrown again and again into specialized worlds, and you’ll worry that you’re not qualified to bring the story back.

If you want your writing to convey enjoyment, write about people you respect. Writing to destroy and to scandalize can be as destructive to the writer as it is to the subject.

The moral for nonfiction writers is: think broadly about your assignment. Don’t assume that an article for Audubon has to be strictly about nature, or an article for Car & Driver strictly about cars. Push the boundaries of your subject and see where it takes you. Bring some part of your own life to it; it’s not your version of the story until you write it.

I mention this to give confidence to all nonfiction writers: a point of craft. If you master the tools of the trade—the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction—and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.

“This man knows so much about his field, I’m too dumb to interview him. He’ll think I’m stupid.” 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. That means prodding him to clarify statements that are so obvious to him that he assumes they are obvious to everyone else. Trust your common sense to figure out what you need to know, and don’t be afraid to ask a dumb question. If the expert thinks you’re dumb, that’s his problem.

This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content.

As an editor and a teacher I’ve found that the most untaught and underestimated skill in nonfiction writing is how to organize a long article: how to put the jigsaw puzzle together.

A man would say that he wanted to try a piece about the town where he once lived and would venture a possible approach: “I could write about X.” X, however, was uninteresting, even to him, lacking any distinctiveness, and so were Y and Z, and so were P and Q and R, the writer continuing to dredge up fragments of his life, when, almost accidentally, he stumbled into M, a long-forgotten memory, seemingly unimportant but unassailably true, encapsulating in one incident everything that had made him want to write about the town in the first place. “There’s your story,” several people in the class would say, and it was. The student had been given time to find it.

Intention is what we wish to accomplish with our writing. Call it the writer’s soul. We can write to affirm and to celebrate, or we can write to debunk and to destroy; the choice is ours.

In travel writing you should never forget that you are the guide. It’s not enough just to take your readers on a trip; you must take them on your trip. Make them identify with you—with your hopes and apprehensions. This means giving them some idea of who you are.

That asterisk is a signpost. It announces to the reader that you have organized your article in a certain way and that a new phase is about to begin—perhaps a change of chronology, such as a flashback, or a change of subject, or emphasis, or tone.

I ask myself one very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What is the piece about?”)

Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.

One of the oldest strains in travel writing and humor writing is the eternal credulity of the narrator. Used in moderation, making yourself gullible—or downright stupid—gives the reader the enormous pleasure of feeling superior.

Roget’s Thesaurus

books by Britain’s “desert eccentrics”—solitaries such as Charles Doughty, Sir Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, who lived among the Bedouin.

A crucial decision about a piece of writing is where to end it. Often the story will tell you where it wants to stop.

When you get such a message from your material—when your story tells you it’s over, regardless of what subsequently happened—look for the door. I got out fast, pausing only long enough to make sure that the unities were intact: that the writer-guide who started the trip was the same person who was ending it.

(A little nervousness gives writing an edge.)

As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If a subject interests you, go after it, even if it’s in the next county or the next state or the next country. It’s not going to come looking for you. Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather.

Writers are the custodians of memory,

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. Another is to work through some of life’s hardest knocks—loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure—and to find understanding and solace.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere.

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

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:

But if you prefer the other route—to write about your younger years from the wiser perspective of your older years—that memoir will have its own integrity.

This brings me to another question that memoir writers often ask: What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might offend or hurt my relatives? What will my sister think? Don’t worry about that problem in advance. Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it—now. Don’t look over your shoulder to see what relatives are perched there. Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain passages out—which you may or may not agree to do.

Finally, it’s your story—you’re the one who has done all the work.

Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else.

It can also be an act of healing for you. If you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.

Remember that you are the protagonist in your memoir—the tour guide. You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control. This means leaving out of your memoir many people who don’t need to be there. Like siblings.

My final reducing advice can be summed up in two words: Think small. Don’t rummage around in your past—or your family’s past—to find episodes that you think are “important” enough to be worthy of including in your memoir. Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.

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.

Here’s what I suggest. Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir”—the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about—and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s unusual, what’s funny, what’s worth pursuing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take. Then all you have to do is put the pieces together.